8 ms·
I live in a house right on the dividing line of Portland's neighborhoods. On one side of a street, the house would be 1 N Graham St, on the other side of the s
by jaggederest 9y ago
I live in a house right on the dividing line of Portland's neighborhoods.
On one side of a street, the house would be 1 N Graham St, on the other side of the street, it would be 1 NE Graham St.
Needless to say, some confusion occurs. In addition, many times locations are referred to as being on 39th and Graham, for example. So you must specify very carefully that you live at Number 39 Northeast Graham St, "Not 39th and Graham, at the corner of Graham and Williams, on the Northeast side"
It's a bit of a hassle. But a nice neighborhood. My mirror-neighbors kindly forward me packages, and I return the favor. Saves everyone a lot of agony.
(This is leaving aside the area in Portland where, being east of the 'dividing line', but west of the river, the houses are numbered identically except with a leading zero. Many mapping systems truncate this leading zero. Ergo you end up ~15 blocks away)
From 63 NE Graham to 63 N Graham -
0.1 miles - https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652 https://goo.gl/maps/xPLNKLzWv652
From 10 SW Boundary St to 010 SW Boundary St - 98 feet - https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2 https://goo.gl/maps/FRCXuYKir3M2
- zimpenfish 9y agoI live on A B Road West. One street over is A B Road. The street joining them at the top is A B. As you can imagine, delivery drivers get very confused. Additionally, one street over the other way is A Fields which leads into A Hill. Across the main road is A Terrace.
- forthefuture 9y agoThis was one of the weirdest things about driving across the country from the East to West coast. At some point I passed a sign that just said "Z".
- phjesusthatguy3 9y agoI did some inventory work for a company during y2k. I got assigned to Holland, MI, and our jobs were sent electronically to a fancy bespoke app running on a Palm VII. There's a section of Holland where the roads running East-West were <number> Avenue, and the roads running North-South were <number> Street. The app stripped the St/Ave designation, so I was being sent to addresses like "45678 123". Good times.
- astura 9y agoWow! Having both numbered roads and identically numbered aves in the same city is ridiculously common. So common that I am baffled that something like that made production. Not only that having street names like "Church St" and "Church Ave" in the same city/town is also ridiculously common. Sometimes it just happens naturally and sometimes it's an artifact of cities consolidating.
- ghaff 9y agoAt least somewhere like Manhattan, the fact that Streets and avenues are very different things is pretty deeply ingrained. Locals are unlikely to confuse the two. More generally, it's easy this sort of thing could cause confusion though.
- nerdponx 9y agoThe app stripped the St/Ave designation How was this ever a good idea to anyone?
- mannykannot 9y agoThe borough of Queens, New York, has numbered streets, avenues, roads, terraces, places, lanes, and drives, all interleaved or intersected according to a defined scheme: http://www.stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm http://www.stevemorse.org/census/changes/QueensFormat.htm
- 9y ago
- SmellTheGlove 9y agoTIL a house number can have a leading zero. I've always liked your Portland (I live in the other one).
- willvarfar 9y agoSo you can have another kind of address twin, where you live in the same house number and street etc, except a different portland?
- jaggederest 9y agoWhy so you can, if you fudge the quadrant: https://goo.gl/maps/n99GipXHqiF2 https://goo.gl/maps/n99GipXHqiF2 Parenthetically, there are actually either 5, 7 or 8 "quadrants" in Portland depending on who you ask and when. The traditional 5 are NW, N, NE, SE, SW. However, Burnside street is simply labeled E/W since it's on the dividing line, and John's Landing is the aforementioned zero-prefixed division which has been occasionally called "South", or the area just north of it, the "South Waterfront", even though it's not included in addresses with an S anywhere.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere are, roughly, 27 Portlands, in the U.S alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland
- SmellTheGlove 9y agoFine, the original Portland in the US.
- grecy 9y agoOh, I like the leading zero. I worked for the telco that runs Northern Canada - all the way up to and inside the Arctic Circle. Most communities there don't have the concept of street names or house numbers at all. Our provisioning database had addresses like "brown house down from church" and "three houses from general store". Many were just "house1","house12","house334455" etc. As horrible as it was, our data was the best in existence, to the point Canada Post was asking to use it :)
- mikeash 9y agoI grew up in a village in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and it was the same thing there. For normal mail, we had a box at the post office, which was conveniently right next to our house. (Smallest post office in the state, I believe.) For delivery services like UPS, we would tell them "the first house east of the post office." It usually worked. Occasionally we got a UPS driver who was directionally impaired, and we had to go over to our neighbor on the other side of the post office and get our package from them.
- jvolkman 9y agoDid the town ever consider just adding numbers?
- mikeash 9y agoIt wasn't big enough to be a separate political unit. It looks like the county eventually added street names and numbers, so people have normal addresses now. I left in the early 90s, before that happened. I did see the same process happen in rural Wisconsin in the late 90s. I had an address by then, but I had a friend who lived out of town and had no address initially, but they went through and assigned one to everyone. I think the stated reason was to help emergency services, but of course it helped a lot of other stuff too.
- mod 9y agoI live in an area that is similar, in the rural US. I do have a street address, a long ways up a dirt road, but google maps can't locate it. Not even the locals know the streets by names. For friends and family, since I am technically savvy, I was able to figure out a google maps lat/lng that navigates to my house. For locals or, for instance, utility workers that I can't send a lat/lng to, I have to give directions like this. "Go past the school, take the road to the right. Turn left at the cemetary. When you're on the dirt road, take the high road at every fork. After 4 miles you will come to three mailboxes all together, and my driveway is the 2nd one after that." My street address also has the word "box" in it, despite being a physical address, so lots of places like Paypal don't want to accept it s a real address. It's caused me some grief and actually cost me some money, too.
- ubernostrum 9y agoI used to live in Roanoke, VA, which similarly has directional quadrants in addresses. They're appended after the street name (so, for example, the nearest grocery store to me was on "Brandon Ave. SW"). And since street names and numbers can repeat, it's necessary to always include the quadrant in an address there. Roanoke, and nearby Salem, are also nice tests for assumptions people make about addresses hierarchies and local government units. In Virginia, anything legally classified as a city is its own independent governmental unit, subject only to the state government; towns are part of and subject to counties, but cities aren't. Which creates situations like Roanoke the city not being part of Roanoke County (despite being located within the geographic boundaries of the county). And Salem being the county seat of Roanoke County despite legally not being part of the county.
- mikeash 9y agoI live in Fairfax County, whose county seat is Fairfax, which is not part of Fairfax County. It's fun. I used to live in Alexandria, which is a city. Occasionally I'd conduct some business where they needed to know which county I was in. I'd tell them "Alexandria" and they'd say, "no, county." Then I got to explain how Virginia is special and that was the closest thing to a "county" that I could give them. It always amused me that companies who needed this information somehow were unaware of this important fact about one of the states they operated in.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI wonder why there isn't more drive to fix these addresses. The prefixed 0 issue would probably make me think twice before I'd move there. You know it's gonna be a frequent annoyance.
- jaggederest 9y agoIt certainly was when I was house hunting in the region. Most software would output it without the leading zero and you'd be off on a chase to find it.
- _jal 9y agoI was in Corvallis a while back for the first time, heavily dependent on GPS. The robo-directions sounded like a mental DOS attack at first - "Head South East on North West Western Ave." Took me a bit to be able to parse it.
- dunham 9y agoI live on the N/NE border in Seattle, but fortunately I'm on an avenue, so the entire street is N. It's an interesting system that I'd never seen before I moved here. Streets are East/West. Avenues are North/South. The compass direction indicates the section of the city that the street is in. And the directional goes up front on streets and on the end for avenues. It sounds like Portland has the same system - how widespread is it? Is it a pacific NW thing?
- Camillo 9y agoChicago uses a similar system.
- jdeibele 9y agoIn Portland, I've never seen the direction at the end of the street address. It's always <house number> <direction> <street name>. A lot of the City of Portland systems have you input your house number, street name, then direction so (guessing) they can validate it. Of course, browsers have been filling form fields for many, many years and I wish they'd just put an address field there.
- Splines 9y agoHere's more detail about the naming system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_layout_of_Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_layout_of_Seattle
- jerrysievert 9y agoit makes me wish that we had 6 quadrants, instead of 5. for those that don't know, portland has five "quadrants" due to the river being the east-west dividing line, and having a few turns. it makes for interesting explanations to visitors - I can't begin to estimate how many times I've drawn the city on a whiteboard for GIS professionals visiting.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSextants.
- mariuolo 9y agoDon't couriers also check the name on the bell? Or is it also the same?
- Treblemaker 9y agoWhen I moved to Silicon Valley years ago I found it quite confusing at first when trying to find addresses on Kifer Rd, which lies right on the border of Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. Driving westbound one finds the addresses on the left in the 1,000's and decreasing, while the addresses on the right are in the 3000's and increasing. I'm ashamed to admit it took more than a couple U-turns to figure out what was going on and stop beating myself up for "missing it, _again_"...