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

by Deirdre Mask

And how did Ireland and the United States share the proceeds? Is there some accountant in a windowless back room of the post office, dividing each penny between the two countries?

会计师小唐再次被cue，但确实，现在的邮票可能只有几块钱，到底会被如何分配呢？

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.

In the late eighteenth century Alexander Macrabie, the sheriff of Calcutta, described the staff his home required, including a steward; 2 running footmen; 11 household servants; an ironing man for each person; and 8 men to carry his palanquin, a kind of covered bed, through the streets of the city. He also listed 4 Peons, 4 Hircarahs, 2 Chubdars, and 2 Jemmadars, whose roles I can only guess. Overall, he had 110 servants for four Englishmen.

“Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.”

(Zip stands for “zoning improvement plan.”) Moon first submitted the idea to his bosses in 1944, then lobbied for almost twenty years before his idea was finally adopted. His wife, who wore a gold pendant emblazoned with “Mrs. Zip,” told newspapers that it took so long because Moon was Republican and his bosses were Democrats.

政党派别的不同确实会影响对于意见的接受

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.

前两个更相当于externality，而真正的作用还是帮助政府。

In the Czech Republic, each house has two numbers, one for directional purposes, and one for government registration. In Florence, houses have different numbers for residential and business purposes.

难以想象当时会有多么复杂的地址系统。

Most Europeans, for example, didn’t have permanent last names before the fourteenth century. (China’s Qin Dynasty had, however, been requiring last names since the fourth century B.C. “for the purposes of taxation, forced labor, and conscription.”)

仔细想来，姓氏更是方便古人追溯家族、宗谱的方式，中华文化更讲究传承，通过把自己和历史名人联系到一起获得自豪和优越感。

It wasn’t just Geneva; across Europe, house numbers were defiled with excrement and hacked away at with iron bars. House numbering officials were beaten, sprayed with water, and run out of villages. At least one officer was murdered.

地址对于我们是再普通不过的个人信息，难以想象当时的人们会如此厌恶，不过设身处地，我们认知中的普通也来源于“习惯”和拥有地址带来的便捷。

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

If they couldn’t number you, if they couldn’t conscript you, if they couldn’t see you, they didn’t own you—you really were a free man.

I took a train and a bus to see Guillauté’s original book at Waddesdon Manor, a great French-style château sitting incongruously outside an old market town in Buckinghamshire, England.

马克一下，有机会要去看看。

As it turns out, Tanter found, the empire wasn’t just finding and numbering its people; it was also listening.

通过建立地址，了解民众需求，并提供资源应对，解决问题，也算是positive externality。

Twenty-year-old surveyor John Randel, hired to lay out the grid, was frequently arrested for trespassing (a former mayor had to bail him out when the commissioners were away) and had his stakes pulled up by angry residents.

为了现在的地址系统，有太多人付出了时间，精力，甚至名声。

Second Street is the most common street name in America (some towns use Main instead of First Street), and seven out of the ten of the most common street names in America are numbers.

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.

In fact, five streets immortalize Sands in France, along with a few others around the world. And yet, for all the outrage of the Irish petitioners about Bobby Sands Street in Tehran, no street commemorates Sands in Ireland, north or south.

A simple message, repeated in the right context, could worm its way into the mind and feast forever. And what message is more simple than a street name?

We want our lives to be predictable, and predictability requires a “narrative link” between the present and the past that reassures us that everything is as it should be. We salt away our memories, bronze them in parks, and tattoo them on street signs to try to force our future societies to be more like our past ones.

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.”

(It 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.) Nearly nine hundred streets in the United States are named after Martin Luther King Jr.

St. Louis, still one of the most segregated cities in America, was, Gordon argues, the product of racial restrictions and failed city policies that isolated and marginalized St. Louis’s black community. Newspapers listed properties for African Americans under a separate section—“for colored.”

“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.”

One black South African election official told me how growing up he had a cousin who had an address—which made him seem very “glamorous.”

Watching the courtroom, you see a steady stream of feet walk above their heads outside. At all times, judges are reminded that they are not above the law.

South Africa is the most unequal nation in the world. Just a tenth of the population, nearly all white, owns 90 percent of the nation’s wealth. The net worth of 80 percent of South Africans (mostly black) is zero. Geographically, economically, and emotionally, it is almost as if apartheid never ended.

“I do not use the term ‘segregation’ because it has been interpreted as a fencing off, but rather ‘apartheid,’ which will give the various races the opportunity of lifting themselves on the basis of what is their own.” Racism was repackaged as empowerment.

Mandela took the opposite approach. Keeping the old names was, perhaps, a tactic to make the revolution seem less revolutionary, the peace less fragile.

I suspected that we are no different now, celebrating what we see to be beautiful and neglecting the value of invisible infrastructure.

Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, for example, meaning “insurance companies providing coverage for legal expenses” is too long for an address whose selling point is brevity.

But as Kent adds, phone calls are expensive: a single call might cost 40 cents, a pretty deep cut, he points out, into a pizzeria’s profit on a $7 order.

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.

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.