Top Quotes: “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power” — Deirdre Mask

Introduction

“In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes. Let me give you a moment to think about that. The city council is congress to the mayor’s president. Its fifty-one members monitor the country’s largest school system and police force, and decide land use for one of the most densely populated places on earth. Its budget is larger than most states’, its population bigger than all but eleven states. On top of that, New York’s streets have largely been named or numbered since the nineteenth century with some street names, like Stuyvesant and the Bowery, dating from when Manhattan was little more than a Dutch trading station.

The city council often focuses on honorary street names layered on top of the regular map. So when you walk through the city, you may look up and see that while you are on West 103rd Street, you are also on Humphrey Bogart Place. Or you might be on Broadway and West 65th Street (Leonard Bernstein Place), West 84th (Edgar Allan Poe Street), or East 43rd (David Ben-Gurion Place). Recently, the city council approved the Wu-Tang Clan District in Staten Island, Christopher Wallace Way (after the Notorious B.IG.) in Brooklyn, and Ramones Way in Queens. The city council co-named 164 streets in 2018 alone.”

“Founded in 1874, the Universal Postal Union, based in Bern, Switzerland, is the world’s second-oldest international organization: The UPU coordinates the worldwide postal system.”

Life Without An Address

“Here, I learned for the first time that billions of people don’t have reliable addresses. Addresses, the UPU argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people our of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights, and worldwide markets. But this is not just a problem in the developing world. Soon, I learned that parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either. On my next visit home, I borrowed my dad’s car, and drove to West Virginia to see for myself.”

“The first problem I had was finding Alan Johnston. Johnston was a friend of a friend who had petitioned the county government for a street address. The street he lives on had never had a name, and he had never had a house number. Like most residents of McDowell County, he had to pick up his mail at the post office.”

“West Virginia has tackled a decades-long project to name and number its streets. Until 1991, few people outside of West Virginia’s small cities had any street address at all. Then the state caught Verizon inflating its rates, and as part of an unusual settlement, the company agreed to pay $15 million to, quite literally, put West Virginians on the map.”

“Keller was personally in charge of naming a thousand streets in the county. He searched online for ideas, poaching names from faraway places. He tried to match places with historical names. He ran out of trees and flowers. “For generations people will be cussing my road names,’ he told me. Keller ordered street signs and personally installed them with a sledgehammer, his body trained for the job from years of chopping wood as a child.

Each West Virginia county cultivated its own naming strategy. Some took an academic approach, reading local history books to find appropriate names. Phone books borrowed from Charleston and Morgantown were brought to the office. When one addresser was looking for short names that would fit on the map, his secretary scoured Scrabble websites. Things got creative. One employee told me that a widow, “a pretty hot lady,” found herself living on Cougar Lane. Addressers came across the remnants of a party at the end of another street. Bingo: Beer Can Hollow.

Another addressing coordinator told me he would sometimes sit for forty-five minutes at the end of the road, his head in his hands, trying to think of a name.

“It’s like trying to name a baby, isn’t it?” I asked him.”

“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. West Virginians’ suspicions about the addressing project were remarkably similar to those of eighteenth-century Europeans who rebelled when governments slapped numbers on their doors — a story this book will tell.”

Addressing The Slums

“The traffic in Kolkata is so terrible that the government recently started an initiative to play calming music, blasted so loudly over speakers that you can apparently hear it from inside an air-conditioned car.”

“[They started] giving each home a GO Code, a nine-digit string of numbers and letters linked to the site’s GPS location. The string of numbers was a bit unwieldy, but naming the streets – or, even deciding what passed as a street in the serpentine and often dead-end lanes of the slums – was time-consuming and fraught with politics. For now, the number would have to do. The code was then printed on a blue and white placard and nailed to the front of each hut. By then, more than 2,300 houses in Chetla had been assigned GO Codes, which meant that nearly 8,000 people now had formal addresses.

The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. 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. Scandals had exposed money-lenders and scam banks operating throughout Kolkata’s slums, with some residents reportedly committing suicide after losing their life savings to a crook. With their new addresses, more residents of Chetla can now have their own ATM cards, with accounts Subhashis and his staff helped to open at the Bank of Baroda.

More important, addresses are essential for your identity. Every Indian resident should have an Aadhaar card, a biometric, government-issued ID that gives everyone a unique twelve-digit number. Without the card, it is often impossible to get access to services like pregnancy support, pension provision, or even schooling for children. (A woman in Kolkata sued after she was denied a card for lack of fingerprints, which she had lost in a fire.) Without an Aadhaar card, you can’t get food subsidies; activists blame starvation deaths throughout India on the lack of the cards. It’s not impossible to get an Aadhaar card in the slums, but not having an address makes it difficult. The government allows for “introducers” to facilitate an Aadhaar card if someone has no proof of address but the introducer has to have an Aadhaar card already. As of 2015, the government revealed that only .03 percent of Aadhaar numbers had been issued this way.”

““Slum” is an umbrella term for a wide range of settle ments. 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.

Still, the slums often have much in common: poo ventilation, limited clean water supplies, and a scarcity of toilets and sewage systems. One government definition describes a slum’s structures as “huddled together,” a term I thought more literary than technical until I saw shacks literally leaning on each other for support. The estimated three million Kolkatans who live in the city’s five thousand slums are often the luckier ones; at least they have some shelter. The poorest, the sidewalk dwellers, sleep on the streets, babies pressed carefully between couples on the sidewalks.”

“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.

But the cadastral projects run by the World Bank frequently failed. Poor countries didn’t have the resources to keep up the databases. A cadastre could be corrupt, too, if officials put in the wrong information, stripping rightful owners of their titles. And instead of creating a simple registry, highly paid consultants designed high-tech, computerized systems that became overly complex to manage. Millions of dollars were sunk into never-ending projects that didn’t go anywhere.

Organizations like the World Bank and the Universal Postal Union struck on an easier way. It wasn’t just that developing countries lacked cadastres — they also lacked street addresses. Addresses allowed cities to “begin at the beginning.” With street addresses, you could find residents, collect information, maintain infrastructure, and create maps of the city that everyone could use.

Experts began to train administrators intensively in how to address their cities. Chad, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali all became early adopters. World Bank specialists wrote books, designed an online course for street addressing, and even sponsored a competition to come up with a board game to advertise the benefits of addressing. (Bureaucrats sat in board rooms judging the thirty-five games entered into the competition. “I need a sign” and “Urbs and Civitas” were the winners.)

The benefits were almost immediately obvious. Street addresses boosted democracy, allowing for easier voter registration and mapping of voting districts. They strengthened security, as unaddressed territories make it easy for crime to flourish. (On a less positive note, they also make it easy to find political dissidents.) Water and electric companies had been forced to create their own systems for collecting bills and maintaining infrastructure — a street addressing system made that task far easier. Governments could more easily identify taxpayers and collect what they were owed. 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.”

“He had to scrap the original plastic placards for the addresses because residents worried they would fall off their doors and cows would eat them. Originally, the team had printed maps of the slums, complete with each home’s new GO Code, on large plastic sheets so people could find their way around. But they soon disappeared, as residents used the sheets to plug holes in their roofs during the monsoons. But slowly Alex and the Addressing the Unaddressed team began to develop systems that worked.”

“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. This is particularly true in slum areas. “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.” a group of experts wrote in a book on street addressing. Citizens should have a way to “reach and be reached by associations and government agencies,” and to be reached by fellow citizens, even ones they didn’t know before. In other words, 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.”

Missing Maps

“Today, huge swaths of the world are insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people.”

“”I actually make the bold claim, but I stand by it,” Ivan told me. “If we had a gazetteer for Sierra Leone and Liberia, we could have stopped Ebola cold.” By now, I believed him.

He banded together with organizations like the British and American Red Cross, and Humanitarian OpenStreet-Map. Soon Missing Maps was founded. The organization enlists volunteers from all over the world to use satellite images from their homes to trace roads and buildings of unmapped places. “Many people want to help, hands on, not just donating,” he has said. “They offer to knit socks for the kiddies and so on. But I tell them no, don’t knit socks for the kiddies — the cost of getting those socks out there and distributing them just isn’t worth the potential benefit. But with Missing Maps, they can actually participate in real, genuine heldwork. That’s huge.”

After the volunteers draw the roads and the buildings, locals and volunteers on the ground set out with paper and pencils to write down the street names and verify the maps, often on motorcycles. They ask the people themselves exactly what they call their streets and neighborhoods. With this process in place, Missing Maps had decided not to wait until the next crisis — they were going to map ahead of it.

I decided to attend a Missing Maps party close to home in London. In the halls of the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington, one of the most handsome Victorian buildings in the city, volunteer mappers sat around folding tables in what I imagined was once a ballroom. Missing Maps now coordinates mapping parties all over the world, and this was one of many that will take place in London every year.”

“On my screen was a satellite image of Niger, divided into five-kilometer squares. The instructions were simple. You had to start at a corner, and then slowly look for roads, buildings, paths. Buildings had shadows or roof peaks. With a mouse, you traced the road onto the screen. You circled anything that looked like it might be a house.”

Origins of Addresses

“Early street names were practical. In medieval England, names developed gradually, drawn from a nearby tree or river, the farm at the end of the road, the inn on the corner. Streets might be named for what happened there — Gropecunt Lane, for example, but also what you could find — the butcher, the blacksmith, the produce market.

Other streets were helpfully named for where they led to — take the London Road to London, for example. Street names became official only after long use and the rise of street signs. Unsurprisingly, dull names like Church Street, Mill Lane, and Station Road are still among the most common street names in England.

And yet this haphazard approach also bequeathed us Britain’s most ear-pleasing names. Reading the streets of English towns and cities is a delightful exercise in time travel. In London, names like Honey Lane, Bread Street and Poultry conjure the food markets that once lived there. Fish Street Hill, where a thriving fish market once stood.”

“In the early days of the English postal system, the recipient, not the sender, paid for postage, often at extraordinary costs to the working classes. Prices varied according to distance and how many sheets of paper the letter used. Even the rich used a system of writing both horizontally and vertically on a single page to save paper.”

“Analyzing reams of official post office documents, Hill found the postal system rampant with fraud and corruption. Parliamentarians were allowed to send mail to recipients for free, and rich people were more likely to have access — and to abuse — these free postal services. In their own way, the poor, too, could thwart the system by drawing a symbol on the outside of a letter so that the recipient could glance at the letter in the postman’s hand, understand the message, and refuse to pay the postage. (When I was a child, 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!”) But many poor people never wrote letters at all.”

“Hill’s simple plan offered what now seems an obvious solution: a flat rate for mail delivered anywhere in the country, payable by the sender. William Dockwra, a private merchant, had established a flat-rate post in London in 1680, where letters could be sent within London for a mere penny. But the government, which had a monopoly on the mail, saw this as a threat and absorbed it into the General Post Office. Now Hill offered the idea of a nationwide post where each letter’s postage, no matter how far it was to be sent, cost a single penny.

Hill, always a teacher, emphasized the moral and intellectual advantages of cheap mail, calling for the Post Office to become “the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization.” William Henry Ashurst, an activist lawyer, wrote an 1838 pamphlet supporting Hill’s proposal. For poor men’s children, he argued, who were required to travel far from home to work, the cost of post amounted to a “sentence of banishment.” “If a law were passed forbidding parents to speak to their children, till they had paid sixpence to government for permission,” he wrote, “the wickedness would be so palpable, that there would be an end to the tax, in that form of exaction, in twenty-four hours.”

What had begun as an economic cause was now a deeply political one. Could the penny post help Britain avoid the revolutions of France and America? Catherine Golden, who has elegantly chronicled the rise of the penny post, writes that postal reformers “recognized that small measures of progress might ease the political unrest between the “the masters and the men,’ quelling political revolt, which never came to pass in England.” Together with lectures, pamphlets, and advertisements (one published in the latest Dickens sensation, Nicholas Nickleby), the public forced a recalcitrant parliament to accept a measure many thought would bankrupt the nation.

So the nationwide penny post was born in 1840, and not long after, Hill invented the postage stamp. On the first day of the penny post, so many people wanted to mail letters that police stood guard outside the General Post Office.”

“Hill’s penny post was hardly charitable; money poured into the exchequer. The Royal Mail soon became one of the largest and most efficient bureaucracies in the world. In central London, you could write to invite a friend to dinner in the morning and have the reply well in time to order an extra joint of beef. In 1844, a travel guide advised the times you would have to send a letter to have it delivered:

FOR DELIVERY IN TOWN,

Over night by eight o’clock, for the first delivery.

Morning by eight o’clock, for the second delivery.

Morning by ten o’clock, for the third delivery.

Morning by twelve o’clock, for the fourth delivery.

Afternoon by two o’clock, for the fifth delivery.

Afternoon by four o’clock, for the sixth delivery.

Afternoon by six o’clock, for the seventh delivery.”

“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. And duplicate names, poorly numbered streets, and a public unfamiliar with what an address should even look like made the job of a delivery man harder than it had to be. In 1884, James Wilson Hyde had worked in the post office for twenty-five years, “the best, perhaps of his life,” he wrote. In his history of the Royal Mail, he described some badly addressed letters. Here’s one: “My dear Ant Sue as lives in the Cottage by the Wood near the New Forest.” And another: “This for the young girl that wears spectacles, who minds two babies.” And my favorite:

To my sister Jean,

Up the Canongate,

Down a Close,

Edinburgh.

She has a wooden leg.

Letters with indecipherable addresses were forwarded to what was known as the Dead Letter Office, where “blind officers” (so called, apparently, because the addresses were “blind” to them) would work out the sender’s intent. The blind officers would study maps and lists of farm names around the country to direct the letter to the right place. One useful technique required saying the addresses out loud, just as a child does when learning how to read. (A letter to Mr. Owl O’Neill was actually sent on to Rowland Hill.) Even today, more than three hundred postal workers in a giant Belfast warehouse (in an “aircraft hangar-sized room”) spend their days decoding addresses.

Clever senders like to play games with the Dead Letter Office. When Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, wrote to his sons at Eton, he hid the addresses in intricate drawings. His great-great-great-granddaughter, the artist Harriet Russell, carried on the trick, sending herself and friends 130 letters from Glasgow with addresses hidden in recipes, hand-drawn cartoons, a color-blindness test, an eye chart, and connect the dots puzzles. One letter required postal workers to solve a crossword; another puzzle was delivered to the correct address with the message “Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre.” One hundred twenty out of the 130 letters she sent arrived safely.

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.

The most talented letter detective was Patti Lyle Collins, who could decode almost a thousand addresses a day. Collins had been born wealthy and traveled extensively, but her husband died when her children were young and her widowed mother old. In the Dead Letter Office, she found the perfect career. She apparently knew every post office and city in the United States, as well as cities’ street names, corporations, colleges, lumber camps, mining settlements, and other private institutions. She even knew the handwriting style associated with different languages — which made it easier to decode their addresses.

Was anyone so well suited to her profession? As Bess Lovejoy has described, Collins sent one envelope, addressed to “Isabel Marbury” at “Stock” to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, because she knew Marbury was a common name there. Another letter, addressed to “Island,” was forwarded to West Virginia, where a part of the state was known as “the Island.” According to the 1893 issue of Ladies Home Journal, Mrs. Collins could pick up an envelope addressed to 3133 East Maryland Street and know that “while many cities had ‘Maryland’ streets, only in Indianapolis did they go as high as 3133.” Mrs. Collins correctly sent a letter addressed to “Jerry Rescue Block, NY” to Syracuse because she knew that was the site of the 1851 rescue of a fugitive slave who called himself Jerry.”

“In 1857 Rowland Hill split London into eight districts giving each a code. (Later, two were dropped at the suggestion of post office surveyor Anthony Trollope.) In the United States, the zip code was invented by Robert Moon, a Philadelphia postal employee. 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.

To encourage the use of zip codes, the postal service ran public service announcements with a dapper cartoon character, Mr. Zip. The Swinging Six, a Broadway/folk band sang a promotional song about the codes on national television. Opening lines: “Zip! Zip! Well, hello, my friend. How do you do? We hope you have a moment or two / to listen to what we have to say to each and every one of you. / It concerns our postal system.”

Today, the post office estimates that the zip code saves over $9 billion a year by allowing for more accurate and efficient mailing services. The Swinging Six should demand their cut.”

Modern Naming

“We no longer name streets, for the most part, Shopping Street or School Street. (I was delighted, however, to read of a street in Scotland with a Costco and an Ikea recently named Costkea Way.)”

“To his neighbors, Division Street was Hatsellers Street, Rutgers Street was Garbage Street, and Kosciuszko Bridge, named after a Polish leader who fought in the American Revolutionary War, somehow became “the Japanese guy bridge.” Immigrants from different regions in China have their own Manhattan street names for the same street according to region and dialect.

But maybe even our official street names describe us better than we think they do. Economist Daniel Oto-Peralías examined street name data in Spain and in Great Britain. In Spain, he found that people who lived in towns with many religious streets really were more religious. In Great Britain, people who lived in areas with a larger percentage of streets containing the word “church” or “chapel” in the name were more likely to identify as Christian. And in Scotland, he found that people who live in places with street names like “London Road” or “Royal Street” felt less Scottish.

We can only speculate as to causation: Do you live on Church Street because you are religious and want to live near a church? Or do you become more religious because you live on Church Street? Perhaps we make the street names, and then the street names help make us.”

“In Poland, the five most popular names are Forest, Field, Sunny, Short, and Garden. Several streets recently named by the public in Belgium celebrate the nation’s culinary history: Passage of Cuberdon (a cone-shaped Belgian candy), Passage of the Speculoos (a cookie), Passage of the Chicon (a cheese and endive dish).

New streets in modern Britain often have multicultural names. (“Karma Way,” and “Masjid Lane,” which means “mosque,” are some examples.) And, as one scholar told me, “The future of street names is women.” Feminist organization Osez le Féminisme has been plastering Paris with new unofficial street names (Quai de Nina Simone, for example). Only 2.6 percent of street names in Paris commemorate women.”

“After a successful campaign in 2009, the residents of Butt Hole Road now live on Archers Way.

And in 2018, a local business owner in Rowley Regis in the West Midlands of England pushed flyers through house doors supporting a street name change, claiming that it would raise property prices by £60,000. The name of the road was more rude slang I wasn’t familiar with: Bell End. I thought it sounded elegant — the light trill of the word Bell paired with the serious and solid End. But in British, it apparently means the end of the penis. According to the local petition, children living on the road had been bullied because of their street name.”

The First Addresses

“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.”

“She needed more soldiers. The Habsburg Empire was still governed by a feudal system. Landlords, who controlled the families who worked on their land, were largely responsible for military recruitment. Unsurprisingly, they held back the strong and hardworking for themselves, and sent the rest to fight. In theory, Maria Theresa reigned over an empire full of hearty young men, but what use were they if she had no way to find them?

So, in 1770, the same year her youngest daughter Marie Antoinette was married at Versailles, Maria Theresa ordered a “conscription of souls,” an accounting of all military-eligible men in her territories. But soon she discovered another problem: she had no real way of counting people in the warrens of the villages. There was no way to distinguish between the homes.

She struck on an answer: house numbers. By numbering each door and listing its occupants, the military could strip away the house’s anonymity and discover the men of fighting age inside. In March of 1770, Maria Theresa issued the order. More than 1,700 officers and civil servants fanned out across the empire. A professional painter, entering a village, would inscribe a number on each wall in a thick, black paint made from oil and boiled bones. On preprinted forms, scribes recorded each man and his fitness to serve. In deep winter, they trudged between villages and towns, rain blurring the cheap ink.

In the end, they numbered more than seven million “souls” — 1,100,399 house numbers in all. Over budget and out of time, the house numberers sent so many scrolls back to Vienna that there wasn’t space to fit them in the palace.

Together, Anton Tanner and I set off across the snowy city to look for some of Maria Theresa’s numbers in Vienna. We searched for the original conscription numbers — the spindly, elegant numerals painted against a white background.”

“You could instead start the history of house numbers in London. Before street names and numbers, businesses announced themselves with illustrated signs above their doors. The wordless signs used their own language, such as a dragon for an apothecary or a sugarloaf for a grocer. (Sometimes, as businesses changed hands, the signs became more arcane. The symbol of three caskets and a sugarloaf was James Olaves’s sign for his coffin business; the building had formerly been a grocer.) The heavy signs, often embellished with ironwork, creaked and groaned in the wind. In 1718, a sign pulled down the side of a building, killing four unlucky shoppers passing under it. House numbers absolved shops of the need for these signs. 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.

But even then, it took a while for the idea to sink in. Rowland Hill, regarded as the founder of the modern postal service, wrote that “On arriving at a house in the middle of a street, I observed a brass number 95 on the door, the houses on each side being numbered respectively 14 and 16. A woman came to the door, when I requested to be informed why 95 should appear between 14 and 16; she said it was the number of a house she formerly lived at in another street, and it (meaning the brass plate) being a very good one, she thought it would do for her present residence as well as any other.”

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

“Berlin was hardly alone in its confusion. Initially in Vienna, each new building got the lowest available number, no matter where it was. So when a new house was built, number 1521 could sit (un)comfortably next to, say, number 12. You could number houses around a city block, but then you have to know the street name, the number, and the block to find someone; it’s a bit too much to ask. (Venice has a similarly maddening system, the city divided into districts, or sestieri, and the numbers distributed almost randomly within them. But Venice can, of course, get away with anything.) 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.

But what is the right way to number houses? Enter the 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.”

“Most Europeans, for example, didn’t have permanent last names before the fourteenth century. (China’s Oin Dynasty had, however, been requiring last names since the fourth century B.C. “for the purposes of taxation, forced labor, and conscription.”) But in Europe, as Scott has described, people had a first name, and if something else was needed, they might add their occupation (Miller, Baker, Smith), where they lived (Hill, Brook), or perhaps the father’s given name or clan name (Johnson, Richardson).

But these names weren’t systematically passed down. And you couldn’t find someone by first name alone; 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. What use was that to an outside policeman or a tax collector? Locals might know how to find Henry son of William, but they have their reasons not to tell you. So rulers began to demand permanent last names, yet another sign of the lengthening reach of the state.”

“On just one night, Genevans destroyed 150 numbers, even as the military patrolled the streets at night, looking for house-number defilers. The painters painted again. In court, some argued (sheepishly, I imagine) that they hadn’t known they weren’t allowed to erase their numbers. 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.”

“In the United States, federal offcials openly despised Native American naming practices, which were often gender-neutral and fluid (Five Bears might become Six Bears, Scott points out, after a successful hunt) and forced them to change names as part of a grander “civilizing project.” Prussia allowed Jews to be citizens in 1812, in exchange for taking fixed surnames. 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.”

“Once Manhattan was Mannahatta, a sylvan island where black bears, timber rattlesnakes, mountain lions and white-tailed deer roamed. So many tree frogs croaked that, as one naturalist wrote in 1748, it was “difficult for a man to make himself heard.” Streams teemed with eels, porpoises danced in the sea, and migratory birds chattered in chestnut and tulip tree forests. A red maple swamp full of beavers sat in the middle of what is now Times Square. Manhattan once boasted more plant species than Yosemite, more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and more ecological communities than Yellowstone, ecologist Eric Sanderson has ex-plained. Sanderson has spent years imagining New York right before the “very faire and hot” day in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into the Muhheakunnuk River (we know it as today as the Hudson) in 1609.”

“Much of Manhattan was still farmland. (During the Revolutionary War, George Washington rode through cornfields on his way to rally his troops against the British at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.) Yet the commissioners’ plan included hardly any green space at all, explaining that “those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan island” meant that New Yorkers didn’t need so many parks for fresh air. Land was simply too valuable. (Central Park was only added to the plan in the 1850s.)”

“New York was founded as an outpost of the Dutch West India Company for the sole purpose of making money. Indeed, the Dutch colonists, unlike the English Puritans, rather liked their homeland. The Dutch encouraged immigrants from all over to populate the city precisely because they didn’t want to do it themselves.”

“Numbered streets are largely an American phenomenon. Today, every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. (Most have lettered streets, too.) According to census data, 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.

But as geographer Jani Vuolteenaho has described, in Europe, numbers rarely appear on street signs. In Madrid, in 1931, in what is now called the Second Spanish Republic, someone sensibly suggested using numbers to avoid conflict over what to rename the streets. The city council dismissed the idea outright, explaining that numbered streets were not in the “the traditional Spanish spirit” that honored citizens “by giving their names to cities and villages.” Even today, across Europe, instructions about street naming often include a rule rejecting the use of numbers. Estonia, Vuolteenaho points out, has banned them by law.”

“His young son had converted to Quakerism, a religion founded on the rejection of social hierarchy. (Originally called the “Children of Light” they adopted the nickname “Quakers” given them by their detractors, who saw them shake in worship.) Quakers believe that God appears to each person individually, without the need for intermediaries like priests or kings. Quakers also believed in modest and simple dress — one rule William Penn openly flouted by wearing a small wig after he lost all his hair to smallpox. And Quakers used “thee” and “thou,” pronouns reserved only for intimates in the seventeenth century, for everyone, including the king.

In seventeenth-century England, Quakers lived their convictions at their peril. The younger Penn refused to remove his hat in the king’s presence, so the king swept his own off, wittily telling Penn that “it is the custom of this place that only one man should remain uncovered at a time.” The point was made, but Penn still refused to take off his hat.

Penn spent seven months and twelve lonely days in the Tower.”

“In addition to land and money, Penn inherited the benefit of a loan his father had made to the king in the amount of about £16,000. Instead of calling in the debt (which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway; the king was broke), Penn negotiated a different prize: land in America. It was a win-win: the king could rid himself of the debt and William Penn, too, who could take his annoying Quaker friends with him. With his claim to 45,000 square miles of American land, Penn was now the largest private landowner in England, apart from the king himself.

At the age of thirty-six, Penn could start over. He had been kicked out of Oxford for “non-conformist views,” describing it as a place of “hellish darkness and debauchery,” for which he was whipped by his father. He had traveled across Europe, sometimes twenty-four hours in one go, in the back of a bouncing cart, preaching in several languages, bailing some Quakers out of jail, and saving others from certain ruin. He had written books and pamphlets on the intricacies of religious doctrine, and been to prison six times. But he would no longer seek to save the Quakers in England. Instead, he would get them out of it. Admiral Penn, who had once turned his son out after his conversion, had provided in his will the Quakers’ salvation.

Penn set out to conduct his “holy experiment” in the Americas. He wanted to call his densely forested colony “Sylvania,” after the Latin word for woods, but the king insisted over his objections that he add “Penn” to the name — in honor of Penn’s father. “Philadelphia,” taken from the Greek for “brotherly love,” would be Pennsylvania’s flagship settlement.”

“William Penn, one of the earliest urban planners in America, also introduced numbered streets to America’s cities. He named the cross streets after “things that Spontaneously Grow in the country,” launching another fashion of tree names like Cherry and Chestnut Streets. The street poor Holme had wanted to name after himself became Mulberry Street.

Penn had hardly invented the gridded city, however. Peter Marcuse, a professor of urban planning, tells how Roman military camps often used closed grids, surrounded by walls and fortifications. (Marcuse is no fan of the grid; he points out that its name derives from “grid iron,” a medieval torture device designed to hold martyrs in place as they were set on burning coals.) An ancient city in Pakistan, Mohenjo Daro, had a grid, as did the Greek city of Miletus. Grids, Marcuse points out, also used in Spanish settlements in the Americas and French cities in Africa, provided “a uniform layout that could easily be established in the conquering country and imposed on the colony some distance away.” But in North America, it was Penn who popularized the grid as a tool of urban planning for different, and more peaceful, reasons.”

“The Land Ordinance of 1785, inspired by Jefferson’s ideas, instructed surveyors to draw lines running north and south at right angles, dividing the territory into thirty-six square mile townships. Lots were numbered, and the need for speed and efficiency meant that the streets were often numbered as well.

As historian Vernon Carstensen has described, surveyors ambitiously set out across the country to record millions of acres in precise squares — all, somehow, “on the curved surface of the earth.” Some discharged their duties diligently. Others, whether from ineptitude, lack of proper tools, or drunkenness, drew squiggly lines. One reportedly measured the length of a buggy wheel with string, and then rested on a horse-drawn cart while he counted the rotations. But for the most part the land was laid out into neat parcels, with intersecting right angles.

“The straight lines were spread over the prairies, the foothills, the mountains, over the swamps and deserts, and even over some of the shallow lakes,” Carstensen has written. “Like bees or ants or other well-organized societies, Americans, once they fixed upon the rectangular survey, were inflexible in their devotion to the idea.” Ultimately, the surveyors covered about 69 percent of land in the public domain in the Continental United States.

As in Manhattan, gridding the West converted the land into easily traded gambling chips. But Carstensen, who has closely chronicled the land survey, found in it a higher purpose. “No one will ever know how much the straight lines of the rectangular surveys contributed to the public peace during the Nineteenth Century,” he wrote. In parts of the country where the map looked like a “crazy quilt.” like Tennessee and Kentucky, disputes over land boundaries had led to murderous, generations-long feuds.”

“Grids vary in size and shape in every city. Some have rectangular blocks (Manhattan), some have square blocks (Houston), some have large blocks (Salt Lake City’s are 660 by 660 feet, inspired by the Mormon founder’s idea that plots should be large enough for urban farming), while others are small (Portland, Oregon’s are only 200 by 200 feet). The parceled land, so often coupled with numbered streets, reflected America’s image as an orderly, pragmatic, and new country. And because grids made navigation easy, the land was welcoming to the newcomers flooding in. People might feel so at home in New York, so ready to call themselves New Yorkers, because they never have to stand on a corner staring at a map like a despicable tourist.

A European country could hardly remake its landscape in this way.”

Cultural Differences

“Today, more than fifty years after Barthes’ first trip to Japan, perhaps nothing about Tokyo infuriates Western tourists more than its lack of street names. (Only a small number of major streets are named.) 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.

The absence of street names makes navigation challenging, even for people from Japan. To help people find their way, Tokyo is dotted with köban, small buildings staffed with police officers familiar with the area and armed with detailed maps and thick directories. The fax machine persisted in Japan long after it had died out elsewhere in part because of the fondness for — and necessity of sending maps. Barthes himself wrote that he would sometimes direct a taxi driver to a big red phone box to call the host for directions. Smartphone maps have revolutionized getting around Tokyo.

But hand-drawn maps were one of the delights of Barthes’ time in Japan. “It is always enjoyable to watch someone write, all the more so to watch someone draw,” he said. “From each occasion when someone has given me an address in this way, I retain the gesture of my interlocutor reversing his pencil to rub out, with the eraser at its other end, the excessive curve of an avenue, the intersection of a viaduct.”

David Howell, a professor of Japanese history at Harvard, explained to me over email that streets historically had never been named in Japan. Urban neighborhoods in the seventeenth century were broken into rectangular blocks (cho), and those owning property in the block had some responsibility for its governance. The block became the key unit for urban administration and geography, and a group of blocks would often share a name. Most neighborhoods had a shop, where newcomers could ask for directions. Samurai lived in walled compounds on bigger plots that were easy to find simply by asking, or by using one of the many maps in circulation.”

“Kanji are not written on lines. Instead, Emiko told Barrie how in Japan their paper did not have lines but dozens of square boxes. (The paper is called genks yöshi, and is still used in Japanese schools today.) Each kanji acted independently; each was perfectly understandable on its own, unlike English letters, which make no sense unless they are put together in lines and read from left to right to make words. (English words must also be properly spaced — ”redone” is entirely different from “red one.”) Even reading all capital letters in English is exhausting, and reading more than a few words written vertically is painful. But Japanese can be read easily in a number of ways. The quill, Barthes pointed out, could “scratch away at the paper in one direction” but the Japanese brush could move any way it wanted.

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.”

“it seems we don’t just use different parts of our brain to read different languages; the languages we read may also influence the way we think. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky decided to test this idea. In Pormpuraaw, a remote community in northern Australia, the Aboriginal community speaks a language that lacks words for “left” and “right.” Instead, the Kuuk Thaayore use compass points to describe space. “There’s an ant on your southeast leg,” someone might say. “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” “Having their attention trained this way,” Boroditsky writes, “equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities.” She once asked a five-year-old girl from the community to point north, and she did so immediately and accurately. Boroditsky asked conference rooms full of Ivy League scholars to do the same, and they could not. Most refused even to try.

In another study, Boroditsky and her collaborator, Alice Gaby, gave various subjects a set of pictures that, once placed in the right order, told a story a man aging, for example, or a banana being eaten — and asked them to put the shuffled cards in order. English speakers arranged the pictures left to right, the same way the subjects read and write in their own language. Hebrew speakers would, on the other hand, organize the pictures in chronological order from right to left — the way they read and write. But the Kuuk Thaayore people arranged them in a pattern from east to west, a pattern that changed depending on the direction they were facing. If, for example, they were facing south, they placed the cards left to right. But if they were facing north, the order was switched from right to left.”

“Hangul was invented, some say single-handedly, by a fifteenth-century emperor, King Sejong. Before hangul, written Korean used Chinese characters, which Koreans called hanja. But Sejong recognized that the fit was awkward: “The speech sounds of our nation are different from those of China and are not confluent in writing.” he wrote in 1443. “Thus, there are many among the ignorant peasants who, when they have something they wish to say, are ultimately unable to express their meanings. Taking pity on this, I have newly created twenty-eight letters, and simply wish for any and all to learn them with ease and use them at their convenience in daily life.” He had retreated into study and emerged with a miracle, nearly losing his eyesight in the process.

Linguists have called hangul the world’s greatest alphabet, which both North and South Koreans celebrate with a national holiday. It is exceptionally easy to read. Sejong wrote of its letters that “wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.” The alphabet is phonetic, with each character corresponding to a single sound: everything could now be written, wrote Sejong, even the “sound of the winds, the cry of the crane, the cackle of the fowl and the barking of the dogs.” Even more amazingly, the shape of the letters look like the sounds they make. One letter corresponds, for example, to the English letter d — and it simulates the tongue’s position as it makes the sound.”

“In 2011, the government announced that it was changing Korea’s addresses, and adopting a more Western-style method of naming streets and numbering houses. The government vigorously promoted the new addressing system, giving out Bluetooth headphones to those who converted their street addresses through an online system. TV shopping companies offered gift certificates of $10 if people switched to the new system. Chungbuk province gave families with children bracelets engraved with the new street addresses.

But every Korean I spoke to informally said they didn’t really use them. Cabdrivers convert the new addresses back into the old system, as do postmen. Of course, this reluctance may be temporary, a liminal period before the next generation grows up knowing no other way to address streets. Or it could be a sign that Koreans are still reading their city in blocks.”

Politics

“Carefully, he and his friend traced out a new street sign in markers, with the name in Farsi at the top and in English at the bottom. With practice, he was able to mimic the signs perfectly. Pedram and his friends mixed the glue with water and pasted their new sign on top of the old street name, Winston Churchill Street. When Pedram came back a few days later, he said, other people had plastered over other old Churchill Street signs in the same way. He could tell that someone had tried to peel them off — a corner would be missing but the glue was too strong.

A few months later, he knew they’d won, he’s said, when he heard a woman hop in a taxi and say, “Take me to Bobby Sands Street.” The city soon made the name official. To avoid having to mention their revolutionary foe every time they gave the embassy’s address, the British opened a new entrance on another street.”

“At the end of Ireland’s War of Independence in 1921, the peace treaty with the British called for the northern six counties of Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Protestants living in Northern Ireland generally want to stay in the United Kingdom. For the most part, Catholics, like Bobby Sands, do not and they often faced humiliating discrimination. The IRA’s aim was to reunite Ireland by force, removing the six counties of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and transferring them to the Republic of Ireland.”

“Many Iranians hated the British as much as Sands did. In the 1920s, the British had helped put the first Shah, a dictator, into power. And then, in 1953, the British, alongside the American CIA, also helped engineer a coup against a new, democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had initiated the state takeover of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as BP — British Petroleum.”

“What they couldn’t convert, they could rename. And that included themselves. Before the Revolution, French forenames were largely restricted to Catholic control — which meant sticking to biblical and saints’ names. (The nobility could, as in most everything else, get away with more flair.) But in September of 1792, just one day after the National Convention of France unanimously voted to abolish the monarchy, French people were handed a new right: the right to name their children — and themselves — whatever they wanted. Many chose new names with revolutionary zeal, such as Fleur ‘Orange Républicaine, Lucius Pleb-Egal, and Simon la Liberté ou la Mort. Children were named La Loi (the law) and Raison (reason). It was this kind of creativity that would in 1803 spur Napoleon to come up with a closed list of prénoms (first names) that people could name their children. (The list was scrapped in 1993, though French courts have nevertheless rejected names like Joyeaux, Nutella, Strawberry, and MJ, after Michael Jackson.)”

“Ferguson vividly describes how Pujoulx wanted to turn each street into a geography lesson — streets named for towns, with the size of the street corresponding to the size of the town.”

“The French Revolution nevertheless sparked a trend for rebranding streets to show off a new ideology. Around the world, revolutionary governments kick off their regimes by changing the street names. Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of its peasant revolution. In Croatia, the main street of Vukovar has changed names six times in the twentieth century, once with each change of state. Recently, Poland and Ukraine have passed laws ordering the “decommunization” of their streetscape. Russia has more than four thousand main streets named after Lenin alone. Together, they run 5,363 miles, which, as Gideon Lichfield points out, is longer than the distance from Moscow to Minneapolis.”

“A Spanish law requires changing all streets named after fascists — and cities are renaming them after women like Rosa Parks and Frieda Kahlo. And more recently, Sudanese pro-democracy protestors have changed the names of streets to those killed in the uprising that brought down the dictator Omar al-Bashir.”

“The rules also forbid the use of streets named after people, living or dead, presumably because of the communist egalitarian ideal. (There are no Mao Zedong streets in China.) Shanghai’s local regulations, which call for street names to “have healthy implications and be in line with social morality,” could have been written by Grégoire himself.

China has used street names as a tool to keep ethnic minority regions in check, as political scientist Jonathan Hassid has described. You would expect places that have their own languages and cultures to have more variation in street names, but Hassid found that the opposite is largely true; areas with a higher concentration of ethnic minorities largely have streets that sound more like those in Beijing than other areas. Street names became one more tool to keep the locals under control.

America’s own revolution also knit together names and ideology. George Washington, who would give the capital city its name (though, apparently, he always called it Federal City) chose Pierre L’Enfant to design the city. L’Enfant was born in Paris, and studied art and architecture in France but had volunteered, like thousands of his compatriots, in the American revolutionary army. His plan for the new capital merged the ideals of American and European cities; Washington would have an American grid, but European avenues, circles, and squares. The streetscape would be ripe with symbolism — the Capitol, for example, was put on the hill, not the White House. Unlike in Britain, the president would not be king.

And then there were the street names. Washington, DC’s street names are maniacally rational. Numbered streets run east to west, and lettered streets (A, B, C) north and south. (After W Street, the pattern starts again, with each name now two syllables — Adams, Bryant, etc. — and then at the end, restarting with three-syllable street names, Allison, Buchanan, etc.) The diagonal avenues that break up the grid were named for the states in the Union (fifteen of them, then), with the longest avenues given the names of the three largest states at the time, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Now every state in America has a street name in DC.”

“Protestants and Catholics still largely live apart. “Peace walls,” some three miles long, still separate Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast, and more of these walls exist today than at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. About 90 percent of children in Northern ireland still go to schools segregated by religion.

When you write a lot of articles about street names, editors tend to title them in homage to “Where the Streets Have No Name,” after the U2 song. The song was inspired, in part, by Northern Ireland. Bono, the Irishman who wrote the lyrics, told a magazine. “An interesting story that someone told me once is that in Belfast, by what street someone lives on you can tell not only their religion but tell how much money they’re making literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further up the hill the more expensive the houses become.” This largely true in my husband’s hometown. in one housing estate, streets salute the royal family with British-sounding names like Princess Avenue and Windsor Street, the streets often covered in red, white, and blue bunting from end to end. Catholic estates tend to have Irish names, like Ratheen and Rathbeg, and Irish flags fly from telephone poles.

And yet, there is no Bobby Sands Street in Cookstown, or in any other town or city in Ireland, north or south. The principle he stood for — a united Ireland is one that most Catholics in Northern Ireland agree with. But a majority of Catholics never accepted the violent tactics he and the IRA used. Almost three thousand people on both sides died in the Troubles. Many more were infured.”

“The Jew Streets were instead old, descriptive names — Church Street was where the church was, Jew Street was where the Jews lived. They had been changed during the Nazi era, and then changed back after the war as a sign of respect.”

“By 1933, nearly every single town in Germany had a street named after Hitler. (In 2004, Google accidentally reverted the old name of Theodor-Hauss-Platz, in Berlin’ tony district of Charlottenburg, to its World War II name, Adolf-Hitler-Platz.)”

“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.”

“Less than a month after Adolf Hitler swallowed a cyanide capsule in his air-raid bunker, the new Allied government composed of the Four Powers — America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — began to govern Germany. They found a lot to do. Almost 50,000 buildings were rubble. In Berlin alone, 53,000 children were lost or orphaned, others killed by tuberculosis and rickets, pellagra and impetigo. During an outbreak of dysentery in July 1945, 66 infants died for every 100 live births. With the knowledge of Stalin, mostly Russian troops raped an estimated 1/3 of Berlin women and girls (fathering between 150,000 and 200,000 babies in Germany alone), spreading typhus, syphilis, and gonorrhea. Even though the postwar German population was now smaller than before, four times as many people were dying per day after the war than during it.

And yet, on the first agenda of the first meeting of the new borough mayors of Berlin, on May 24, 1945, was street names. The German Communist Party combed through every street name and recommended 1,795 street name changes out of an estimated 10,000.”

“Pre-apartheid South Africa does not look that different from the country today; in fact, by some measures, 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.

At the same time, Afrikaners are a small minority in South Africa — only about 5 percent or so of the population. And though many had committed unspeakable acts against their countrymen, their ancestors had come to South Africa only about thirty years after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. Afrikaners were still very much there, and, for the most part, had no plans to leave, and nowhere in particular to go. Other historical villains had been able to assimilate, even when their crimes had been more depraved. The Confederates became Americans again. The Nazis returned to being German. The question became whether the Afrikaners could simply become South African.”

“The Afrikaners, many of whom had come to South Africa under the Dutch East India Company, had themselves started off poor and marginalized. In the nineteenth century, the British came and, as the British so often did, took over. They looked down upon the Afrikaners as savages, denigrated their language, and took away much of their political autonomy. But on a plus note, they also abolished slavery, which fueled Afrikaners’ resentment. Dressed in short “dopper” coats and bonnets, the pioneers — or “Voortrekkers” headed for the interior in loaded ox-pulled wagons. Between 1835 and 1846, about 15,000 Afrikaners left in the “the Great Trek,” waging bloody battles with tribes they came across — the Zulu, the Basotho, the Tswana, and the Ndebele to name a few. They abolished slavery in name, but captured what they called “apprentices” sometimes — as one German missionary said, “wagonloads of children” — to labor for them.

But they couldn’t get far away enough from the British, especially when rich reserves of diamonds and then gold were found in their territory. The British and Boers (the Afrikaner word for “farmer”) clashed in two wars, where the British, outmatched by guerrilla warfare, burned farms, slaughtered cattle, and put women and children in concentration camps (a term the war arguably coined). Around 26,000 Boers died in the camps, mostly children.”

“In 2018, the ANC passed a resolution to draft legislation allowing the transfer of land from whites to blacks without compensation. As I write, the South African parliament is considering a constitutional change to allow this to happen.”

Vanity Addresses

“New York City regulations limit building heights, but developers can buy the air rights from a nearby site that is not using its allowance. The Zeckendorfs paid Park Avenue’s Christ Church $40 million for seventy thousand square feet of air rights to build what one real estate agent called a “Viagra” building — tall and straight. But the deal with Christ Church wasn’t just about making the building taller. The Zeckendorfs also promised an annual payment of $30,000 to the church for one hundred years in exchange for one simple thing: its address. The Zeckendorfs’ new mega building, 520 Park Avenue, does not even have frontage on Park Avenue; it is actually on East 60th Street, 150 feet west of that avenue.

How is this possible? In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive. (Cashier’s check or money order only, please.)”

“(Times Square is itself a kind of vanity address, having been renamed from Longacre Square in 1904 when The New York Times moved there.) But there’s a good reason. An apartment on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue can cost 5 to 10 percent more than an equivalent property on nearby cross streets.

The formal vanity street address program exploded in the time of borough president (and later mayor) David Dinkins, when the city was trying to attract more development.”

“Vanity addresses seem like a cheap way to increase the value of real estate, but they can cost more than money. Police and firemen might struggle to find a building with a Fifth Avenue address that is not actually on Fifth Avenue (one problem Manhattan and rural West Virginia share). In Chicago, where a similar program allowed developers to manipulate addresses, thirty-one-year-old Nancy Clay died in an office fire when firefighters didn’t realize that One Illinois Center was actually on the less grandly named East Wacker Drive.”

“Street names can add or subtract value all over the world. At Sacred Heart College in Geelong, Australia, high school students came up with a useful research project, identifying twenty-seven streets in Victoria with goofy names (“Butt Street,” “Wanke Road,” “Beaver Street.”) Having pored over details from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they found that property on these streets costs 20 percent less than adjacent streets — on average, about $140,000 in savings on a Melbourne house in the median price range.

It’s not just the street’s first name that matters. In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.” “Is it the association of the word street street urchins and streetwalkers?” Richard Coates, a professor of linguistics, asked in the Guardian. “You don’t get avenue urchins, do you?” Disturbingly, houses on roads named “King” or “Prince” were also worth more than those on “Queen” or “Princess.””

““Courts,” “Circles, and “Ways” were popular in the United States in the 1980s.”

Homelessness

“The people Sarah interviewed desperately wanted to be on the grid with all that the grid entails: homes, bills, bank accounts — in essence, everything required for modern life. Most of all, they wanted jobs, and jobs required addresses. One man told her, “I used to work but now I don’t have an address.” Sarah discovered evidence showing many homeless people are especially hard workers because they are so grateful for the work.”

“Dennis Culhane, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a grad student when he lived in a shelter for several weeks for research. When he returned to that shelter months later, he realized that a lot of people he knew weren’t there anymore they had struggled through a difficult time and had been living in the shelter only temporarily. Only about a tenth were chronically homeless.

Today, we know that while the incidence of mental health and addiction is higher in the homeless population, many more have simply fallen on hard times. (Severe mental illness is also more visible in people who live on the streets, rather than in their cars or on friends’ sofas.) Families with children make up a third of the homeless population. And many people without permanent homes are already working.”

“The postal service will receive and hold mail addressed to your name, if you send it to general delivery. (In many countries, this is called poste restante, and it dates back to the earliest days of the postal service.) Ronald Crawford told a reporter that he loves the junk mail he receives, which he picks up at the general delivery window of New York’s main post office. “I have something with my name on it and I’m recognized, you know, so I kind of appreciate it.””

“Sarah’s solution: ban the address. Or, rather, ban employers from asking for it before giving a job offer. Employers contact applicants by phone or email — what did they need the address for anyway? Simply taking that line off the application would stop discrimination and perhaps give homeless people the confidence to apply.

Banning questions on an application form is not a new idea. Dorsey Nunn was sentenced to life in prison in 1969. When he was released after twelve years, he started an organization advocating for former prisoners. One of the innovations he pushed was advising employers to “ban the box” — the question asking if the applicant had been convicted of a crime. What if employers only asked the question after they had reviewed the application? Nunn traveled across the country to sell his idea. When Walmart took the box off its form, other businesses — Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Starbucks — followed. Thirteen states have banned the box for all employers. Now more than two hundred million Americans live in places where asking about criminal history at the initial application stage is limited by law.”

“London is remarkable in that the poor and the rich often live incredibly close together. Houses in my neighborhood listed for £1.5 million sit next to vast public housing apartment buildings. Grenfell Tower, a mostly working-class council estate where seventy-two people died in a 2017 fire, stood in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, Kensington and Chelsea — where the average property price in 2019 was £1.77 million.”

“To receive unemployment benefits — known as “Job-seeker’s Allowance” in the UK — the applicant must turn up in person at a Jobcentre. Jobcentres, too, still issue their appointment letters by mail. If you miss an appointment after a letter was sent out, you can be sanctioned by losing your benefits, Chris told me, for between four weeks and three years. A man who went to his dying mother’s bedside was deprived of his benefits, even though he told the Jobcentre in advance. A man who missed an appointment because his baby had been stillborn was reportedly sanctioned. A man who had a heart attack during a work capability assessment: sanctioned. One recent study found that 21 percent of people using homelessness services had become homeless because of sanctions.”

“Why not allow the homeless to use the addresses of empty houses? It is a strange fact that in England, a country with soaring house prices and a housing shortage, more than 200,000 houses sit empty for more than six months and at least 11,000 are unoccupied for more than ten years. In Kensington and Chelsea, more than 1,600 homes are empty — owned by Ukrainian oligarchs, offshore companies, foreign royalty, and even Michael Bloomberg (a £16-million seven-bedroom period mansion, if you’re wondering). In 2019, over £53 billion worth of property sat empty in England — over 216,000 homes. Sometimes the reasons for the empty homes are the usual ones — someone has gone into a nursing home or vacated for extensive renovations. But for many investors, London houses are Georgian-brick bank accounts.

Chris looked amused when I asked him whether the homeowners would mind. He told me that people always asked him of the homeless, “How will they get in?” But they don’t get in at all — the address is just a place marker. You own your home, not the address. Even if you move back in, it wouldn’t matter if someone else was using your mailing address. In fact, there’s no reason you couldn’t do this with occupied houses as well — but that, he told me, would be too radical a change. People might not understand that there is no risk to them, and complain.

Chris pulled up a spreadsheet on his laptop and showed me how the scheme would work. The homeless person receives an address of an empty home, and then enters it in an online database where she wanted her mail forwarded — to a shelter, a friend’s house, etc. The post office would then redirect the mail to that location. An employer would never have to know the homeless person didn’t actually live at her assigned address.”

Conclusion

“In September 1905, Daniel Burnham revealed his new plan for the city of San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel. Burnham was already one of the world’s most famous urban planners and architects. He had designed the “White City” at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition (1893), an exhibit of more than 150 neoclassical buildings, with facades crafted from plaster of Paris, spray-painted white and lit by 100,000 electric bulbs. About 30 million people — a number equal to a third of the U.S. population — visited Burnham’s creation. Although it was little more than a collection of “decorated sheds,” many left the White City in tears of awe.

Burnham’s plan for San Francisco was well received. But in April 1906, an earthquake struck the city, killing 3,000 people and leveling 80 percent of its buildings. Most of the copies of Burnham’s plan, which had been stored in City Hall, were lost. He traveled to the city to drum up new interest in the plan, but San Francisco simply wanted to rebuild, not reinvent.”

“With a mathematician friend, a fellow chess-player from Eton, he came up with an ingenious idea — divide the world into squares, 3 meters by 3 meters. Instead of using coordinates, they decided to use words, which are easier to remember than a string of numbers. Three words per square: 40,000 words, 64 trillion 3-word combinations.

And so what3words was born. Every spot on the world’s surface now has its own what3words address. It’s easy to look up on the company’s website or on its free app. The middle of the Taj Mahal is at doubt.bombard.alley. The Eiffel Tower is at daunting.evolves.nappy. What3words can lead you to places without traditional addresses. The middle of the White House Rose Garden is army.likes.jukebox. The playground slide my kids love to careen down is at shot.pokers.clock.

The uses of the technology are endless. Want to find your friends sitting under a tree for a picnic? Use a what3 words address. Need to pin exactly where on a sidewalk you took that picture? Or find your Airbnb tree house in Costa Rica? What3words can help with that, too. The technology has more serious uses. The Rhino Refugee Camp in Uganda is using what3words to help people find their way to the camp’s churches, mosques, markets, and doctors’ office. The Mongolian postal service is using the addresses to send mail to nomadic families. And Dr. Louw now uses the three words to find patients in the townships of South Africa.

In the UK, emergency services have begun to embrace the technology as well. Police in Humberside found a woman who had been sexually assaulted and taken to an unknown place by helping her locate her three-word address using her phone’s GPS. They rushed to her quickly — and arrested her attacker. And the BBC reported how the words “weekend,” “foggy,” and “earphones” helped police track down a mother and her child after a car accident. Sam Sheppard, who works with Avon and Somerset police, put it this way. “We are moving away from the old style questioning — ’Where have you come from?”, ‘Where are you going?’, ‘What can you see?’ et cetera. These questions take time and aren’t always that accurate.””

“Most recently protests spurred Berlin to change the names of the streets in the city’s Afrikanisches Viertel, or “African quarter,” where in the years before World War 1, 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.”

“It was the 1920s, and the United States was the richest country in the world. Americans brimmed with pensions, paid holidays, and new automobiles. Florida was hot, but the rest of the country was brutally cold. In 1920, a seventy-two-hour blizzard covered New York with almost eighteen inches of snow. Soldiers from the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service used flamethrowers to melt the ice. In Boston, almost seventy-four inches of snow fell on the city the same year.

In search of paradise, Americans rushed to Florida, often driving down in the brand new cars now so widely available. Speculators often flipped empty lots before any money was even put down. The Miami Herald was the heaviest newspaper in the country, full of advertisements for land. Two-thirds of all Florida real estate was sold by mail to people who had never even been there. Still, Joseph Young chartered twenty-one “no obligation” buses from Boston and New York to Hollywood.”

“What3words hires native speakers, often culled from linguistics programs at London universities, to speak each word out loud to rule out homophones that would be confusing — blue and blew, for example. The advisers also sift out rude words or slang. (The word “tortoise” doesn’t appear in the Bengali list because some people think it’s bad luck to have one in your house.) They weed out words that don’t work; Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, for example, meaning “insurance companies providing coverage for legal expenses” is too long for an address whose selling point is brevity. And they make sure that every word is unique to all editions of the map — barn, the Norwegian word for “child,” can’t be used in the Norwegian map because “barn” already appears in the English-language version.

Eventually the linguists cleverly whittle down the list of words. And then the most familiar words are allocated to places on the map where speakers of the language are most likely to live. On the French map, the word chat (“cat”) is likely to form part of a what3words address in Paris, or perhaps Montreal. On the Korean map, the word for cat will appear most often in Seoul. Less common and more complicated three-word addresses were put in the Arctic (ultimatum.deadliness.comically in the English version) or in an Afghanistan desert (capabilities.concur-rency.rudimentary).”

“It’s not just what3words. Google has devised Plus Codes that use a string of numbers and letters to provide an address for any spot in the world. Plus Codes, which are derived from longitude and latitude coordinates, are about the length of a phone number. But the length can also be shortened when combined with a place name. So my regular spot at the British Library becomes GVHC+XW Kings Cross, London.”

“In much of the unaddressed world, the problem is not shipping the item from, say, China, to Tanzania. The problem, instead, is what logisticians call the “last mile” — more specifically that the last stretch of delivery — can sometimes make up half the total delivery cost.”

“Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, at the edge of Syria, houses almost eighty thousand refugees, with thirty-two schools and fifty-eight community centers. By some estimates, it is Jordan’s fourth largest city. But it was only in 2016 that it got street names: Basil Street, Olive Street, Anise Street, Zaytoun Street. “The street names are civilized ones, and they remind the individual of his country, and now an individual has an address. We used to live in a neglected area and now we have an address,” one refugee, Abu Ismail, told Reuters. “Where do you live? In this specific street. Thank God, I now have an actual address.””