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

The author of this book appears to be torn between wishing to celebrate the way that street addresses can help people–assuming that those street addresses are not ones that are automatic signs of a bad neighborhood, leading to entrenched poverty–as well as recognizing the way that they were developed (as is common) as a means of projecting state power and making people less private and less anonymous. It ought not to puzzle us that this is so; very often in life that which benefits us benefits others as well, and things that serve to connect us to others also allow others to keep track of us. We should not be surprised, for example, that the same GPS that allows us to find out where we are, where the nearest restaurants or gas stations or other businesses are at, and how to get from where we are to where we want to be also allow our loved ones, companies, and governments to keep track of where we are at the same time. Whether or not addresses are a benefit to others or a problem depends on the balance between convenience and connection to others around us, including potentially life-saving emergency services, and being easier to track, identify, monitor, and tax. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Within the larger tension of the work, the book also examines a great deal of complexity in the way that street addresses have always proved to be complicated. The way that ancient Romans are said to have navigated their way through the city–and described addresses to others–similar to the people of West Virginia is striking. The vanity address system of New York, where for a fee you can claim any address, no matter whether or not you should, allows for showmanship when it comes to real estate marketing but also has negative consequences when the fire trucks and ambulances come for you and do not realize that you cannot be reached from the street whose address you claim. Similarly, the author notes continuing complications over the naming of roads, whether they are named after Confederate generals or Martin Luther King, and what that often communicates to other people. The author finds, for example, that some addresses make property worth more and some make it worth less, a striking way in which people are judged by their name. She even has anecdotal evidence about this, in looking at addresses she was uncomfortable in living in because of their name. While William Shakespeare may have said that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, the name of something does have an effect on how people view it, which makes identity, even when it comes to one’s street address, something that will likely always be contentious and troublesome when different people have different ways they want to be understood and seen by others.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 250 pages. It begins, sensibly, with an introduction that discusses why street addresses matter. This is followed by two chapters on the relationship between street addresses and development issues, with a discussion of how street addresses may help transform Kolkata’s slums (1) and how street addresses in Haiti could have helped stop an epidemic that was the result of cholera spreading from a UN base full of unclean Nepalis (2). The next five chapters then turn to examine the origins of street addresses as well as different ways to mark place, which include chapters about how the ancient Romans navigated (3), the source of street names in the English world from London (4), how street numbers from Vienna can teach us about power within societies (5), why Americans love numbered streets from a look at the street names of Philadelphia (6), and how Japanese and Koreans, perhaps by virtue of their different type of language, view areas in blocks and not in lines (7). Two chapters allow the author to discuss the politics of street addresses, including Iran’s tendency to name roads after foreign and not only domestic revolutionaries (8), and Berlin’s street names and how they relate to the difficult process of coming to terms with the past (9), or vergangenheitsbewaltgung, as the Germans put it. At this point the author discusses racial matters of addresses, including American’s tendency to fight over Confederate street names (10), the problem of Martin Luther King Jr. streets (11), and the touchy issue of street names in post-apartheid South Africa (12). The author then turns her attention to questions of class and status with a look at how much Manhattan street names are worth (13), and how street addresses are a deep problem for the homeless (14). The author asks in her conclusion whether street addresses are doomed before closing the book with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.