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

by Deirdre Mask

Soon, I learned that parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either.

Addresses aren’t just for emergency services. They also exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail.

“That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Kentucky representative Geoff Davis said, in 2008, about America’s nuclear arsenal. “That boy” was Barack Obama.)

“Slum” is an umbrella term for a wide range of settlements. Most slums, arising along canals, roadsides, or vacant land are illegal—the inhabitants are squatters, living without permission on someone else’s land. Others are “bustees,” legal slums, often with higher quality housing, where the tenants lease their land.

Researchers found a positive correlation between street addresses and income, and places with street addresses had lower levels of income inequality than places that did not. All this, for pennies a person.

And inclusion is one of the secret weapons of street addresses. Employees at the World Bank soon found that addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society.

“A citizen is not an anonymous entity lost in the urban jungle and known only by his relatives and co-workers; he has an established identity,”

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.

Epidemiologists are, like Snow, “disease detectives,” working out how, why, and where diseases are spreading, and using this information to improve public health.

“He cracked the case in two days. Two days!”

I used a similar strategy to avoid having to deposit a quarter in a pay phone: I’d call collect, and instead of saying my name at the beep, I’d blurt out “Come pick me up!”)

In the United States, the Dead Letter Office, which opened in 1825, manages misaddressed letters. It soon processed about seven million items a year. In the early days, the Dead Letter Office was often staffed by retired clergymen, because they could be trusted with the money often found in the undelivered mail. The post office also hired women, apparently believing that they had superior analytical talent and could therefore decipher addresses more easily.

“Mrs. Zip,” told newspapers that it took so long because Moon was Republican and his bosses were Democrats.

Perhaps we make the street names, and then the street names help make us.

plastering Paris

Ha!

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.

In America, the British first began to number Manhattan to keep track of revolutionaries.

The city wasn’t renumbered and officially divided between East and West at Fifth Avenue until 1838. And even after that, many businesses were slow to display their numbers.

Philadelphia system: odd numbers on one side of a street, even numbers on the other. An adviser to George Washington, Clement Biddle, devised this system in 1790 when Philadelphia was conducting a census. Odds on one side, evens on the other takes much of the guesswork out of knowing how far a number is along a street. In Philadelphia, this system was revised in the nineteenth century to make house numbering even more logical, assigning one hundred numbers to each block, with the numbers shifting to the next hundred at the next block.

in England in the 1700s, for example, 90 percent of men had one of only eight names: John, Edward, William, Henry, Charles, James, Richard, Robert.

before the Civil War, southerners feared that the city directories were all part of a “Northern enterprise.”

People were also leery in the North, where anyone even carrying a city directory was suspected of being a draft officer.

Numbering is essentially dehumanizing. In the early days of house numbering, many felt their new house numbers denied them an essential dignity.

am not a number, I am a free man,” he cried, quoting the British spy show The Prisoner. He paused. “This is also a song by Iron Maiden.”

they couldn’t see you, they didn’t own you—you really were a free man. These were not unreasonable concerns.

An edict of 1833 required all Jews, not just those who were nationalized, to take surnames from a list the government chose for them, like Rubenstein and Bernstein. But soon after, in 1845, Jews were legally confined to a closed list of surnames, names they could not change, setting them up for effortless identification later by the Nazis.

the people needed an ever-watchful police force to secure their happiness.

Second Street is the most common street name in America

those who used force for Religion could never be in the right.”

And Quakers used “thee” and “thou,” pronouns reserved only for intimates in the seventeenth century, for everyone, including the king.

the case would become a foundational text for the right of a jury to make up its own mind, no matter the evidence against the accused.

“In Lübeck, on 20 March (1933), a large number of people were taken into so-called protective custody,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Soon after began the renaming of streets.”

By 1933, nearly every single town in Germany had a street named after Hitler.

One lesson of Hitler’s Mein Kampf is that people are forgetful and impressionable at the same time.

We all have the need to confront the past, memorialize it, struggle with it, do something with it.

Three names in particular: Lee Street, after Robert E. Lee; Forrest Street, after Nathan Bedford Forrest; and Hood Street, after John Bell Hood. All three streets ran through Liberia, the historic black district of Hollywood.

“With a wink, the grand wizard told him, ‘I lied like a gentleman.’”

just a week after he spoke at the Gettysburg Reunion, President Wilson ordered separate bathrooms for blacks and whites working in the Treasury Department.

These changing attitudes eased Northerners into accepting Jim Crow as one of their own.

many still seemed to be confused about why anyone would think of changing the names now. One resident, who owned Lee Street Apartments, stood in front of a sign for her building, talking to a reporter. “This history took place two hundred years ago,” she said. “So what’s wrong?”

“The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.” 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.

But memory can change. The myth of a grand reconciliation, already chipped, has begun to shatter.

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.”

When the commission debated the proposed changes, hundreds of supporters gathered outside. Counter-protesters waved Confederate flags at the crowd, shouting “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

But defenders of Confederate street names rarely use overtly racist rhetoric.

“Thank you for all you’re doing here,” he told him. He just hadn’t wanted to make any trouble with his neighbors. And that’s what I was doing on my Civil War school trip all those years ago, I suppose. Not making any trouble with my neighbors. At the time, it seemed like the only thing to do.

took Haarlem, in the Netherlands, only a week to name a street after him; one appeared in Mainz, West Germany, in three weeks. Still, an MLK street didn’t appear in Atlanta, MLK’s birthplace, for eight years.)

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.”

Racism was repackaged as empowerment.

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