This Month’s Bookshelf New books and films are putting population trends into focus

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth and Power

To demographers, it all starts with an address. Letters from the Census of 2020 state that they need our help providing information on everyone “living or staying at this address.” The street address is a critical data point for the Census. Knowing who lives where determines federal funding to local communities and representation in government. Still, the street address is only the starting point. The Census faces the challenge of counting those with multiple addresses, those with temporary addresses and those with no address at all.

Take Native Americans, for example. According to an audit by the Census Bureau of the 2010, about 1 in 7 Native Americans living on a reservation, or 82,000 people, went uncounted. Some of those Native Americans live in extremely remote places without street addresses. For Native Americans in North Dakota, the lack of a street address has been at the center of the discussion about the upcoming Presidential election. New voter identification requirements in that state threatened to block those without a residential address from voting. In February, though, the state reached a settlement that relieves “certain burdens on the Tribes related to determining residential street addresses for their tribal members.”

In The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth and Power, Deirdre Mask takes us on an around-the-world tour of street addresses. She tells the stories of the cities where street names and numbers were invented and perfected, and how that impacts its residents.

One of the first stops in the book is to rural West Virginia. In 1991, the state embarked on a project to give street names to the thousands of roads outside of the state’s cities that didn’t have them – streets that have long befuddled UPS deliverymen and 911 operators alike.

The author visits other places throughout time and history, relaying fascinating stories throughout. A section called “Development” examines how an NGO called Addressing the Unaddressed is working to assign street addresses to over 220,000 dwellings in Kolkata, India, an effort the organization believes will lift many out of poverty by giving them access to bank accounts, voting cards and electricity accounts. Another chapter looks at how street addresses can help to more efficiently map the spread of an epidemic in Haiti.

Examining the origins of street addresses, Mask notes America’s considerable contributions. In particular, the author says that “numbered streets are a peculiarly American phenomenon.” The country’s penchant for numbered streets, as well as gridded street plans, hark back to the days of William Penn and his surveyor Thomas Holme in Philadelphia. Penn’s preference for numbering may have been due to his Quaker beliefs. He eschewed naming streets after people and instead picked numbers, crossed by “things that spontaneously grow in the country.” Indeed, the US Census has said the most common street names in America are numbered ones – Second, Third, First and Fourth (Second is more popular than First because First is often called Main Street or Front Street instead) – while other popular ones include Park, Oak, Pine and Maple.

The author suggests that America’s gridded and numbered streets may have eased the adjustment of immigrants to the new world, who might have otherwise gotten easily lost. Still, one wonders how immigrants can navigate Queens, NY, at once one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world and one that’s exceedingly confusing from a street perspective, boasting such streets as 69th Street, 69th Place and 69th Lane.

The Address Book also tackles what street addresses may communicate with regard to race. In a chapter about Hollywood, Florida, one local citizen, Benjamin Israel, has fought to rename three streets bearing the names of Confederate generals that run through Hollywood’s black district. Hollywood’s founder had originally intended to name those streets after cities with strong black communities – Louisville, Macon and Savannah – but after a 1926 hurricane, the founder ran out of money and those names were “mysteriously changed.” The names were changed again in 2018 to Liberty Street, Freedom Street and Hope Street. In a chapter about St. Louis, Mask writes about a man named Melvin White, who grew up on St. Louis’ Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, which like some of the more than 900 MLK streets in the country, have become “a code name for a certain kind of urban, black decline.” To better honor King’s legacy, White started an organization called Beloved Streets of America, whose aim is to revitalize the streets bearing King’s name.

Mask devotes another chapter, about Manhattan, to street names that symbolize class and status. “Street names were an early tool for gentrification,” says Mask. Living on certain streets in Manhattan convey wealth and power. She writes about New York’s vanity street address program, which allows builders to buy a “fashionable street name or a nice round number,” and then ask for higher rent.

Month by Month at a Glance AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS

Census Day and Counting

(April)

The Mystery of Algorithms

(May)

Who Are “The Influencers?

(March)

Let American Demographics be your umbrella against the uncertainties of tomorrow’s raindrops. Visit www.americandemographics.com and subscribe.

The New World of Work

(July/August)

The Demographics of Drinkers

(September)