5 ms·

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy.

by nkrisc 4y ago

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning. Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the building is on the East side of the street. The "31" tells you it's on the thirty-one hundred block of Sheffield, which once you learn the streets, tells you it's on the block immediately south of Belmont (3200 North). The "45" tells you it's likely at the very North end of the block, because the typical Chicago block only goes up to about XX60 in addresses. The one thing lacking is the latitude for East/West streets and the longitude for North/South street being encoded in the street name, but you could encode an address as an X,Y pair. The above example address could be: 1000 W, 3145 N. Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. Which I suppose is their most basic purpose, but I'm used to addresses being useful for city-wide navigation, so it always felt a bit lacking to me. And don't get me started on my love for and the current lack of alleys where I live now. Chicago alleys are the unsung hero of the city's layout. Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile.

turtlesdown11 4y ago
Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where you get a building number + district for an address. No street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and the sestiere (there are six).
- nkrisc 4y ago
  That sounds... difficult. I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.
madcaptenor 4y ago
Salt Lake City encodes latitude and longitude in the street names.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  I just looked at a map - it appears that 0 N/S/E/W is the Mormon Temple downtown. It also looks like "newer" streets have names rather than numbers - further from downtown. Is there a date at which they stopped the practice? One thing the parent commenter missed was that the numbers also have larger distance meanings. 3200 North in Chicago means the road is 4 miles north of Madison St in the Loop (100 is 1/8th of a mile). If the guy was trying to get to the Vic Theatre and accidentally got off the train at Fullerton (2400 N), he'd know that it's only a mile walk - maybe it's faster to just hike it than wait for the next train. EDIT - Diversey is 2800; Fullerton is 2400. Whoops, I haven't been over there in a long time! EDIT 2 - The SLC scheme reminds me of the "rural grid" common in some old NW territory states, such as Indiana, where the county roads and addresses are numbered as the distance from the county courthouse. IE a road named 500N would be an east-west road 5 miles north of the courthouse, which was typically as close to the center of the county as possible.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    That's one of the most important things I forgot to mention!
bombcar 4y ago
Seattle’s grid is similarly informative with additional information just from the numbered street name.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Many of the street names are not numbered though, particularly in the Denny grid area.
dionidium 4y ago
> It made addresses have real meaning. In the spirit of this observation, here are some fun ways to place addresses in (some of) Manhattan. - First of all, "evens go east," so 20th St runs to the East and 21st to the West (14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, and 59th are the primary two-way, E/W thoroughfares (I think you just have to memorize those, but note that they line up with the stops on many of the N/S subway lines)) - Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th). - If you need to remember the order of Lexington -> Park -> Madison, just remember, "Let's party, motherfucker" :)
- kgermino 4y ago
  > Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th). As a logic-minded person used to the Chicago system, this kind of thing drives me nuts. Why on earth would you have a numbered street that doesn't represent its own place in the address numbering scheme? 9th should be at 900 W, 10th at 1000 W, etc. The whole benefit of numbered streets is that you don't have to remember where they are in the grid and you throw half of that value away when the number doesn't match their position in the grid! </rant> I know there's no value here. I'm sorry, but... please make it make sense
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    The Chicago grid system is the result of a 1908 renumbering and a 1913 street renaming. All of this after the grid was built. It used to be every bit as unusual as Manhattan.
  - madcaptenor 4y ago
    I share your complaints about Manhattan. I guess when they did Manhattan they had figured out "numbered streets are good" but not "having the addresses work nicely with the numbered streets are good". By the time they put addresses on the streets in Queens they did what you want them to.
prottog 4y ago
> Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. I've even been on some suburban streets where there was no rule to the numbering scheme at all! Houses next door having radically different numbers, even and odd numbers being on both sides of the same street, etc. Drove me nuts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hgomersall 4y ago
I can't help feeling that designing transport policy around efficient addressing is perhaps not getting priorities right.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  Chicago has its transport issues for sure, but I’m having trouble understanding how the things you mentioned are related. The grid layout is not the cause of Chicago’s transport issues. In fact, many of Chicago’s neighborhoods have their commercial centers where you can get groceries and just about everything else you need, without a car. Everywhere I lived in Chicago I was walking distance from a grocery store and did all my shopping each day after work, walking home from the train station. I rarely drove anywhere in the city. Buses are regular and frequent and run on most major roads (every half mile). Chicago is not a paragon of public transit, but it’s not as bad as you seem to be making it sound and it’s not because of the addressing system. The issues it has are mostly a matter of investment and underserved areas that mirror Chicago’s history of racist planning policies.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Try living, working, or shopping on Peachtree in Atlanta sometime.
- madcaptenor 4y ago
  Which one? Seriously, a few days ago I actually did a four-mile drive that at one point had me take Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to North Peachtree Road to Peachtree Road, and ended on New Peachtree Road. I didn't do this because I wanted to drive on lots of roads named Peachtree, I just wanted some ma po tofu.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    As a former Atlanta resident this checks out.
  - terribleperson 4y ago
    Where'd you get your mapo tofu? I like what I get from S.H. Spicy Garden, but I'm open to trying somewhere new.
    - madcaptenor 4y ago
      Chong Qing Hot Pot, in the Chinatown food court.
      - terribleperson 4y ago
        Ah, I've been meaning to check out that food court but not gotten around to it. I'll definitely try that mapo tofu in January.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    That is in fact the point. <https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-peachtree-streets/ https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-peachtree-st...>
flyinghamster 4y ago
> Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile. Except for the first three miles south of Madison St., which are 1200 S (Roosevelt Rd.), 2200 S (Cermak Rd.), and 3100 S (31st St.) - which also gives the numbered streets southward their pattern of having each mile being an odd number (63rd, 71st, 79th, 87th, 95th, 103rd, 111th...). The Chicago grid extends far beyond the city as well, with many suburbs using it. Will County also uses it for unincorporated areas, so it extends to 37500 South in Reed-Custer Township. There are still many suburbs that prefer to roll their own grids, though, and at least one (Harvey) that uses its own numbering on east/west streets and Chicago numbering on north/south.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  North Ave and Roosevelt Rd, as named, extend all the way west from the lake to the Kane County line. But the roads themselves go all the way to Ogle County - 2/3 of the way to Iowa. North Ave ends at a T-junction in the middle of corn fields, while Roosevelt ends kind of unceremoniously at a messed up intersection at a baseball field in Rochelle.
rippercushions 4y ago
I suspect you'd like the grid system in Sapporo, Japan, where every address has Cartesian grid coordinates in the form "North 3, West 5": https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around Kyoto is similar, but unfortunately the rest of Japan is a mess: most streets have no name at all and house numbers are in construction order.
dghlsakjg 4y ago
Utah, thanks largely to the LDS church, has pretty much the exact same grid naming system for every town in the state. It's a bit boring since all streets are numerical, but you could never get lost if you understood the system, even in pre-gps days.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  Are you familiar with the history and why they did it? SLC is a grid of squares, which seems somewhat unusual for American grid-based cities. But then, I went and zoomed in on Nauvoo, IL and it has the exact same squared grid, quite possibly even the same size squares. But if you look at the 3 cities on the Iowa side of the river - Burlington, Fort Madison and Keokuk - they also have pretty close to that same grid. Did the church pick it up there and take it with them? Because if I’m not mistaken, those cities predate the church presence. As an aside, generally all of the Iowa cities along the Mississippi have astonishingly good grids and urbanity despite giving the feeling that they are part of America from long ago (the Illinois side too - go visit Quincy IL sometime). Burlington even has their own crooked-road-on-steep-hill, built 30 years before Lombard Street https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iowa) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iow...
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    It’s not just the grid. It’s that the naming system is identical as well. The blocks are also exceptionally large to accommodate urban farming, and the streets wide to accommodate being able to turn a tram of horses. I’m not sure if Navoo was planned according to the grid or not. From looking at the names, they haven’t retained the naming scheme. Just about every town in Utah is centered around the intersection of Center and Main. Every other street is a numerical reference to that intersection. So E 100 South Is the street running parallel to center street 1 block south, to the east of Main. There is an E 100 South in just about every town in the state. For the history look up the Plat of Zion by Joseph Smith. 99pi has a great episode about it.
II2II 4y ago
I grew up in a city where (the older parts) were wonderfully easy to navigate. Virtually all of the roads were numbered with an "avenue" suffix corresponding to an east-west road and a "street" suffix corresponding to a north-south road. When building fronted the avenues, the initial digits corresponded to the street number (and vice versa). Even building numbers corresponded to one side of the road, odd the other. The city was also divided up into quadrants (NE, NW, SW, SE), which facilitated expansion in all directions. A complete address would tell someone exactly where a building was and how to get to it from where they currently are. (An example address would be 210, 30th Ave. N.W..) There were likely finer details, but you didn't need to know them to get around. I've had people say that such a system is boring, or that it robs a city of its history. In my books, boring is a lot better than asking a dozen people how to get to some obscure named roads. Historic names are also pointless when virtually no one recognizes or looks up the significance of the road name, and when they do ... well let's just say the heroes of a century ago are controversial figures today. Besides, my home town did name the major roads. They simply weren't so abundant that people lost track of all of the names. But the new subdivisions ... those were a shock to navigate through. Not only was the grid disrupted, but virtually all of the streets were minor variations of the subdivision's name (thus very easy to confuse).

by nkrisc 4y ago

turtlesdown11 4y ago

Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where you get a building number + district for an address. No street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and the sestiere (there are six).

nkrisc 4y ago
That sounds... difficult. I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.

madcaptenor 4y ago

Salt Lake City encodes latitude and longitude in the street names.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
I just looked at a map - it appears that 0 N/S/E/W is the Mormon Temple downtown. It also looks like "newer" streets have names rather than numbers - further from downtown. Is there a date at which they stopped the practice? One thing the parent commenter missed was that the numbers also have larger distance meanings. 3200 North in Chicago means the road is 4 miles north of Madison St in the Loop (100 is 1/8th of a mile). If the guy was trying to get to the Vic Theatre and accidentally got off the train at Fullerton (2400 N), he'd know that it's only a mile walk - maybe it's faster to just hike it than wait for the next train. EDIT - Diversey is 2800; Fullerton is 2400. Whoops, I haven't been over there in a long time! EDIT 2 - The SLC scheme reminds me of the "rural grid" common in some old NW territory states, such as Indiana, where the county roads and addresses are numbered as the distance from the county courthouse. IE a road named 500N would be an east-west road 5 miles north of the courthouse, which was typically as close to the center of the county as possible.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  That's one of the most important things I forgot to mention!

bombcar 4y ago

Seattle’s grid is similarly informative with additional information just from the numbered street name.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Many of the street names are not numbered though, particularly in the Denny grid area.

dionidium 4y ago

> It made addresses have real meaning. In the spirit of this observation, here are some fun ways to place addresses in (some of) Manhattan. - First of all, "evens go east," so 20th St runs to the East and 21st to the West (14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, and 59th are the primary two-way, E/W thoroughfares (I think you just have to memorize those, but note that they line up with the stops on many of the N/S subway lines)) - Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th). - If you need to remember the order of Lexington -> Park -> Madison, just remember, "Let's party, motherfucker" :)

kgermino 4y ago
> Street numbers pivot on 5th Ave and increase in each direction from there, so if you know the street number, you know which two avenues it's between. For example, when I lived at 4xx W 45th St, that was between 9th and 10th, which can be deduced from the first number of the address added to 5 (5 + 4 = 9, so the address is West of 9th). As a logic-minded person used to the Chicago system, this kind of thing drives me nuts. Why on earth would you have a numbered street that doesn't represent its own place in the address numbering scheme? 9th should be at 900 W, 10th at 1000 W, etc. The whole benefit of numbered streets is that you don't have to remember where they are in the grid and you throw half of that value away when the number doesn't match their position in the grid! </rant> I know there's no value here. I'm sorry, but... please make it make sense
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  The Chicago grid system is the result of a 1908 renumbering and a 1913 street renaming. All of this after the grid was built. It used to be every bit as unusual as Manhattan.
- madcaptenor 4y ago
  I share your complaints about Manhattan. I guess when they did Manhattan they had figured out "numbered streets are good" but not "having the addresses work nicely with the numbered streets are good". By the time they put addresses on the streets in Queens they did what you want them to.

prottog 4y ago

> Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. I've even been on some suburban streets where there was no rule to the numbering scheme at all! Houses next door having radically different numbers, even and odd numbers being on both sides of the same street, etc. Drove me nuts.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hgomersall 4y ago

I can't help feeling that designing transport policy around efficient addressing is perhaps not getting priorities right.

nkrisc 4y ago
Chicago has its transport issues for sure, but I’m having trouble understanding how the things you mentioned are related. The grid layout is not the cause of Chicago’s transport issues. In fact, many of Chicago’s neighborhoods have their commercial centers where you can get groceries and just about everything else you need, without a car. Everywhere I lived in Chicago I was walking distance from a grocery store and did all my shopping each day after work, walking home from the train station. I rarely drove anywhere in the city. Buses are regular and frequent and run on most major roads (every half mile). Chicago is not a paragon of public transit, but it’s not as bad as you seem to be making it sound and it’s not because of the addressing system. The issues it has are mostly a matter of investment and underserved areas that mirror Chicago’s history of racist planning policies.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Try living, working, or shopping on Peachtree in Atlanta sometime.

madcaptenor 4y ago
Which one? Seriously, a few days ago I actually did a four-mile drive that at one point had me take Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to North Peachtree Road to Peachtree Road, and ended on New Peachtree Road. I didn't do this because I wanted to drive on lots of roads named Peachtree, I just wanted some ma po tofu.
- rayiner 4y ago
  As a former Atlanta resident this checks out.
- terribleperson 4y ago
  Where'd you get your mapo tofu? I like what I get from S.H. Spicy Garden, but I'm open to trying somewhere new.
  - madcaptenor 4y ago
    Chong Qing Hot Pot, in the Chinatown food court.
    - terribleperson 4y ago
      Ah, I've been meaning to check out that food court but not gotten around to it. I'll definitely try that mapo tofu in January.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  That is in fact the point. <https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-peachtree-streets/ https://hotspotatl.com/3699042/atlanta-how-many-peachtree-st...>

flyinghamster 4y ago

> Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile. Except for the first three miles south of Madison St., which are 1200 S (Roosevelt Rd.), 2200 S (Cermak Rd.), and 3100 S (31st St.) - which also gives the numbered streets southward their pattern of having each mile being an odd number (63rd, 71st, 79th, 87th, 95th, 103rd, 111th...). The Chicago grid extends far beyond the city as well, with many suburbs using it. Will County also uses it for unincorporated areas, so it extends to 37500 South in Reed-Custer Township. There are still many suburbs that prefer to roll their own grids, though, and at least one (Harvey) that uses its own numbering on east/west streets and Chicago numbering on north/south.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
North Ave and Roosevelt Rd, as named, extend all the way west from the lake to the Kane County line. But the roads themselves go all the way to Ogle County - 2/3 of the way to Iowa. North Ave ends at a T-junction in the middle of corn fields, while Roosevelt ends kind of unceremoniously at a messed up intersection at a baseball field in Rochelle.

rippercushions 4y ago

I suspect you'd like the grid system in Sapporo, Japan, where every address has Cartesian grid coordinates in the form "North 3, West 5": https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around Kyoto is similar, but unfortunately the rest of Japan is a mess: most streets have no name at all and house numbers are in construction order.

dghlsakjg 4y ago

Utah, thanks largely to the LDS church, has pretty much the exact same grid naming system for every town in the state. It's a bit boring since all streets are numerical, but you could never get lost if you understood the system, even in pre-gps days.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
Are you familiar with the history and why they did it? SLC is a grid of squares, which seems somewhat unusual for American grid-based cities. But then, I went and zoomed in on Nauvoo, IL and it has the exact same squared grid, quite possibly even the same size squares. But if you look at the 3 cities on the Iowa side of the river - Burlington, Fort Madison and Keokuk - they also have pretty close to that same grid. Did the church pick it up there and take it with them? Because if I’m not mistaken, those cities predate the church presence. As an aside, generally all of the Iowa cities along the Mississippi have astonishingly good grids and urbanity despite giving the feeling that they are part of America from long ago (the Illinois side too - go visit Quincy IL sometime). Burlington even has their own crooked-road-on-steep-hill, built 30 years before Lombard Street https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iowa) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Alley_(Burlington,_Iow...
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  It’s not just the grid. It’s that the naming system is identical as well. The blocks are also exceptionally large to accommodate urban farming, and the streets wide to accommodate being able to turn a tram of horses. I’m not sure if Navoo was planned according to the grid or not. From looking at the names, they haven’t retained the naming scheme. Just about every town in Utah is centered around the intersection of Center and Main. Every other street is a numerical reference to that intersection. So E 100 South Is the street running parallel to center street 1 block south, to the east of Main. There is an E 100 South in just about every town in the state. For the history look up the Plat of Zion by Joseph Smith. 99pi has a great episode about it.

II2II 4y ago

I grew up in a city where (the older parts) were wonderfully easy to navigate. Virtually all of the roads were numbered with an "avenue" suffix corresponding to an east-west road and a "street" suffix corresponding to a north-south road. When building fronted the avenues, the initial digits corresponded to the street number (and vice versa). Even building numbers corresponded to one side of the road, odd the other. The city was also divided up into quadrants (NE, NW, SW, SE), which facilitated expansion in all directions. A complete address would tell someone exactly where a building was and how to get to it from where they currently are. (An example address would be 210, 30th Ave. N.W..) There were likely finer details, but you didn't need to know them to get around. I've had people say that such a system is boring, or that it robs a city of its history. In my books, boring is a lot better than asking a dozen people how to get to some obscure named roads. Historic names are also pointless when virtually no one recognizes or looks up the significance of the road name, and when they do ... well let's just say the heroes of a century ago are controversial figures today. Besides, my home town did name the major roads. They simply weren't so abundant that people lost track of all of the names. But the new subdivisions ... those were a shock to navigate through. Not only was the grid disrupted, but virtually all of the streets were minor variations of the subdivision's name (thus very easy to confuse).