The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Don’t judge his life on his most provocative statements, his supporters asked.

Street names, I learned, are about identity, wealth, and, as in the Sonny Carson street example, race. But most of all they are about power—the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.

it is a complex story of how the Enlightenment project to name and number our streets has coincided with a revolution in how we lead our lives and how we shape our societies. We think of street addresses as purely functional and administrative tools, but they tell a grander narrative of how power has shifted and stretched over the centuries.

The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses—sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money, or receive a state pension.

Establishing a centralized place to register births and deaths would dramatically improve the public health of the nation.

Diseases are more easily prevented than cured,” he wrote, “and the first step to their prevention is the discovery of their causes.”

“The great enterprise of numbering the houses,” Tantner writes, “is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Without any trace of irony, the house number can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment, of that century obsessed, as it was, with order and classification.” House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you.

Instead of naming its streets, Tokyo numbers its blocks. Streets are simply the spaces between the blocks. And buildings in Tokyo are, for the most part, numbered not in geographical order, but according to when they were built.

Early street names were often descriptive—Church Street, Market Road, Cemetery Lane. Bobby Sands was not only a street name—it was also a monument. Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate. To understand why, I had to travel back to a very different revolution, this one in eighteenth-century France.

What strikes me most about Vergangenheitsbewältigung isn’t so much that such a word exists, but that built into the word itself is the process of working through the past. Can the past ever be worked through? it seems to ask. Does Vergangenheitsbewältigung ever end?

But when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in the years following 1915, its strongest and most violent branch was in Florida. On the day of the 1920 presidential election, just a few months after Young bought the land for Hollywood, the KKK in Ocoee, Florida, murdered almost 60 African Americans. Ocoee’s surviving black community hid in the marshes, while Julius “July” Perry hung from a telephone pole, next to a sign: “This is what we do to niggers who try to vote.” Floridians lynched at least 161 blacks between 1890 and 1920—a rate three times higher than Alabama, and twice as high as Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Florida’s state constitution disenfranchised black people and forbade white teachers from teaching them.

Jim Crow laws also forbade black people from living next to white people.

Pierre Nora, who has written extensively on collective memory in France, has argued that before the nineteenth century we didn’t need objects to remember the past. Memory was engrained in local cultures, habits, and customs.

The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, who removed all of New Orleans’ Confederate memorials, explained that they “purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

As I write, the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, which is 87 percent white, has a median household income of $203,250. About seven miles away, the zip code around MLK Drive is 94 percent black, and the neighborhood’s median income is about $27,608. “It’s ironic,” Professor Derek Alderman, a geographer who frequently writes about MLK streets, told me, “that we have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement.”

homes on Washington Street are more likely to be older than those on Washington Court. (“Courts,” “Circles,” and “Ways” were popular in the United States in the 1980s.)

in no state in America today can anyone afford a two-bedroom apartment on a minimum-wage salary.

Sarah’s solution: ban the address. Or, rather, ban employers from asking for it before giving a job offer. Employers contact applicants by phone or email—what did they need the address for anyway? Simply taking that line off the application would stop discrimination—and perhaps give homeless people the confidence to apply.

Thirteen states have banned the box for all employers. Now more than two hundred million Americans live in places where asking about criminal history at the initial application stage is limited by law. Sarah’s adoption of this approach for the homeless makes sense. If employers can’t ask about your address, they can’t know if you’re homeless. It’s a cheap, straightforward answer to a complicated, expensive problem.

At first, I thought clinging to our current system was just nostalgia. But it’s more than that; it is, perhaps, a symptom of the modern condition. We don’t know what the near future is going to look like—technologically or politically. Change seems to come more outrageously every year. And the more things change, the more we feel the need to anchor ourselves to the past. Street addresses have become one way to remember.