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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 3-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-7

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 2, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Origins”

Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Rome: How Did the Ancient Romans Navigate?”

Although ancient Romans developed the technology for smooth, straight concrete roads, they are not responsible for the modern practice of street naming. Certain street names—like Vicus Frumentarius, Grain Street—bear the mark of intentional design, but Mask shows that existing documents use landmarks, rather than street names, to aid navigation.

However, whereas modern English has only a few synonyms for “road” or “street,” the ancient Romans had a wide variety of terms: “angiportum,” for example, referred to the road backing into the rear entrance of a home, while “gradus” described a street leading to stairs. The variety of terms used to describe these different types of streets indicates the importance of streets as a public space in ancient Rome. Mask notes that public streets were often used as restaurants, meeting areas, or even bathrooms.

The question of how ancient Romans navigated these crowded streets leads Mask to the research of Kevin Lynch, an urban planning professor working in the 1950s. Lynch’s research into what makes cities pleasurable led to the development of the idea of an “imageable” city. In Lynch’s theory, an imageable city is one that appears “well formed, distinct, remarkable: it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation” (61). An imageable city is not a city one can get lost in; rather, the sights, sounds, and layout of the city create an impression that helps the wanderer find their way. Lynch’s research identified five markers that help people to develop mental maps: paths (such as streets and sidewalks), nodes (junctions or crossings), edges (rivers or railways), landmarks (City Hall or a mountain), and districts (Chinatown vs. the business district). The presence of these markers in cities allows for locals to more easily develop mental maps.

Research by neuroscientists such as John O’Keefe and James D. Ranck shows that these mental maps have a literal location in the brain: the hippocampus. Human brains contain place neurons that fire electrical signals only when a person is in a particular place. These place neurons may help humans and other animals to navigate without formal maps. Grid neurons, similarly, help the brain to form locational coordinates, creating a kind of internal GPS system. These scientific breakthroughs have helped create a better understanding of the processes behind the formation of mental maps.

Returning to the ancient world, Mask considers how map markers and place neurons may have helped Romans navigate their city. Mask argues that the chaos of Rome would engage all of the senses, and the sounds and smells of the city would have been an important part of its citizens’ mental maps. Moreover, the Romans understood the connection between place and memory. Roman rhetorician Cicero encouraged speakers to memorize their work by imagining the speech as a giant building, with different arguments occupying different wings and rooms. This memorization technique, developed thousands of years before neuroscientists identified place neurons, demonstrates the connection between memory and space.

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “London: Where Do Street Names Come From?”

Chapter 4 begins with a discussion of obscene or otherwise inappropriate street names, beginning with “Gropecunt Lane,” a name that appears in towns across Britain, often in areas associated with sex workers. Seemingly inappropriate names can, however, have innocuous origins, as with London’s Booty Lane, which is likely named after a bootmaker or a family named Booty. Early street names often reflect this kind of simplistic practicality: Mill Streets, for example, often appear at the sites of former mills, and the same can be said for Market Streets, Church Streets, and so on. As London expanded dramatically in the 18th and 19th centuries, two hundred miles of new streets were created, many of them named after the builders’ family members or the royal family.

These various naming systems led to a number of repeated names, and Mask quotes a variety of 19th-century sources criticizing this repetition, including political pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines like The Spectator and Punch. These contemporaneous sources lament both the lack of creativity in naming and the outright falsehoods the names imply: Why have flowery names for streets filled with sewage?

More practically, the repetition of street names across London made postal service nearly impossible. The history of the modern postal service demonstrates the necessity of uniform street names. In the late 1830s, a British man named Rowland Hill began to advocate for a dramatic overhaul of the postal system, including a flat fee for mail sent anywhere in the country. Hill’s “penny post” democratized the mail system, allowing working-class people across Britain to communicate cheaply and quickly for the first time.

Since postage had been so expensive for so long, large parts of the population were unfamiliar with mailing practices, and the Dead Letter Office was established to handle incomprehensible addresses. “Letter detectives” (82) deciphered seemingly indecipherable addresses in Britain and America. The advent of postal codes (called zip codes in the United States) allowed for more accurate and efficient mailing by dividing large cities into smaller districts.

The chapter ends with a mediation on the reasons why street names change: Although new streets are rarely named after the business they contain, informal names for streets often do. Mask offers anecdotes from Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York that demonstrate how immigrant communities often informally rename streets to represent their place within the community. She points to research that suggests street names can actively influence behaviors and beliefs: In Great Britain and Spain, people who live in areas named after churches or religious figures tend to be more religious.

Part 2, Chapters 3-4 Analysis

“Rome” and “London” are the first chapters in the second section of the book, titled “Origins.” Three of the five chapters in this section are dedicated to the origins of modern street naming systems in the United States and Europe; however the first, “Rome,” and the last, “Korea and Japan,” break from this structure. “Rome” describes navigational practices before the advent of street names, while “Korea and Japan” describe modern societies without formal street names. These chapters suggest that the development of modern street naming systems was not inevitable, but the result of intentional political action or inaction.

The theme Street Addresses as a Tool of Social Justice appears again in the discussion surrounding the “penny post” and the introduction of postal codes to make mapping cities easier and more specific. The advent of the “penny post” granted working-class Britons the ability to communicate more easily and cheaply with one another, allowing them to become more connected to their wider communities. In this sense, the democratizing effects of the “penny post” system in Victorian England echo the democratizing effects of the newly implemented addressing system in the modern Indian slums of Chapter 1, which also makes access to a wider community and services easier.

There is also a new emphasis on another important theme, The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community. Both Chapters 3 and 4 show the ways in which people orientate themselves to feel at home in their surroundings. In ancient Rome, the city’s residents could forgo formal street naming by using landmarks and through creating descriptions of the kind of streets and passageways they would encounter. In treating the streets as a public place for meeting, eating, and socializing, the Romans were able to build communities throughout the city. Similarly, community-building continues to be an important aspect of orientation even in modern cities, with Chapter 4’s discussion of immigrant communities and their informal renaming of streets revealing how immigrants identify and connect with their environment through making it their own.

Throughout Chapter 4, Mask also integrates 19th-century sources into her discussion of London’s street name reform, quoting a variety of magazines, political pamphlets, and travel guides on the topic. These contemporaneous accounts demonstrate the longevity of the conversation Mask is engaging in by showing that debates about street names and naming practices have been happening for centuries. Her use of excerpts from the magazine Spectator— “Do all builders name streets after their wives, or in compliment to their sons and daughters?” (76)— and Punch—“Let the streets be called […] by the various nuisances or diseases which infest or pollute them respectively” (77)—emphasizes both the humor and longstanding nature of debates around street naming conventions. These debates echo the modern debates discussed previously in the Introduction, which describe the turmoil associated with contemporary street name changes. Thus, the act of naming and renaming streets has always been—and remains—an often contentious topic.