In many citys in the US, house number is dependent upon a grid system or a specific series of streets/avenues.
For instance, here in Phoenix, the system starts at zero - which is Central Ave. 1st Street, 2nd Street, etc are east of Central and 1st Ave, 2nd Ave, etc are west of central. Aves and streets run north/south.
So, someone living at say 3510 W Osborne would have a cross street of 35th Avenue, while 3510 E Osborne would have a cross street of 35th Street. Addresses pay no respect to city as both streets and avenues are in several cities out here. Each city having it's own addressing system doesn't work because citys are right next to each other.
For example, if I go a couple of streets north from my own house I will be in Glendale, AZ and not Phoenix.
Phoenix goes out as far west as 339th Ave. So, it's possible to have a very high street address if you want to be a desert hermit.
To make this even more interesting: in most major U.S. cities, especially so west of the Mississippi River, the address number (which keeps increasing until one crosses not the city limits, but rather, the county/parish limits) is predicated on each “block” — the distance between two parallel, consecutive streets — being one-tenth of one mile apart and making ten city blocks roughly one mile. This way, an address like 3510 Appleton Avenue indicates, roughly, one is 3.5 miles from the centre of the county seat.
Except, that is, for Seattle — well, technically, Washington state.
Washington went instead with the metric system. This reveals a lot about how young the city and state are, relative to other U.S. continental states, and it also presents a rare instance when a U.S. jurisdiction implemented metric/SI units, rather than imperial units, onto administrative geographies.
In other words, if you’re in Seattle, and you’re on 45th Street, you’re 4.5km from the heart of the county seat (King County/downtown Seattle), and those numbers increase all the way into the 40000-block range in the eastern reaches of King County, deep in the Cascade Mountains. (It’s actually a bit more complicated with Seattle’s case, as two warring developers during the late 19th century chose to draw the original city centre streets in different directions — one developer drew them parallel to Elliot Bay (part of the Puget Sound) and, thus, diagonal, whereas the other developer drew streets to align with cardinal compass points of north/south and east/west. Eventually, the latter won out and only a small grid of diagonal streets remain.)
The outcome of the above is city blocks in Seattle are fairly short (~100m apart), and this tends to make the streetscapes more walkable and compact.
In Canada, meanwhile, cities within provinces whose regions (counties) were subdivided by English concessions tend to have every street begin at 1. In a city like Toronto, the most visible example of this is 1 Yonge Street, once called “the longest street in Canada”, but every street, no matter where one is in the city, starts at 1 (east of Yonge, which bisects the city in half, east-west street numbers increase as one travels east, and west of Yonge, they increase as one travels west; Yonge is also a rare case of seeing a Canadian address number spool up beyond 10000). In Québec, whose land was not subdivided by concessions, but by Catholic church parish (known as
seigneurial subdivisions), relative to the nearest body of navigable water, all address numbers begin with where land meets water. So in a city like Montréal, one sees addresses like 5281 rue St-Laurent, which superficially looks more “American” than most places around Canada, but the address numbers are less based on distance and more on simple, incremental allocation as land was developed further inland of the shoreline.
Sorry, all of this totally veering off-topic, but it’s one of the rare times I get to share fun stuff which touches on my trained background.
🙂
