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

by Deirdre Mask

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.

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.

In the 1980s, the World Bank was zeroing in on one of the driving forces behind poor economic growth in the developing world: insecure land ownership. In other words, there was no centralized database of who owned any given property, which made it difficult to buy or sell land, or use it to get credit. And it’s hard to tax land when you don’t know who owns it. Ideally, countries would have cadastres, public databases that register the location, ownership, and value of land. A good cadastral system makes the buying and selling of land, as well as the collection of taxes, easy. When you buy a piece of land, you (and the government’s tax offices) can be sure that you—and you alone—own it.

With street addresses, you could find residents, collect information, maintain infrastructure, and create maps of the city that everyone could use.

without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

By the early 1900s, the post was being delivered in parts of London twelve times a day. But a successful post needed an effective addressing system.

Shelton, an expert in urban design, began to connect the differences in writing systems with the ways Westerners and the Japanese see their cities. Those who learned to write in English, Shelton reasoned, were trained to see lines. So Westerners fixated on streets—lines—and insisted on naming them. But in Japan, the streets themselves, as one commentator has said, “seem to have too little significance in the Japanese urban scheme of things to warrant the prestige that names confer.” The Japanese, Shelton theorized, focused on area—or blocks.

the languages we read may also influence the way we think.

Across the country, thousands of monuments were raised to southern Civil War veterans, as part of the “Lost Cause,” the idea that the Civil War was fought over everything but slavery. (Never mind that slavery was directly protected by the Confederate Constitution; never mind that the vice president of the Confederacy said that it “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”)

A district in Alaska, along the Bering Sea in an area that is 95 percent Alaska Native, was until recently named after Wade Hampton, one of the South’s largest slaveholders, a lieutenant of the Confederate cavalry, and later, governor of South Carolina.

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.

For others, keeping the Civil War history on the signs was a way of clinging to a heritage they believed was romantic—it was part of their collective memory, a heritage they felt they could admire while still rejecting the evils of slavery.

“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.”

Mandela thought that understanding the Afrikaner was crucial to winning him over to the cause.

Kajsa Norman vividly recounts in her exploration of Afrikaner identity, Bridge Over Blood River.

Most new regimes want to rebrand the landscape to cast away the past, to show how radically the world has changed. Mandela took the opposite approach. Keeping the old names was, perhaps, a tactic to make the revolution seem less revolutionary, the peace less fragile.