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55 pages 1 hour read

Deirdre Mask

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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Part 2, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Vienna: What Can House Numbers Teach Us About Power?”

Mask argues that the development of formal systems of house numbering is connected to the rise of the modern European state and the state’s interest in numbering its citizens. Mask describes a day spent with Anton Tantner, a historian of house numbering. Exploring Vienna and looking for remnants of the earliest house numbers convinced Mask of the historical importance of house numbering and its connection to state power.

Vienna was the site of one of the earliest government attempts at formalizing house numbers. In 1770, the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, desperate for soldiers to fight in her wars with Prussia, ordered officers to travel throughout her territories numbering residences and recording the occupants of each. In all, the Habsburg officers identified over 7 million citizens living in over 1 million individual residences. Although this was not the earliest attempt to identify individual residences—Mask points to examples in Paris, London, and New York—the house numbers ordered by Empress Maria Theresa represent the first large-scale, successful attempts to identify individual residencies and list their occupants.

Many early attempts to number houses were unsuccessful. In 19th-century London, a house numbered 96 was found between houses numbering 14 and 15. When asked about her house number, the resident of number 96 explained that she had recently moved and brought her old house number with her to her new house. Similarly chaotic numbering systems were found in Berlin and New York up until the 1950s.

In the United States, modern house numbering relies on the Philadelphia system, which was devised for the 1790 Philadelphia census. Designed by Clement Biddle, an advisor to George Washington, the Philadelphia system calls for odd numbers for houses on one side of the street and even numbers for the other side of the street. In the 19th century, an additional feature was added to this system: 100 numbers were assigned to each block, with the numbers shifting to the next hundred at the next block regardless of whether 100 individual residences actually existed.

Mask argues that the sudden proliferation of house numbering systems in the 18th and 19th centuries is related to the growth of modern states and an increased interest in identifying and policing citizens. She points to an 18th-century French book by a policeman named Jacques François Guillauté as evidence of the state’s interest in monitoring its citizens. Guillauté’s book describes his plan to divide the city into districts, eradicate duplicate street names, and number every home and hovel in the city of Paris. He imagines a police force that can compile detailed records about the lives of citizens and connect that information directly to their residence.

Although there is no evidence that Guillauté’s book received any recognition in its own time, Mask notes that many of his ideas, including formal house numbering systems, were adopted by cities and states around the world. The chapter ends with Mask visiting an archive containing a copy of Guillauté’s book; she is surprised that the manuscript does not look sinister.

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Philadelphia: Why Do Americans Love Numbered Streets?”

Chapter 6 begins with a lengthy discussion of perhaps the most famous collection of numbered streets in America: New York City. Pre-colonial Manhattan—known to the Native Americans who once lived there as “Mannahatta”—was a forest paradise, populated by a variety of animal and plant life. This verdant scene is contrasted with 18th-century New York City, in which the population doubled between 1790 and 1800. The abundance of wildlife was soon replaced by chaotic, crowded streets lacking a central organizing system.

To combat this chaos, three men—John Rutherford, Simeon De Witt, and Gouverneur Morris—were tasked with establishing a uniform street system. After four years, they proposed a grid system for New York City, with 155 numbered streets intersecting at right angles with eleven major avenues. Although surveyors sometimes struggled to impose straight lines on the Manhattan landscape—which still contained farms, cliffs, and rivers—the grid system was a success. The new system made land easy to buy and sell, solidifying New York as a center of finance.

Mask then focuses on Philadelphia, the first city in the United States to be built on a grid system. Mask offers a thorough survey of the life of William Penn, from his conversion to Quakerism to his imprisonment for illegal street preaching, in order to frame his founding of Pennsylvania as a uniquely American act. Equally unique, she argues, was his decision to establish the city on a grid: Although other gridded cities existed in the past, they were usually built for defensive purposes, and relied on castles or walls to supply the grid. For Penn, a pacifist Quaker, the gridded lines of Philadelphia were a manifestation of the order and rationality he hoped to impose on his new land. Mask argues that the numbered street names the city established may have been influenced by the Quaker practice of calling months by numbers, rather than by the names of the Gregorian calendar, which Quakers rejected for their pagan origin.

The chapter ends with a discussion of proposals to rebuild the city of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Although many proposals involved a grid system, Londoners ultimately rejected these and decided to rebuild much of the city along historical lines. Mask argues that William Penn, who witnessed the Great Fire, may have attributed the fire’s quick spread to London’s crowded, crooked streets. She suggests that his insistence on a grid plan for Philadelphia may have been a reaction to the trauma of the fire.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Korea and Japan: Must Streets Be Named?”

Chapter 7 challenges the idea that formal street naming systems are an inevitable necessity in modern cities. Tokyo is a prime example: The majority of the major streets in Tokyo are unnamed. Instead, the Japanese number their blocks, and houses are numbered according to the period when they were built.

Mask quotes the journals of French philosopher Roland Barthes’s time in Tokyo as evidence of the difficulty the Japanese addressing system presents for Westerners. She explains that, historically, urban neighborhoods in Japanese cities were divided into rectangular blocks called chō, and that these blocks, rather than the individual streets that comprised them, formed the civic center. As these cities developed, the practice of referring to residences according to their block continued.

To explain the lack of street names, Mask cites the work of urban designer Barrie Shelton. Shelton’s research suggests that differences in English and Japanese writing practices can explain the tendency for English-speaking cities to name their streets while Japanese-speaking cities name their blocks. Japanese text is written in kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese that each represent a specific word or idea.

Shelton discovered that, when learning to write, Japanese children use dotted paper because kanji requires freedom of space for each unique character. English speakers, on the other hand, learn to write on lined paper because English characters are strung together linearly to form words. Shelton’s analysis suggests that street addressing practices follow these reading practices. The Japanese understand their cities, like their letters, in terms of area, and focus on blocks. Westerners, on the other hand, understand their cities, like their sentences, as a series of connecting lines, hence the focus on street names.

To support this argument, Mask points to the Korean language, which integrates aspects of both Japanese and Western writing systems. Korean is written using phonetic letters, like English, but the letters are joined into blocks resembling Japanese kanji. The Korean addressing system similarly combines Western and Japanese traditions. Although Koreans used to rely on named blocks, following the Japanese system, recent attempts have been made to integrate Western-style naming practices. Mask notes that the Japanese-style system is a remnant of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea in the early 20th century. She argues that resistance to these Western-style addressing “updates” can be read as resistance to change or resistance to attempts to globalize Korean culture.

Part 2, Chapters 5-7 Analysis

Chapter 5 is bookended by personal anecdotes that begin with descriptions of meeting someone at a particular place. The chapter begins with a research trip: “I met Anton Tantner in Vienna, near the chancellor’s house in the center of the city” (91). Mask relates how meeting Tantner, a leading authority on house numbering, changed her thinking on the topic. The chapter ends with a similar anecdote, in which Mask spends the afternoon with a curator named Rachel Jacobs and goes “to see Guillauté’s original book at Waddesdon Manor […] outside an old market town” (107). In both cases, the location-based details—the chancellor’s house in the first example and the old market town in the second—establish the scene while spotlighting the importance of place, reflecting the preoccupation with identifying and ordering locations in the chapter.

The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community takes on a new dimension in these chapters, as Mask compares how different addressing systems reflect different cultural and communal values. In Chapter 6, she discusses how establishing a grid system in New York City allowed early New Yorkers to buy and sell property quickly as the city expanded, helping to create its identity and culture as a place of business opportunity. She then argues that Philadelphia founder William Penn’s choice to number his streets, rather than give them names, “was probably inspired by [the] Quaker practice” (119) of numbering months, rather than using the names of the Gregorian calendar.

Finally, Mask turns to the restoration of the city of London after the Great Fire of 1666, which William Penn witnessed. Mask suggests that Londoners rejected proposals to rebuild the city on a grid because it represented such a huge departure from the historical city. After the trauma of the fire, people wanted to rebuild London “in just the way they remembered the city” (125) instead of creating a new city from scratch. These historical examples demonstrate how city planning and naming conventions often reflect—and in turn, shape—the habits, attitudes, and values of the communities dwelling within them.

Mask’s arguments in Chapter 7, “Korea and Japan,” rely on a distinction between English reading and mapping practices and their Korean and Japanese counterparts. Just as the presence or lack of a grid system reflected specific cultural and historical contexts in America and England, so too do the different addressing systems between modern Western countries and Japan and Korea reflect cultural differences in thinking about space. Moreover, Mask’s suggestion that Korean resistance to westernizing their addressing system might reflect a desire to maintain traditional Korean cultural habits, which speaks to The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community: Just as 17th-century Londoners rejected modern grid systems to maintain their city’s traditional identity, modern Koreans seem to desire the preservation of their addressing systems, which they believe reflects their cultural identity and personal preferences.

Chapters 3-7 belong to the section “Origins.” This section title seems appropriate for Chapters 3-6, which describe how people navigated ancient Rome, the modern development of street names and house numbers in Europe, and the origin of numbered streets in America. However, Chapter 7, “Korea and Japan,” presents an alternative: Rather than discussing the origins of street names or numbers, this chapter discusses the lack of Western-style addressing systems in Korea and Japan. These Asian examples suggest that the development of street naming systems was not inevitable, but rather, as Mask argues, the result of intentional, culturally informed choices.

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