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

“The traffic in Kolkata is so terrible that the government recently started an initiative to play calming music, blasted so loudly over speakers that you can apparently hear it from inside an air conditioned car.”

This passage is indicative of Mask’s use of sensory details to immerse her reader into her experience in India. The sights, sounds, smells, and feeling of the Kolkata slums are essential to Mask’s storytelling, reflecting her use of the techniques of Creative Nonfiction (See: Background) and illustrating the lived experience of the slum’s residents. The reference to air conditioning, a luxury in the Indian climate, is also an acknowledgement of Mask’s privilege as a visitor to the slums.

“One of Hope’s employees, for example, had correlated the number of boys in a family with household income and school dropouts, to search out areas of high child labor.”

Here, Mask offers concrete evidence of the ways in which formalizing street addresses can increase access to social services. By comparing census records to school lists, workers for an NGO called the Hope Foundation were able to identify boys who had dropped out of school to work and support their families. This kind of targeted research allows governments to allocate funds and services where they are most needed. Street addresses make this research possible, reflecting Street Addresses as a Tool of Social Justice.

“‘Maps are how we organize our data,’ Tom Koch, a world expert on disease mapping told me from his study in Ontario. ‘They are how we take our ideas and place them in a workable argument.’”

Although Mask’s source is primarily focused on maps as a tool for fighting disease, this quote highlights the importance of mapping as a tool for organizing ideas. Throughout the book, Mask describes the ways in which maps are used to develop, codify, and challenge ideas and ways of thinking.

“Today about 70 percent of the world is insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people. It’s no surprise that these places happen to be the poorest places on earth.”

Central to Mask’s argument is the idea that a lack of accurate mapping is not merely a symptom of poverty, but also a cause of it, reflecting an important aspect of The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality. Accurate maps allow for efficient distribution of resources and services, and enable emergency workers to quickly reach those in need. A lack of maps can make this difficult, allowing for the circumstances that cause poverty.

“Place and memory are deeply connected. Think of the montage scene of a romantic comedy where the bereft party returns to the sites of courtship: we ate spaghetti in that booth; we spilled cocktails on that sofa; my bridesmaid’s dress ripped right on that bench.”

The connection between place and memory is essential to Mask’s argument. This explanation of the connection is indicative of Mask’s friendly, casual narrative tone: Rather than reference a scholarly text, Mask encourages her audience to think about this topic in the context of romantic comedies. This low-stakes example helps her audience understand a complex topic.

“Bootmakers Court is too expensive for the old-working class residents of East London—one bedroom flats go for about £400,000—but the name helps affluent Londoners feel connected to a more romantic kind of neighborhood, even if it was one that they probably wouldn’t have ever wanted to live in.”

Throughout the book, Mask offers examples of street names used to obscure unsavory historical details. Here, she gives an example of a street name chosen explicitly to connect modern residents to a “gritty” historical period. Ironically, the name obscures the luxury of the building it accommodates, and the forces of gentrification it represents. Bootmakers Court is a useful example of the historical valence of street names and The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality by highlighting the wide gulf between the rich and poor in London.

“And it was about more than the street name. The name ‘Bell End’ is a link to a proud and colorful past, and (architecturally speaking, at least) a more romantic time.”

Central to Mask’s argument in this book is the idea that street names are inextricable from identity, whether it is personal, communal, civic, or national. In this passage, Mask describes how some residents of a formerly prosperous mining town fought to prevent a street name change. As cities face dramatic change, holding on to historical street names can seem like an act of communal preservation, reflecting The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community.

“Maria Theresa’s orders had been specific; red numbers for Vienna, black for everywhere else. The numbers must be Arabic numerals—1, 2, 3, rather than the Roman i, ii, iii. Only the homes of Jewish people, whom Maria Theresa despised, were assigned Roman numerals.”

This historical example usefully demonstrates Mask’s arguments about house numbers as an instrument of state power, stressing The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality. In this case, the color of the number differentiates residences in the center of the Hapsburg Empire (Vienna) from those at the periphery (everywhere else). The use of Roman numerals for Jewish residences both marks them as other and exposes them to violence. In both cases, the state is using the house numbers to classify and organize its citizens.

“If they couldn’t number you, if they couldn’t conscript you, if they couldn’t see you, they didn’t own you—you really were a free man.”

This passage explains the widespread resistance to early attempts at formalizing house numbers in Europe. Since house numbering was often connected to census-taking and conscription, many people believed state-assigned house numbers were a form of oppression. For these people, true freedom included freedom from numbering.

“Once Manhattan was Mannahatta, a sylvan island where black bears, timber rattlesnakes, mountain lions and white-tailed deer roamed.”

This passage demonstrates Mask’s larger argument that place names, including street names, are essential to identity. The structure of this sentence implies a connection between the change in name—from the Lenape word meaning “island of many hills” to the English bastardization—and the change in environment. Although the name change is not directly responsible for the loss of wildlife, Mask shows that the process of laying out New York City’s grid system (turning Mannahatta into Manhattan) had a concrete effect on the landscape.

“The parceled land, so often coupled with numbered streets, reflected America’s image as an orderly, pragmatic, and new country. And because grids made navigation easy, the land was welcoming to the newcomers flooding in.”

This passage usefully articulates Mask’s arguments about the uniquely American practice of using numbers for street names. The uniform, orderly arrangement of number-based grid systems reflected the American desire to be seen as a rational, democratic society. Moreover, the use of a numbered grid allowed immigrants—who might not be able to read English street signs—to navigate their new home quickly and easily.

“Those who learned to write in English, Shelton reasoned, were trained to see lines. So Westerners fixated on streets—lines—and insisted on naming them.”

Central to Mask’s arguments in The Address Book is the idea that street names are intimately connected to personal identity. In Chapter 7, Mask suggests that the very practice of naming streets is culturally sensitive. Here, she argues that Westerners, who write in lines of connected letters, are more interested in identifying and naming the lines of streets than the Japanese, whose language is written in blocks and who identify buildings by their block, rather than their street.

“But every Korean I spoke to informally said they didn’t really use them. Cabdrivers convert the new addresses back into the old system, as do postmen. Of course, this reluctance may be temporary, a liminal period before the next generation grows up knowing no other way to address streets. Or it could be a sign that Koreans are still reading their city in blocks.”

This passage reflects the fact that government-imposed street naming systems—like the one in 2011 Korea described above—are not always immediately successful. Citizens can resist street name changes for a number of reasons, consciously and unconsciously, and changes tend to take place over generations, rather than years.

“A few months later, he knew they’d won, he said, when he heard a woman hop in a taxi and say, ‘Take me to Bobby Sands Street.’ The city soon made the name official. To avoid having to mention their revolutionary foe each time they gave the embassy’s address, the British opened a new entrance on another street.”

This passage demonstrates two of Mask’s most important arguments about street names: First, that they are decided within a community, and second, that they hold symbolic power. Here, she shows that the community’s habit of calling this street “Bobby Sands Street” ultimately led the city to formalize the nickname. The fact that the British literally restructured their embassy to avoid acknowledging the new name speaks to its power.

“Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for anything at all.”

Chapter 9 focuses on street names including variants of the word “Jew” before, during, and after the war. Here, Mask argues that changing these street names is an explicit act of propaganda, reflecting The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality. Street names can be used to demarcate where someone is or is not allowed to be, reflecting wider systems of power and discrimination.

“The newly chosen street names seemed deliberately provocative—Karl-Marx-Platz, in Dresden, was renamed Palaisplatz (Palace Square) and Friedrich-Engels-Straße became Koenigstraße (King Street).”

This passage demonstrates the political uses of street names after regime changes. Here, Mask explains how streets in East Berlin named after Communist icons Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were renamed following German unification. Mask implies that the new names, which were designed to eliminate vestiges of communism, may have overcorrected by reflecting conservative values. In reflecting the political values of East Berlin at given historical periods, the passage demonstrates The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community.

“For others, keeping the Civil War history on the signs was a way of clinging to a heritage they believed was romantic—it was part of their collective memory, a heritage they felt they could admire while still rejecting the evils of slavery.”

In this passage, Mask attempts to articulate the emotions that compel people to celebrate and fight for Confederate-themed street names. Although Mask clearly disagrees with this romantic view of southern history, it affirms her arguments about the importance of street names as historical monuments, and the emotional baggage street names can carry.

“Melvin has grand plans for the back end of the Beloved Streets building, now a vast, loftlike space with paint peeling from the walls in foot-long sheets.”

This passage, describing the Beloved Streets’ headquarters on MLK Avenue in St. Louis, is indicative of Mask’s evocative narrative style. Here, she demonstrates the concrete effects of the city’s defunding of Black neighborhoods, including those surrounding streets named after MLK, in describing the building’s dilapidated state. The allusions here to underfunding and urban decay also reflect The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality.

“For many people, a street named after Martin Luther King can only be a black street. And for them, a black street will always be a bad street. No parks, no boutiques, no evidence to the contrary will ever make them feel any differently.”

This passage demonstrates the power of street names to define communities, in both positive and negative ways. Mask notes that, for many white Americans, streets named after MLK are associated with Black neighborhoods. However, this passage also points to the difficulty of changing the associations, and suggests that only a name change can improve an MLK street’s reputation, despite the work of activists like Melvin White.

“The Confederates became Americans again. The Nazis returned to being German. The question became whether the Afrikaners could simply become South African.”

Chapter 12 focuses on racially motivated street name changes in post-apartheid South Africa. The issues surrounding renaming streets in South Africa speak to both the need to disavow the evils of apartheid and the tensions felt by Afrikaners who wish to “simply become South African” but who experience the erasure of Afrikaner references as discriminatory or signs of continuing Black anger against them.

“Most new regimes want to rebrand the landscape to cast away the past, to show how radically the world has changed. Mandela took the opposite approach. Keeping the old names was, perhaps, a tactic to make the revolution seem less revolutionary, the peace less fragile.”

Throughout the book, Mask offers examples of politically and racially motivated street name changes, arguing that they reflect a desire for change or a new identity. Here, she demonstrates the inverse, suggesting that Nelson Mandela’s decision not to change street names was an attempt to downplay the extent of his revolution. She points to the ongoing conversation regarding street names in South Africa as evidence that Mandela’s attempts to downplay the revolution were perhaps too successful.

“I wonder if there’s any need for vanity addresses anymore. Now, it seems to me, every street in Manhattan might as well be Park Avenue.”

Essential to Mask’s arguments in this chapter is the idea that Manhattan real estate is intentionally expensive: Park Avenue, for example, is so-named because developers wanted it to sound like the type of place rich people would live. Ultimately, Mask argues that developers seeking to make money have made New York City inaccessible to all but the ultra-rich, reflecting The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality.

“Most of all, they wanted jobs, and jobs required addresses. One man told her, ‘I used to work but now I don’t have an address.’”

This passage highlights the crucial importance of permanent street addresses in the modern world. The unhoused person quoted here directly attributes their lack of employment to their lack of a formal address. As Mask notes, the lack of a permanent address often leads employers to dismiss unhoused applicants as a result of the continued stigma against homelessness, preventing them from changing their housing status. Assigning permanent addresses to unhoused individuals is therefore an example of Street Addresses as a Tool of Social Justice.