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

by Deirdre Mask

Addresses, the UPU argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people out of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights, and worldwide markets.

The British were among the most prominent slave traders in the world, but the vast majority of British-trafficked Africans did not end up in England. (British Africans were servants, England deemed by a court to have “too pure Air for Slaves to breathe in.”) Instead, British slave ships left from ports like Bristol and Liverpool full of British goods to buy African slaves. Crammed with men and women, the ship would then travel to the Americas, and swap the human cargo for sugar, tobacco, rum, and other New World goods to bring to Europe. By some estimates, the British carried 3.1 million people in this way across the ocean.

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.

Some books are about how one small thing changed the world—the pencil or the toothpick, for example. This is not that kind of book. Instead, 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.

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.

The British occasionally razed slums, but they did so to make way for a road, for example, or to clear more land for colonists. They showed little concern for the welfare of the displaced, but they never really believed that getting rid of the slums was possible.

In 1837, the General Register Office started to record births and deaths. Parliament had created the system largely to facilitate the transfer of inherited wealth between generations, but it had an unintentional, and far more meaningful purpose. Establishing a centralized place to register births and deaths would dramatically improve the public health of the nation.

Today about 70 percent of the world is insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people. It’s no surprise that these places happen to be the poorest places on earth. When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.” Often where epidemics break out, there are no maps either.

Thousands of years before place neurons were discovered, the ancient Romans seemed to know by instinct that visually distinctive spaces and memory were deeply intertwined.

Bootmakers Court is too expensive for the old working-class residents of East London—one-bedroom flats go for about £400,000—but the name helps affluent Londoners feel connected to a more romantic kind of neighborhood, even if it was one that they probably wouldn’t have ever wanted to live in.

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.

The new London house numbers, together with the rise of street signs, revolutionized the job description for footmen who, for the first time, had to be literate and numerate to deliver a message.

Most Europeans, for example, didn’t have permanent last names before the fourteenth century.

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 name something is to assert power over it; that’s why God lets Adam name all the animals in Eden (and eventually, problematically) Eve, as well.

Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for virtually anything at all. The state can literally put words in your mouth. The Nazis understood this best of all.

Berlin has one of the most tumultuous histories of any city in the world, leaping from the Prussians to the Weimar Era to the Nazis to the Cold War in less than a century. Street names have, as Dirk Verheyen puts it, “been both substance and metaphor of Berlin’s struggle with identity.” Most recently protests spurred the city to change the names of the streets in the city’s Afrikanisches Viertel, or “African quarter,” where in the years before World War I, an animal and human zoo was planned (but never opened). The names commemorate men who participated in the enslavement, rape, and torture of Africans in German colonies. In 2018, the German government decided to change them to the names of African liberation activists who fought against the Germans.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It’s made up of two ideas—“the past” and “the process of coming to terms or coping.” It’s a word that is very German, and is often used to describe the nation’s reckoning with its Nazi past and the German division during the Cold War. But its meaning is universal. We all have the need to confront the past, memorialize it, struggle with it, do something with it.

memorializing the past is just another way of wishing about the present.

The growth of the Civil War monuments peaked twice: first, in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow laws were being made, and then again in the 1950s and ’60s when the laws were being challenged. “These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy,” historian James Grossman has said.

Monuments to Confederate heroes became a physical testament of the absurdity of the Lost Cause, and the growing awareness of deeply systemic racism.

“purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

Mandela didn’t think that the Afrikaners were inherently bad; he knew they were simply afraid. And it was this fear, this insecurity, this almost religious commitment to racism, that led to apartheid, the killing of thousands of people, and to his own nearly twenty-seven years of imprisonment. After Mandela’s release, the question was only whether the Afrikaner could finally let the black man in through the front door.

The building’s advertising was a mishmash of half-truths. Trump did not actually own the whole building; the General Electric Pension Trust did. Trump said the building had fifty-two floors when it only had forty-four; he had invented a new math that determined how many floors his buildings would have if each floor had “average” ceiling height. The fact that the extra floors don’t actually exist didn’t seem to matter.

this kind of real estate “psychology” wasn’t a new idea. By the time Trump began to develop his first buildings in the 1970s, New Yorkers had already been bullshitting street names for more than a hundred years.

And if you so desired, you could stay and watch a promotional video where Trump tries to sell you an apartment, Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” playing in the background, even though Sinatra had allegedly once told Trump to go fuck himself.

By definition, homeless people don’t have homes. But an address is not a home. An address, today, is an identity; it’s a way for society to check that you are not just a person but the person you say you are. How many times have I been asked to show proof of address to register a child in school, to vote, to open a new account? It’s not for the bank manager to come and meet me at the door. In the modern world, in short, you are your address.

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

Thinking that you are temporarily without a home implies that you will have a home in the future. Adopting the view that homelessness is a long-term status, rather than a temporary condition, can lead to despair. It’s one reason I’m told many who qualify for homeless services don’t accept them; to stop being homeless, you often have to find ways to pretend, sometimes even to yourself, that you aren’t. The fiction of having a home might just be the first step to getting one.