tomoc (01/11/83)
How about the case where you have missing numbered street names? In my home, we`ve got a 12th through 16th street, then an 18th, 19th, 21st and then 22nd. I often wondered what ever happened to 17th and 20th street. My grandfather lived practically his entire life there, and he used to say that that was how it was when he was a kid. Call it "THE CASE OF THE MISSING STREET NUMBERS". As a corrolary, not all the houses on our blocks have consecutive addresses. I mean, in most places, the numbers always go up by 2. Just on our block, the houses go 1515, 1521, 1525, 1527, 1531, 1535. When our house was built, we had a choice of numbering it 1527 or 1529. I assume this has something to to with the size of the lots each homeowner has, since we`ve got a double lot. Is this numbering scheme very common, or is my town a little screwy. Tom O`Connor ixlpc!tomoc Living in the suburbs of the Windy City in Berwyn, Ill. - houby capital of Ill. if not world
rew (01/11/83)
Consecutive numbering of houses on a street is a rather old practice and leads to some interesting situations in older cities -- like New York. Buildings on North-South streets such as Broadway were numbered consecutively from the Battery (that's the southern tip of Manhattan). Many visitors to NYC expect building numbers to be tied into the east-west street grid, so that 4500's are one block north of 4400's and so on. Sometimes they find themselves walking considerable distances to go 'one block's worth of numbers'. Bob Warren cbosgd!nscs!rew
ech (01/12/83)
#R:ixlpc:-19800:whuxlb:7400013:000:1205 whuxlb!ech Jan 11 16:34:00 1983 Missing street numbers and house numbers are often the result of an attempt to correllate the numbers with some other distance measure, e.g. miles. For example, many towns I have seen reset the house numbers at each block, so that a prefix of the house number is the next cross street. In Queens, NYC, house numbers are often of the hyphenated form sss-nn, where sss is the adjacent cross-street. An even better example is the way most Florida cities are laid out (Florida is even flatter than the legendary Kansas, moreover all streets AND WATERWAYS run in straight lines, north-south or east-west, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers). I once lived at 688 NW 46 Terrace in Ft. Lauderdale, which places me ~.688 miles north and 4.65 west of the FTL "origin". You would have to "know" that all Terraces run n-s and are on odd .05 mile boundaries (streets run n-s on .1 mile boundaries. courts and avenues correspond to terraces and streets in the east-west direction). Hence you would also expect to find my house between NW 6th and 7th avenues. A nice side-effect of these kinds of numbering schemes is that you rarely have to give anyone directions to anywhere...the address tells all. =Ned=
leichter (01/12/83)
The numbering of major streets haven't100's get cut off. You get so used to NOT having to deal with this that it
b-davis (01/14/83)
In my neck of the woods the street numbers have reference to actual measurments taken from where the street begins. Because of this, all the telephone poles have street numbers (I don't know what the USPS would do with mail sent to them).
gh (01/16/83)
Re telephone poles having street numbers: Some people I knew in the Sociology Dept who were doing a survey by mail obtained a rural mailing list that ad addresses like: Smith Family Telephone Pole No. 5 Wayoutnowhere Road Scituate, RI. The meaning is clear; unfortunately, I never found out whether the Post Office delivered them.
rosin (01/17/83)
The 'H' street just east of Mass Ave is Hereford.