History of 'street numbers'

[bzakharin]

I just had to research someone's address in rural Russia (not that Rural, quite close to Moscow, but they don't really have suburbs like in the US) and was surprised to get a (I think) 5-digit house number without a street name, so the opposite of what you're talking about.

Back in the US, I seem to recall that some government forms even today let you draw  your location and label landmarks if you have no true address.

[Brandon]

Never lived in an area without addresses.  As far back as I recall, even rural Will County had house numbers based off State & Madison in Chicago.  I have seen a few while performing phase I site assessments on properties in other rural areas.

[english si]

Milton Keynes (a post-WWII "new town") has Second to Tenth Streets. At least some signs write them as ordinal numbers. Here's a business that uses "Upper 4th Street" in their address: http://thaimodern.co.uk/location.html

It actually goes up to 14th Street. However it's barely a grid, more lazy way of naming side streets/parking alleys (This is 14th St - no wonder you couldn't find it) off the Gate-Blvd grid that operates in that area of MK (even tweaking the big grid's N-S Streets a bit, renaming most of them 'Gate'). Sometimes the side roads are running E-W (have a look at Third St, which is more E-W than N-S), rather than N-S. Plus you have the 'fun' North-Upper-Lower-South definer of what two E-W roads you are between.

It strikes me that as little different to numbering and/or color-coding sections in large car parks, only with the car park having buildings in it, distributor roads through it, and covering a 2km by 1km area.

[hm insulators]

I recall many addresses in my parent's address book growing up showing entries like: Route 2, Box 4 with a city and zipcode. That's mail route, not highway route number. But those were mainly rural areas of Louisiana and Texas

When my parents and I first moved to Koloa on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, we had a Rural Route address. We later got a PO box.

[RG407]

Addresses along US1 in the Florida Keys were originally giving using mile markers.  For instance, an address might be given as "Overseas Highway MM94.6."  Now, they use the mile markers to come up with the numeric street address.  An address along MM94.6 might be "94632 Overseas Highway."