How Addresses Developed in Salem, Oregon: A Thumbnail Sketch

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Thanks to a dear friend from my distant past and current future, today I stumbled on something I didn't know I wanted to know but actually did want to know.

Now, when it comes to Address Nerdery I'll take second place to few. I have literally obsessed about the way Portland grew its house number system since I was a child and long before I lived here permanently; something about the quadranted house number system suggested more than a basic level of design and my mission was, for myself, to find the reasoning, at least for myself. Then I ran into Eugene E. Snyder's book which Explained It All and a handful of kindred spirits in the online world who looked at things the way I did. I now know much more than I ever thought I'd know about Portland's address system but also a whole number of towns and cities.

And that's as maybe. But I was born of the Salem and Silverton area and I seem to have stumbled into exploring about that. And my friend tossed me a link that opened a little bit of history like a flower that I didn't know I was looking for.

See, unlike Portland, Salem was always just Salem; it didn't start out as four cities in a trench coat that had to co-ordinate street naming because otherwise it would be a crazy-quilt. Salem didn't even abut any other town until Keizer decided to stop messing around and organize as one back in the 1970s. But it did grow an address system, as it turns out, and it changed at least once.

The basic information was gleaned from a post at the Willamette Heritage Center's website at https://www.willametteheritage.org/house-numbering-address-ordinances/. And, I guess I hadn't found it myself because this only exists on the 'web since 2021. But it lays out a simple though interesting time line.

• 1885: Salem City Ordinance 151 defines the address system with 40 numbers per block. Addresses increase northward from Leslie Street (runs east-west, one block north of today's Mission Street) and eastward from Water Street (runs north-south along the Willamette River bank). Addresses did not exceed 560 on streets paralelling the river (the north city limits at the time ran along Mill Creek) and went up as far as 280 on the east-west streets as far east as where the State Capitol is today. 
• 1904: Salem City Ordinance 436 sets up the house number pattern used today though does not establish address directional suffixes: West Salem would not be added to the City of Salem until 1949 and Salem itself was limited to the east side of the river only. Streets did have directional prefixes, but only if they crossed a baseline. It was at this time, that State Street became the principal division between north and south Salem addresses, and the house number allocation per block was adjusted from 40 to 100.
  
• 1957: The system established by the 1904 ordinance served until this time, but it was decided by 1957 that the city had grown enough to require grown-up address districts. It was at this time that the N/NE/SE/S/NW districts were established and deemed to be directional suffixes.

The media coverage of the day was very practical, even bland, which kind of fits for Salem. On Sunday, Oct 13th 1957, the Oregon Statesman ran a very modest article on page 30 about it with a somewhat-crabbily drawn map to illustrate:

 Some of the nomenclature is a little bewildering: Triangle Area, I must admit, leaves me a bit baffled, unless they were commenting on the general shape of the N and S districts. Some of the descriptions have not sustained: while the text seems to suggest that River Road North will be suffixed NE it is suffixed N, and Liberty Road was supposed to get a SE suffix it got S, but both roads are indeed the boundaries as otherwise stated. 

The one essential area that Salem lacks, SW, is only referenced as "a small stretch between the river and the NW area". The 100-block baseline to NW is basically a line formed by Edgewater Street NW and Hwy 22 going west from the core West Salem area. The only area that reasonably describes is Polk County south of Hwy 22 and west of Eola Bend, where the Willamette meets the highway. There has never been any residential development of any scale in that area, and west of that area, while the house number pattern is continued the street naming conventions are not; NW pretty much peters out at the Hwy 22/Hwy 51 intersection. So while there is room for SW as the pattern scales out, I doubt there will ever be a metropolitan Salem address that ends that way.

One other thing I was able to find was this article in the Oregon Statesman published the very next day:

The "oh, well, best get with it" attitude of the article is a scream, quite frankly. Suffixes are now with us, learn to like it, pal. Eventually we'll get used to it. 

And SW is but little populated as yet? Oh, 1957, you had such high hopes for us.

Ex Libris, Marian Frances Milne, of Portland, 1920

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before I delve into this 1920 geography and its aged delights, I wanted to show you all what I found in the inside front cover and also the front endpaper.

The owner and location of the book lovingly inscribed thereupon is what appears to be a light green ink in classic penmanship of the day:

The script parses as follows:

Marian Frances Milne
1317 E. 12th St North
Corner of Holman
Portland ore

Telephone: Walnut-1279

 The addressing would seem quite nonsensical to a modern-day Portlander, but as I've pointed out, long long ago, the address system in Portland was quite different before the 1930s. Today, an address on NE 12th Avenue at Holman would be in the 6300s, and the expression of the street name would be much different: East 12th Street North reflects its location north of Burnside and on the east side of the river, but in those days, numbered streets outside of downtown were prefixed east and suffixed north if they were north of the Burnside baseline. The comparative small magnitude of the house number came from that there were only 20 house numbers to the block in those days.

But whether or not you grok how Portland laid out its house numbering prior to the Great Renaming of 1933, the careful penmanship is actually rather heartbreakingly beautiful. One can picture the nib varying the flow of ink with pressure. 

Truly, art.

Salem, We Need To Talk About State Street

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Salem, you need to get a grip. You got lots of problems. You might run out of money. That's bad. You might close your public library. That's appalling.

But this ...

Explain, I will.

Now, Salem has directional addresses as anyone who's ever heard me drone on about city maps and street layouts and address systems will, after all this, have by now known. And especially if you live there. And it works like this: If you're on the east side of the Willamette River but north of State St, you're NE. And if you're on the east side of the River and south of State St, you're SE. But if you're on State Street, you're neither NE or SE; it's the dividing line. Also, there's no State Street on the west side of the river, so there's no State St W, therefore, no State St E. 

It's just State St. It always was State St. 

Now, just west of Cordon Road NE, which is where town ends (both the unincorporated fringe and the city limits, where they come out that far) and on the north side of State, for years, there was a field, going up to a rail siding that ran parallel to State, and a locally-famous mushroom production facility. I lived on Abiqua Ct SE, just off State via 47th Ave SE, during some formative years during my teens, and we all knew about it

You know what mushrooms grow in. The smell got around.

Well, in the decades since, the mushroom plant has gone, and the rail line with it, and at long last the area along the west side of Cordon Road NE going north from State Street in the direction of Auburn Road is finally being filled in with a housing tract. New streets going in, new houses going up, little old Snailem inching its population ever closer to 200,000. Some of the street blades have already gone up. and here's one sharked from Google Street View:

State St NE, the sign says. And this is wrong, Salem, and you know it.

Why is that a problem, you might ask? Wouldn't the north side of State Street be NE? Well, like I said before, State Street is neither NE nor SE, and it's not E because there's no W half. Besides, most blades along State St just look like this:

This is 47th Ave SE and State, just a few blocks west of that (this corner is in unincorporated Marion County, which has shifted to a street blade format nearly identical to that used within Salem city limits over the years). Just State St. Just like it always has been.

Like eliminating the leading-zero district here in Portland and making it S, labelling State St as NE or SE depending on which side of the street you're on fixes a problem that doesn't really exist and erases a charming local address custom. 

Now, Salem, I know you're short of money and all, so all you have to to is stick a piece of green over that NE there. 

But however you do it, get a grip here.

I say this because I care.

The author is available as a highly-opinionated consultant on designing street naming and address systems due to his obsession of it over the course of more than four decades. Contact for rates.

How To Have A Logical Address System In An Illogical Street Pattern

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Georgia has an amazingly-adaptable system for figuring out a regular system of addresses in counties that have irregularly grown road systems. It's impressive and works very well.

I'd like to introduce you to a document titled Street Addressing Standards and Guidelines for the State of Georgia, created by the Georgia Spatial Data Infrastructure GIS Coordinating Committee, Framework Transportation Technical Working Group, and released in August 2000. It really is an amazing document, and you can get your own copy of the PDF here:

https://www.itos.uga.edu/library/PropAddGuid.pdf

It's axiomatic by now that a consistent, logical system of addressing promotes various public and private goods, from predictable private wayfinding to ease of location for emergency first-responder services. The organic way many Georgia cities grow kind of defeats this, though; take a look at the city center of Atlanta - various sized grids at various angles, no smooth transitions between them - and one begins to see what the challenges of creating such a system might be.

To this end, the group with the long-winded name came up with a complex-yet-simple system. I'd ask anyone interested to read the document (which also goes into considerable depth with respect to establishing logical street-naming rules which promote setting up solid address databases) but it is kind of dry, so here's the TL; DR abstract. It has 2 main moving parts:

1. Identify two intersecting roads, or two intersecting alignments, that cross the county. They meet at the reference point, which is the originating point, from which all addresses radiate. This divides the county into rough quadrants, which can be designated NW, SW, NE and SE.

2. Determine addresses as a function of distance from that reference point; the rule they suggest is one house number per 20 feet of street length as measured from the centerlines of the street. 

The illustration right demonstrates the idea of finding two intersecting trans-county alignments which meet at the reference point and creating rough-but-roughly equivalent quadrants (the county used by the illustrator is Lowndes County, Georgia and the reference point is in city center Valdosta, for what it's worth ... and a look at the county shows they haven't chosen to implement this system, so it amounts to a demo). 

The real magic of this system comes in tying the house numbers to distance relative from the reference point. This is necessary because if a Georgia town starts off with a rectilinear grid, they typically do not hold; they devolve pretty quickly into a county road network that's based on paths that indigenous people took and that settlers created to get to their properties as they developed the lands. There isn't a regular gridded road pattern, and there isn't going to be one ... a regular amount of block numbers per 'block' is difficult if not next to impossbile.

One drawback is that even hundreds don't fall on street intersections, and that's something to learn and get used to, but any address system can be learned and they've been doing things this way in Atlanta since the 1920s, so it may be a stumbling block in the beginning but that wont' last for too long.

It occurs to me that bits and pieces of this logic can be applied to ordering other towns depending on the form of the street network. There's a thought experiment I plan on exploring quite soon, and I'll write about that here. But not quite yet. 

The Reason I Like This Hawthorne Address

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This is charming, no?

It's the transom of The Meadow, a shop next to Powell's and The Fresh Pot that sells chocolate, gourmet salts, bitters, and other trendy comestible impedimenta, and even though the font and the treatment wears its designedness with a smug pride, I love it.

I live the way the abbreviation "No." is in front of the address. That elevates it for me at the same time I kind of resent the way it knows it will charm me. 

You might say it has my number. 

A Rather Unusual Street Blade-Woodward and SE 6th

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This is a set of street blades that've been here for a while, as evidence by the obvious weathering.

 

This is, for sake of reference, one street north of the east end of the Ross Island Bridge and one block east of SE McLoughlin Blvd.

The oddities are manifest. The flat sheet metal of the signs; the rounded rectangle serving as a border, and the ordinal suffix on the number 6 being as large as the number. 

What really gets the attention is the specific; this is not SE 6th St, but SE 6th Av. But the CoP put it up, god knows how many years ago, and since it's in a forgettable corner of town, it pretty much remains. But then, we've seen evidence that whoever posts street blades for the CoP does kind of a sloppy job of it betimes. 

As Though I Were Behind The Dairy Curtain

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The main plant for Darigold, a dairy co-ooperative that sells dairy products all over the western USA, is located just north of the east end of the Ross Island Bridge here in Portland. It's a factory and office complex located generally between SE 6th and 8th Avenues and north of Woodward Street, constructed during the 50s or maybe 60s with details that look mid-20th Century.

There's a sign on the top that, when the support was lit, with red neon, made it like a landmark beacon coming home in the middle of the night when we lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

A Street Name That Didn't Exist 15 Years Ago

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This is a brief bit of Address Nerdery that momentarily obsesses on the way street names change and get extended over time. Dig, if you will, this picture:

This is a corner you come to if you come out of inner NW Portland going east over the Steel Bridge, or if you come west from Grand/MLK and NE Lloyd Blvd. It wasn't a part of Interstate Avenue until only about a decade ago; the only thing I can't determine for sure is what it was called before this. It was either an extension of NE Victoria Avenue, or NE Occident Avenue.

The area around what we now call the Moda Center must be one of the most re-thought urban areas anywhere in Oregon. Before the coming of the Memorial Coliseum, it was Albina's business district, a place also called "Jumptown", the heart of a vibrant jazz scene, and Oregon's black downtown. Then it was decided that Oregon needed a major sports venue; out went the black people, in came the Memorial Coliseum. Then it was decided (by Paul Allen, I think) we needed a bigger and better arena, then came the Rose Garden Arena, though we succumbed to the need to sell naming rights and it became the Moda Center. 

In the process of all that evolution, many streets were renamed, rerouted, and some obliterated and forgotten. In the case of Interstate Avenue, which had other names before it became the main route (pre-Interstate 5) to the Interstate Bridge, hence its modern rubric, before the current revision it turned onto the Steel Bridge just before it crossed the line established by North Williams Avenue, and was fully North Interstate Avenue; after the area was re-thought, Interstate Avenue was extended to the intersection with NE Oregon Street, which is only one block east of where Williams Avenue would be if it extended that far.

So the very southern end of the road is properly NE Interstate Avenue, which, to a long-time Address Nerd, sounds a dissonant note, but it is indeed valid. Strange sounding, but valid.

A Street-Address Map Of Silverton, Oregon

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This is a major signpost in a process that's been developing all my life, really. I don't say this just to be dramatic although I do like to write as though I'm saying things to be dramatic.

City street maps have always been my jam, and, in a life full of plans that went nowhere, I'd say #1 of those was to become a mapmaker. No matter how you get those skills, and I'm self-taught there, there isn't exactly a place that accepts applications to be a mapmaker, and I am beyond shabby in my skills at making connections and networking.

I remember one time, many years ago, applying for a job with surveyors with the City o'Portland. I knew enough of surveying and mapmaking to get an interview, but I must have seemed like the most egregious poser because an interview is as far as it got. C'est la guerre, mon frere. But, during all those years, but not so much latterly (which the Brown Eyed Girl will tell you is one of my biggest problems) I dashed off a prodigious number of make-believe city maps, played with street grids, and all that.

The results are lost to time except in my memory, and I am incredible for map memory (as the Brown Eyed Girl will also tell you).

Early in life, I was born. This was a great relief to my mother who may now point out that if we did things according to my schedule, I'd have waited until I was, at a minimum, twelve. And that occurred in the Willamette Valley backcountry metropolis of Silverton. This was a peculiar place for someone obsessed with street layouts and address grids to be; McEachern's Silverton: the Morphology of an Oregon town hints at the amazing textual variety contained within Silverton's snowflake-like street plan - nothing regular about it,  a combination of little bits and parts that don't really mesh with each other.

The street grid of Silverton can be inscrutable even to the native-born. This is a point I plan on exploring going forward. It's been a curious trip. Anyway, my exploring this has resulted in the map you see embedded here: the first map I think anyone's ever made that sets out, nearly block-by-block the street addresses you can expect to find in Silverton, Oregon.

It's about a 2.3 Mb PNG and here it is:

To make it I hacked apart a PDF copy of the Oregon Dept of Transportation map of Silverton, which I was able to load into the Inkscape application and editing all the street names into a mixed-case font I liked more than was provided, then, with the aid the public GIS at the City of Silverton's website, figured out where the blocks should go, and plopped an obliqued set of red digits there (this was a common them in the maps of California cities that the AAA's California branch produced and I've always rather liked it).

This is a product which is useful even though it's not a finished thing, there's some detail there outside of town I want to add in and I can do it on a 2nd pass.

It also got me of thinking of ways to renumber and quadrant the town so as to make the address layout a little less inscrutable. But Silverton's street address plan is, as it is, quirky and interesting without being too confusing (that's the beauty of smaller-area towns like Silverton). And this too is something I'll be exploring as a thought experiment roping in a few insights from planning documents I've traipsed across in my intellectual travels.

But for now, here, a most unique map. I enjoy this. And even though I was never able to become a professional map maker, I can at least now say I've put something out there. 

The Northside Street Names, They Are a-Changin'

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Springtime, and the City of Portland's fancy turns to renaming streets.

Well, maybe not every springtime. But I remember May, about a year ago, where the CoP created a short-ton of new street names by the simple expedient of re-christening streets in the leading-zero segment of SW as S. Goodbye, SW Macadam Avenue; Hello, S Macadam Ave. Well, they're at it again.

Perhaps with an eye toward some sort of increased development in the city's far north margin, the CoP has deemed it possibly confusing the way street names change on that rim of town. Lombard Street and Columbia Boulevard, together, define a rather hard edge to the north side of town; south of these two streets, north and northeast neighborhoods march in stately array, and are abruptly ended at these arterials and the railroad line they dance around. North of this, the Columbia floodplain, meadows, a major international raceway which is also the site of Vanport City, industrial tracts, auto salvage yards, a branch of the Oregon State Dept of Corrections, and Portland International Airport. And I suppose it can be a bit disorienting:

Starting at Kelley Point, where North Marine Dr bends south to become the outermost end of N Lombard Street, said street descends inward, goes through a bit of a chicane, and becomes N. Columbia Blvd. If you fail to turn right on N Burgard Rd, it's Columbia Blvd upon which you'll remain. Turn on Burgard, however, go through another turn, and the name changes once again to Lombard. Now, in the business district of Saint Johns, Lombard pics up the US 30 BYP shield, which debouches onto N Philadelphia Ave from the Saint Johns Bridge, then for the next seven (give or take) miles, maintains the name Lombard Street from N going into NE, then, and this is unheralded, once you pass the NE 47th Ave overpass, you are no longer on NE Lombard Street but NE Portland Highway (the name is borrowed from the official ODOT name for the road). 

The road remains NE Portland Highway until the wide curve passes you by NE 72nd Avenue; it' s NE Killingsworth Street after that, until its terminus at NE Sandy Blvd in central Parkrose. 

There are other anomalies; the most irritating (a mild irritation to be sure) being the small snakey part of Columbia that starts at NE 89th and (for now, anyway) Killingsworth and ducks under the railroad trestle there by the Airport Holiday Inn to join old Columbia Blvd. This minuscule road is called NE Columbia Parkway. Just that. No other part of the road.

To fix and rationalize all this, the City o'Portland has devised a thing called the Columbia-Lombard Wayfinding Project and this simple thing aims to fix this by doing, majorly, the following:

• Renaming the part of Lombard Street at the city's extreme northwestern corner, alongside Port of Portland Terminal 5 and Kelley Point, as N Columbia Blvd.
• Eliminating the names of N Burgard Rd, NE Portland Hwy and NE Killingsworth St. east of NE 72nd Avenue in favor of a unified N/NE Lombard St along this entire length.
• Small street renames and adjustments to tributary streets.

The result is a Columbia Blvd that runs unbroken from Kelley Point all the way to NE 89th Avenue and a Lombard Street that runs unbroken from just west of Saint Johns all the way into Parkrose. This CoP illustration will make it a bit more graphically clear:

As someone who has lived in the city for almost forty years and has been addicted to the Portland street grid for longer than that, I can see the practicality of it, but I'll miss the quirkiness of having a road neither originating from outside or nor necessarily travelling toward or away from this town being called Portland Highway (there's a "N Portland Road" that exists similarly, so not all is lost). Also, seeing a level segment of Lombard defining the 5500 block north of Burnside will take a little getting used to.

But, just a little more than one year out, this will be the new reality. 

Update your maps, kids. 

The city's page on this foo-fraraw lives at https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/construction/columbia-lombard-wayfinding-project.

The Camas Address Grid As It Seems To Be Now

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A chance look at a bit of Google Mappery sent me down this garden path. Kindly follow along if you will ...

Camas, Washington is a medium-sized growing to larger-medium-sized city on the east side of Clark County, Washington, and the only thing preventing Vancouver from getting the drop on Washougal (Washougal serves its function by preventing Camas from intruding uninvited into Skamania County, but I digress).

Aaaaanyway, as the other towns in Clark County that are also not Vancouver, Camas maintains its own address grid: binomial (NW, SW, NE, SE) extending only to the city boundary, where the County grid takes up. The north-south dividing line is First Avenue, the east-west dividing line is Division Street (these streets don't actually cross; the notional corner on Division and First would be about one block inside the Georgia-Pacific paper mill that dominates the center of town). It serves Camas reasonably well; despite certain quirks introduced by the extreme cant of the central grid and the meander of the Washougal River, it works.

I found this, though, after reviewing the extent of Camas currently via Google Maps. The incorporated area of Camas, during the years I've watched it, has spread rather glandularly; its modest population of around 20,000 or so sprawls over around 16 square miles of riverbank, hill, and prairie, and has become a rather ragged triangle more than five miles from one side to the other. 

The hypotenuse of that triangle is the line formed by Lacamas Lake and Lacamas Creek. Within the last decade, though Camas has been annexing north of that, and there is now, at about six miles NW from the city center, there is a tuft of incorporated land that stretches nearly 1/3 of the way from downtown Camas to Battleground. 

The city has ambitions. 

I reasoned the street numbering should have ascended to certain heights. Up until now, the highest numbered avenue in that NW section of town, which is the largest quadrant, is a NW 78th Avenue. I wondered what, if any, numbered avenues would exist in that tuft. Certainly they must be high, and I was right: I found avenues numbered from 91st through 96th, with a way and a loop stuck in there.

But it was not NW. They were all N: N 91st Ave, N 92nd Ave, N 93rd Ave, Lane, and Loop, N 94th, 95th, and 96th Avenues. And that was strange as, even though it were a sprawl away from the main part of town, it was north and west of the address origin. And so began the search.

And that was a journey. This is the destination:

This is a JPEG, and the resolution might not be advantagious, saved from the PDF which can be viewed at full resolution at the link http://www.cityofcamas.us/images/DOCS/MAPS/streetnamegrid2010.pdf if one is so inclined. In this diagram we find that the City of Camas has gotten a bit experimental in address sectoring. The dividing lines are called out as SR-14 (separates the tiny SW area from NW), Division, (NW from NE) and the incorrectly-called out NE 3rd Av (should be E 1st Ave) which separates NE from SE. That is as expected.

But now there's N and S. N appears to include everything north of Lacamas Lake and Lacamas Creek as well as NE 43rd Ave, and S, which is Lady Island (which only has room for water treatment works and sewage disposal ponds, and appears to have no residential development slated (nor do I expect any). The diagram itself seems somewhat inaccurate too; the streets in the area north of and immediately adjacent to the intersection of NE 43rd and Everett still seems to have NE on the street signs; however, a quick Google Street View check of Adams off Leadbetter Road shows it as N Adams St, and the street sign for N 47th Cir off NE Everett similarly checks out. 

The idea seems to be, as I infer it, changing the directional to a simple N north of the Lacamas/43rd line but the addresses still march on as expected. There's precedent for this on the King County grid: the streets of S Seattle and King County become SE east of 100th Avenue SE with the address pattern proceeding as though no shift in directional had occurred. 

Still, it's odd and seems, like Portland's new 'sixth sextant', to want to solve a problem that only debatably exist

The journey began with me wanting to confirm something I found on Google Maps, which I've never found 100% trustworthy when it comes to this. It wound up with me on Planet Camas, which, as it happens, has six 'quadrants' of its own. 

Passing strange.

Oh, by the way, Camas has a whole Street Naming Manual online. The last revision was in 2010, and you can have it for yourself at http://cityofcamas.us/images/DOCS/PLANNING/REPORTS/streetnamingmanual.pdf. Enjoy your reading, address nerds!

Oh, yes ... there's also a 2008 address grid map that actually marks out the blocks at http://www.cityofcamas.us/images/DOCS/MAPS/addressgridmap2008.pdf.

Block Numbers: There's Something About NE Fremont and Sandy

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Let's go back into street blade and Address Nerd territory with gun and camera.

Well, with camera anyway.

Allow me to introduce you to the intersection of NE Fremont St, NE Sandy Blvd, and NE 72nd Avenue,  in the Roseway neighborhood. This is pretty much downtown Roseway, really: there's Fairley's Pharmacy, the Safeway store, a handful of small shops, a liquor store, a theater, a handful of Vietamese-owned businesses. The late Yen Ha restaurant and lounge is here.

Now, keep your eyes on the road, and don't tell the officer you didn't see the sign.

NE Sandy/72nd/Fremont, looking east on Fremont
from the west side of the intersection

In NE Portland, at the point where diagonal Sandy Boulevard crosses straight east-west NE Fremont St, NE 72nd Avenue also happens to cross. In the big photo above, you can see it entering the plenum from the right, which is south, just behind the mansard roof of Annie's Donuts and just before the US Bank. Off to the left, well out of shot, the street continues northward from this intersection as a sort of parkway  with a very wide boulevard median, similar to the segment of SE 72nd running from Holgate Boulevard to Foster Road. This parkway goes from approximately Fremont/Sandy to NE Prescott Street, about half a mile.

Now, I've prattled at length somehwere at least once or twice in the past three-thousand, seven-hundred plus visits to this blog about how to read a Portland street blade. And when you put a block number on a street blade as an aide in motorist navigation, there are essentially two ways to do it:

1. The block number on the blade indicates the block of the street named on that blade, based on where the intersecting street cuts across. In other words, if I'm in Salem, and I'm on 12th St SE, and I look at a sign saying 12th ST SE and the block number says 3000, then what that street sign is telling me that it's directly labeling that block of the street that I'm on. This seems to be the most common way of going about it. Or:
   
2. The block number on the blade indicates the block of the street you're on as defined by the intersecting street, which in Portland will be whatever block you're either entering or leaving as you go. Say I'm on SE 52nd Avenue and I come to a stop at SE Woodstock Blvd. The block number on the Woodstock blade will read 6000. This does not mean that's the 6000 block of Woodstock; it means Woodstock defines the beginning of the 6000 block of whatever street's crossing it. I'm either entering the 6000 block if I'm heading south  or leaving it for the 5900 block if I'm heading north.

Number 2 is Portland's way of going about it. From what I've been able to see, though Portland is hardly the only city that does it this way (Salt Lake City has perhaps the most extreme idea of this sort of thing). It also lets you know how many streets away from, and quickly estimate your distance from said baseline (Woodstock at 6000 is the sixtieth block south of Burnside, and is therefore three miles from it). 

It also influences geographic parlance: in Portland it's common to hear it put as "Woodstock is the 6000 block" or "Hawthorne is the 1500 block". It's particularly useful in a town like Portland where the grid is so strong through most of town. It's also why you don't see block numbers on the numbered avenue signs; since the hundred block of numbered avenues in town is keyed to the avenue number, it follows directly from the street name (NE 15th Avenue is the 1500 block of named streets that cross it).

There's more I could say but all that I've laid down so far should have set the table for what I'm about to lay on you. Pay attention:

At this intersection, you have two major traffic streets, NE Sandy Boulevard and NE Fremont Street, and a local side street, NE 72nd Avenue. Sandy runs at a diagonal, so it has no standard block number; it depends on the rise/run at the point of intersection. Now that does happen to be Fremont. What's Fremont's block? It's the 35th block north of Burnside; Fremont Street is the 3500 block, at least of NE 72nd Avenue (Sandy Blvd is numbered as an east-west street, so it's building numbers at that point would be the same as Fremont's which would be 7100 7200.

Okay, knowing all this, what would you assume would be the block numbers on the named blades for NE Sandy Blvd and NE Fremont St? Since Fremont is the 3500 block north, and Sandy cuts 72nd at the 3500 block, you may have guessed that the block number on those street blades would read 3500.

That's an entirely reasonable assumption. It's also incorrect: Here is what they do say:

That's right. Not 3500, but 7200. That's the block that 72nd intersects both those streets at.

It's like that on all points of the intersection. I've walked the entire thing more than once and I did on that day. The following picture is the extreme northeastern corner of the intersection, where the northbound side of NE 72nd north of Sandy leaves Sandy Blvd:

The block number on the Sandy Blvd blade?:

Yep. 7200. As is the one on the blade of Fremont Street pointing east from NE 72nd Avenue.

I've done a lot of reasoning about this because it is rather bewlidering. The Portland system of street sign information is actually fairly simple but just like every system it will run into cases where the demands of reality test it to a limit and this would appear to be one of those situations. It fails in a way at delivering the information one expects. But my going over my multi-decade store of impressions and expectations as to the information this system can deliver, I can at least, I think, provide an insight, that will cause it to at least make sense.

Bear in mind that I can't read PDOT's collective mind and that I do not function as any sort of consultant on these matters to them (I mean, I should, that would be just and righteous, but I don't. C'est la guerre, mon frere).

In referring to Portland street blades over my adult life one decoding principle I've used in interpreting this information is that the intersecting street blade tells you all you need to know about where you are on the street you're travelling on. You, presumably, don't need to be reminded of the name of the that street you're travelling on; you intentionally put yourself there. Here am I, say, going northbound on NE 60th Avenue crossing Glisan. I look at the sign and I see NE GLISAN ST 500, and I say to myself Well, I know I'm going into the 500 block on NE 60th and I just crossed Glisan St. 

That street blade told me information relating to the street I was most likely to be on. Since 60th and Glisan only is composed of two intersecting streets, that further possibility is like an algebra term that multiplies by zero and falls out. I'm only going to be on one street or the other.

But what if the intersection I was at had three streets intersecting and only two of them were major through traffic routes? With the limited amount of room on the sign, what would I do?

What if, proceeding from the example of 60th and Glisan, I prioritized the needs of travellers coming into or through the area rather than those who wanted a reassurance that Fremont is the 3500 block north of a relatively-much-lesser travelled intra-neighborhood street? If that were true, then maybe I'd want to put 7200 on all those named street blades:

• If you're on Sandy Blvd, the intersection of NE Fremont Street defines the 7200 block of NE Sandy.
• If you're on NE Fremont Street, the intersection of NE Sandy Blvd defines the 7200 block of Fremont
• NE 72nd Avenue, being a comparatively little-used street, and less likely to be travelled on by people who are through-bound on Sandy and Fremont, can be left off the signs and cause minimal confusion and inconvenience because most locals already know that the 3500 block starts there and those through-bound people are more likely to be concerned with what block of Sandy or Fremont they're at.

So, there it is. I'm not saying I approve or disapprove, what I am saying here is that this is what I think the method behind this madness is. And there are other places in Portland where block number blade mistakes exist, and even some intersection signs which appear to contradict this logic within blocks of this very sign too ... Sometimes I don't know where PBOTs mind is on some of this.

And ... I still like the Portland system better than any others. But it does have its weaknesses where confusion can occur. This'd be one. But then, why even be in a city if you aren't going to take your time when you can, and look carefully around at your world.

The Burkle Address System: A Unified Statewide Address Grid

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I'm kind of hoping that at least part of that title was provocative, at least on the Address Nerd level, because many of us don't live in, and indeed probably can't picture, a unified system for rural addresses stretching across an entire state.

But then, most of us don't live in North or South Dakota. I'll explain.

In my virtual peramulations across the globe, one thing for which Google has made me grateful (there are downsides, but more on that some other time), I was, one fine day, scanning the wide open spaces of North Dakota, when a detail caught my eye. 

I found ordinally-numbered streets, suffixed with binomial directionals (96th Ave SW, for example) in truly out-of-the-way rural areas. Such is the form of my inquisitiveness that I began panning, following the decreasing numbers in the direction of what I'd hoped would be the origin point of that system. I quickly saw that these numbered streets and avenues were one section ... one full surveyed mile ... apart. Before I knew it I had panned across a significant section of the state. And still, I had not located the origin, it seemed not to be near any of the larger towns (and some of those had their own county grids superseding the statewide pattern I was seeing. 

I poked about via Google now and again hoping to find some defining document but was unsuccessful (amazing how often that is true for many of these address systems). I was unsuccessful for a very long time but then, a few days ago, I stumbled on what I was looking for.

According to this article (https://www.farmshow.com/a_article.php?aid=4428) at a site called Farm Show News Magazine, back in 1988, when Enhanced 911 was coming to North Dakota, the emergency coordinator in Stark County, was wondering how to solve the problem of establishing findable addresses in a state where the geography is kind of unrelentingly flat. From the article:

Anyone who has tried to find a farm in a rural area knows how difficult it can be. One hill looks like the next. The same with shelter belts and mile lanes, especially at night.

Thinking on it, he hit on the idea of not just his county but the entire state of North Dakota is though it were one town. The flat, rectilinear geography of the Public Land Surveyed North Dakotan landscape fairly gave itself to the approach.

Simply put, an intersection of section lines as close to the geographic center of the state as practical was chosen. (As it would happen, it can be found at 47°24'52.2"N 100°32'42.6"W, a spot about 20 miles NNE of the state capital, Near a place called McCluskey) The section line extending east and west from this, from the east boundary to the west boundary was designated a baseline and whenever it sported a road that road would be Main Street; the section line extending north and south, from the top of state to the bottom, was the other baseline and when it sported a road that road would be called Center Avenue, numbered streets and avenues corresponding to section lines radiating out from there. This divides the state up into more-or-less equal quadrants and each quarter would be suffixed with the appropriate directional: NW, NE, SW, and SE. A notional intersection of an otherwise-nondescript pair of rural roads, one being 29 miles south of Main Street and 45 miles west of Center Avenue would be the corner of 29th St SW with 45th Ave SW. 

This system bears the name of its inventor, of course, it is known as the Burkle Address System, and, except for its three most populous counties, is used across the entire state of North Dakota.

Not just there, either. Neighboring South Dakota though it so ideal that they use a modified version of it too (the baselines being the northern and western boundaries of the state itself, avoiding the requirement for having directionals at all.

The guidelines for South Dakota rural addressing can be found in a PDF hosted by the State of SD at https://dps.sd.gov/resource-library/South-Dakota-Rural-Addressing-Procedural-Handbook.pdf-782. 

Not all states can approach rural addresses this way, of course. But the Dakotas seem uniquely qualified to go it that way, and it's interesting how it worked out.

The Smallest Triangular Restaurant We Know, and the Street Sign at Mason and Sandy

3727

Sandy Boulevard is one of Portland's signature arterials. Starting from the corner of SE 7th and Washington, it does a curl up that hill then shifts from SE to NE at Burnside (and is now made discontinuous by the Burnside-Couch couplet). It then strikes out diagonally across east-side Portland, creating complex intersections and small flatiron-shaped blocks in its relentless drive to Parkrose, many of those blocks containing almost absurdly-small flatiron-shaped buildings.

One of those is on the block bounded by Sandy, NE 81st Avenue, and NE Mason Street. This is directly to the west of the major intersection of NE 82nd and Sandy. This block is scarcely 100 feet long on the hypotenuse, and it is absolutely full of a very charming little breakfast and lunch place: the Cameo. It's directly across Mason Street from the Cameo Motel to which, we surmise, it was once organizationally-attached to as the motel's cafe. There seems no such affiliation now, but it's retained its old sign and name as it's become rather a landmark.

This is it, looking west from where Mason splits from Sandy:

We were there a few times before the Covid hammer came down, and found it most delightful. It's the kind of place, you know the kind, where the breakfasts and omelettes come at a price but you get what you pay for, satisfying and filling or, at least, you'll be taking some home to eat later.

The Korean ownership inflected the menu as one might expect. Kimchi is available in a few dishes, and there was even an omelette having that as its principal ingredient. One of the the times we were there they had a live guitar player in for the brunch crowd. Everything was very nice there.

The practice of Portland's street blades identifying the address block of the street one's travelling on by telling one how the intersecting street defines it has created, over time, spots on Sandy Blvd that tend to be bewildering, hampered by an inconsistent approach on the part of PBOT's signing. I have a few examples that will follow this. But here is a good introduction to this issue.

Please direct your attention to the street blade set there.

NE Mason Street is the 4100 block north of Burnside, so you see the 4100 there on the corner of its blade. The 4100 doesn't apply to Sandy, though: it's a diagonal road which addresses as an east-west street. The 4100 does, however, apply to NE 82nd Avenue, which runs perpendicularly to Mason and is about thirty feet behind me as I was standing to take that picture.

The 8200 on the Sandy blade might just be straight-up weird to anyone who comes from a town where the block number refers to the block face rather than the intersecting street. Look at it this way, though: You're on Mason Street, coming east out of that neighborhood. You come to the stop sign. This street opens into the intersection of 82nd and Sandy but this corner is just short of a solid intersection with 82nd. Sandy isn't the 8200 block east of the river and Williams, but it does cut across Mason at the 8200 block, or at least close enough that it would apply. 

Now, you could argue that the block number on the Mason blade should also read 8200 by this logic, since Sandy cuts Mason at the same place, but as potentially confusing as that might be for the out-of-towner, it does provide the North-South block for those passing by on 82nd (for which the position of this sign might make it a little hard to see, but the logic does work out).

Actually, I love this system despite its pitfalls. Once I got tuned into it, I find it makes a solid bit of sense: it tells me what I need to know about the cross street. I already know the name of the street I'm already on. 

But explaining it makes for some prolix profundity, that's for sure.

SW 4th And Harrison

3679

The street blade set caught my eye because there is something so pleasantly urban about the way it contrasts against the new-as-new-can-be building behind it. I also like that the block is 1850, not an even number; an address quirk about Portland I'm happy to say that they can't get rid of.

This is in the part of the city center that's south of SW Market St, which is the 1600 block south of West Burnside. SW Harrison St is three blocks south of that, but instead of a full block it only gets a half block; 1850 instead of 1900.

There's a reason for this, and it has to do with the end of canted downtown blocks, which align to the river, and the part beginning at SW Lincoln St, which is the 2100 block, which runs more cardinally east-west and begins the more cardinally-oriented grid south from there. Lincoln was designated 2000; SW Mill St, one south of Market, was designated 1700; SW Montgomery, 1800, SW Harrison, 1850; SW Hall, 1900; SW College, 1950; SW Jackson, 2000; SW Clifton, 2050. These all occupy a wedge of land which starts narrow on the east and widens as you go west at the point there the grid straightens out, and while the streets continued to march southward at the rate of one every 220 feet, the north-south address blocks on the numbered avenues were stretched to fill by 2 every hundred numbers, to even out at 2100 by the time they, either notionally or physically, crossed Lincoln Street.

Not all of these streets exist on the ground, of course; a great many were erased by urban renewal in the 1960s, construction of the Stadium Freeway and, in some places, ground too steep to build a street on. But it's a fun pattern to suss out.

At The Dawn Of South Portland On Asbury Barbur Day

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Well, we've had about two years now to get our psyches into the idea of a sixth address 'quadrant' (the CoP loves the word sextant but we do not) called South encompassing that long shim of land between a line made up of SW Naito Parkway and SW View Point Terrace on the west and the Willamette River on the east, and we must admit ... we're still not entirely there.

We loved the zero-hundreds, the city-termed leading zero addresses. Of all the quirks a city could come up with to deal with the reality that their west-east division south of the north-south baseline not behaving itself and dawdling off to the east, this was the most charming and the most local. We also, with all charity and no necessary malice, don't entirely buy the reasons the city had for making this change.

But all that's as may be. The decision was decided and the thing has taken its course. Personally, while I like it not, go along with it I will (I mean, it's not as though I have a choice), and have made my peace with it by watching the process and consoling myself with the knowledge that I'm watching the most consequential city address rationale change since the very Great Renaming itself. That was 1931. Almost 90 years is a long run.

In honor of this suspicious occasion, my online friend Michael Long, every bit as much of an Address Nerd as I am, has dubbed this "Asbury Barbur Day", in honor of the man who gave us an unbroken thing that the City o'Portland, in the way cities are time and oft wont to do, strove to fix.

Photo courtesy of Michael Long; used with permission

If the name sounds familiar, it should; that great southwestern gateway to Portland, SW Barbur Boulevard, is eponymous of him. Ironically, the easternmost curl of Barbur, that part east of View Point Terrace and generally between SW Hamilton St and the ramp that sends northbound traffic down Naito Parkway will be ... South Barbur Blvd.

Because if there's anything we Portlanders are, it's consistent as hell.

And so it goes.

• Michael Long is a smart fella of much ilk and geographical knowledge and Portland history, and his Facebook feed is hither and hence.
• My long-time PDX blogging colleague Isaac Laquedem has a nice thumbnail of Asbury Barbur and his life the original Portland address nerd here: https://www.isaaclaquedem.com/2016/12/asbury-barbur-1861-1941-who-told-you-where-you-are.html.

The Street Sign At The "Center" Of Troutdale

3633

Yesterday, the Brown Eyed Girl and myself did a little East County sightseeing. With nowhere to really go during these COVID-19 inflected times, its about all one can do really, but then, when you live in greater Portland, it's a fine thing to do indeed.

Yesterday, on our "Sunday drive", we went all the way out Division through Gresham to Troutdale Road, then into Troutdale itself. As many years as I've been a Portlander, the majority of my life by now, I'm a little abashed to say that while I know where just about everywhere is and can get there without a map, I am rather parochial as regards my beloved E 122nd Avenue and David-Douglas-landia. The wife thinks in broader terms than I, and is not only interested in as many things as I am, but more given to spontaneity. So we hung out in downtown Troutdale for a short while, and I ligged about taking snapshots.

I've got pictures to share over the next several missives, but I wanted to satiate my Address Nerd with this. The center of the Troutdale address grid is this intersection, right here

Troutdale, as with all but one of the other cities that hem Portland in on the east side, has an address grid of its own, and its origin point is where these two roads come together.

The east-west street is part of a storied historical road, and its somewhat gangly name tries to carry the whole of that reputation on its back. The whole of the official name of the street is Historical Columbia River Highway, and since it's divided in twain by the street that, in central Troutdale, divides the grid east from west, it comes in two complementary flavors: West Historical Columbia River Highway and East Historical Columbia River Highway. The necessity to include so much type on a street blade, even a fairly macho wooden one, necessitated a creative solution, as can be seen in the photo.

Buxton Road is the other baseline, running south from the city center and dividing Troutdale into east and west halves, and does not present a directional, similar to State Street in Salem. After this road leaves the center of town it does a small s-shaped jog and becomes South Troutdale Road, maintaining its baseline duties to the edge of town.

Troutdale's address grid is quite lopsided: the historic center of town is well into the north part of it and the town grew mostly southeast and southwest from there. Buxton Road does not extend north of Historic Columbia River Hwy; north of the main drag there's the railroad, then I-84, then the Troutdale Airport then, the Columbia River, all in less than a mile. The city is divided into binomial compass quadrants, however and the grid is considered to continue into that area; the streets, all of which lie north of the freeway, are prefixed NW west of the airport, and there are one or two streets just east of the airport which wear the NE directional in a NE quadrant that is an almost absurdly small sliver of land.

I have more pictures of a very picturesque little Oregon town on the edge of the Metro, positioned at the literal entry to the Columbia Gorge, Oregon and Washington's own Grand Canyon, which has a knowing sense of its own history and is charming as anything, and the will form the subject of further posts.

North Portland Roads and Highways

3610

Herewith, a little trivial crumb that you can use to win bets and amuse people at parties, if they were the parties that existed and the sorts that I would attend. They involve Portland street names, because that's the way I roll.

1. NE Portland Highway. There is a road near the margins of North and Northeast Portland called Lombard Street. This totally like the Lombard in San Francisco, except ours is very long and doesn't go up hills and is in fact made of long, straight segments. Except for that, it's just like SF's Lombard Street. In as much as it's a street. It's also badged in the US Hwy System as US 30 Bypass and is one of the principal arterials across the north side of the Rose City.

First, a necessary digression: ODOT, as I may have said elsewhere but maybe is worth repeating now, has a way of numbering state highways that does not coincide with the posted highway numbers. Also, in the vulgate parlance, when someone says 'Highway' or 'State Hwy', what we mean is the route number, that is the one you'll see on the signs. What locals call Highway 213, which runs from the east side of Portland through Oregon City, the farmlands of Clackamas, past Molalla, through Silverton and into Salem is known, from Portland through about Silverton as State Hwy No.68 - Cascade Hwy North, and from there through Salem as State Hwy No. 160 - Cascade Hwy South.

Think of it like a catalog number. You'll order a Deluxe Whizzit with extra froom-froom rom Whizzit World but they also know it as Catalog No 67-325. But you wouldn't call it by Catalog number.

So! Since the posted route number is technically a State Route, and in this case an Oregon Route, when, in times future, I talk of a state highway by its route number, the nomenclature will be, in this case, for Oregon Route 213, OR 213. We don't say State Route or SR here, that's Washington, folks. Get it straight. We used to escort people back to the border for that.

Anyhow, and to get us back on course, the reason I told you that is because, even though Lombard Street isn't a Oregon highway route, it's maintained by the state and is classified as an Oregon highway, No. 123, as it would occur. And those viewing maps or travelling down this road east of NE 42nd Avenue but west of where it merges with NE Killingsworth will notice it goes by a particularly generic name: NE Portland Hwy. 

While I don't have any way to run down why those who decided decided to change it where it is, I can tell you that the state's name for this highway is the Northeast Portland Highway. As State Hwy No. 123, it runs from Saint Johns, starting just across the river at Hwy 30 via the St Johns Bridge, all along Lombard Street and along Killingsworth and Sandy out to Troutdale.

But for that part between 42nd and approximately 72nd, where the city apparently decided adopting ODOT's name for the road was enough, and convenient too; it already contained the directional.

2. N Portland Road. Going north out of the Saint John's neighborhood, there is a road that runs along the railroad embankment from approximately where N Columbia Blvd goes over N Columbia Way to the south shore of the Columbia River at N Marine Drive. It's called North Portland Road. As Eugene E Snyder tells us, that was so named because there is a station along the railroad (the railroad equivalent of a wide spot in the road, trains never actually stopped there) which was itself called North Portland. When the street namers went out that way it must have seemed natural to call it North Portland Road, as it went out to that place, but when the Great Renaming came round in the 1930s, as the road itself would fall in the North quadrant, calling it North North Portland Road must have seemed a bit goofy. Once again, the historic name handily provided the necessary directional.

It too is a state highway: Hwy No. 120, Swift Highway ... not because it was a direct route into the area from the nearby stockyards, but because that used to be Portland's meat packing district, and Swift was the largest company. We also have a N Swift Street in the St Johns area dedicated to that memory.

State Hwy 120 is also one of the many unsigned state highways that adopted those numbers as state routes back in 2002. The majority of these are still unsigned; one not otherwise informed would never know a priori that N Portland Rd was also OR 120. Presumably ODOT's priorities lay elsewhere and, the way things are going in government these days, I wouldn't be the least surprised.

Portland: Like It Or Not, A City Of Sextants

3535A.

As of yesterday, they finally went and did it, they did, did they.

As a charter member of the Address Nerd club (or, as I like to call myself, a cartesiaphile), I hold my adoration of Portland's neat, well-ordered and pleasing address system as second to nobody's ... well, maybe Michael Long's of Portland and Ben Lukoff's of Seattle.

I will fight you on this.

A short while ago I reported on an approaching revision to the city's address grid; that of the conversion of the area between the river and Naito Parkway, including the South Waterfront area, Johns Landing, and areas including Dunthorpe and Riverdale, on whose east-west streets addresses increase as you approach the river and include a zero on the front, were going to become a new address district.

I traveled the district in prose in this missive, committed to the aether back in the salad days of 2005 on this blog (http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2005/07/geography-address-nerd-on-zero-hundred.html) I called them 'zero-hundreds'; it's developed that the official city nomenclature on those are 'leading-zero' streets. The most common example is the address of the Old Spaghetti Factory, a favorite place of many hardcore Portlanders (including Your Humble Interlocutor and wife, whose birthday dinner tends to happen there), which is, in the common rubric, 0715 SW Bancroft St; seven blocks east of the Naito Meridian yet located west of the Willamette.

Yesterday was the city council's vote to change the face of Portland just a bit, but remarkably so, and the city council approved. So, as of May 2020 (I'm born in that month, so what a coincidence!) the leading zeroes disappear from this area, and the SW is dropped in favor of simply ... S, giving us the most consequential Portland geography revision since the Great Renaming itself, nearly 90 years ago.

This was the layout of Portland before:

The east-west baseline being Burnside, of course, and the straight line going north is N. Williams Avenue. This is then, now; as of May 2020, this will be now, then:

Welcome, South Portland, to the family of Northeast, Northwest, North, Southwest, and Southeast Portland. The city, who keeps liking to call it a sextant, holds that the change was needed to facilitate wayfinding for emergency dispatch services. Those I know who aren't all that thrilled about it find it specious, pointing out that modern wayfinding technology is plenty sophisticated enough to make sense of leading-zero addresses and it's just plain lazy not to bother to learn it, not to mention the cost of manufacturing hundreds of street signs to replace the old.

6 of these = 1 PDX

I agree with those amongst us who say it's a problem that wasn't really demanding a solution that hard. I'm also sad to see a most unique Portlandism, and perhaps the most satsifying local geography quirk that exists pretty much anywhere, evaporate so. And it's such an absurdly small sliver of land to go on about!

The timeline as thus: in May, 2020, the new street blades go up in the South area. They remain up until 2025, after which leading-zero address will officially become a a Thing Of The Past, going into the hazy demesne of nostalgia that holds Ramblin' Rod, Barney Keep, Tri Met Service Sectors, and my ability to hear Lars Larson's voice without gagging.

Although, as the article at https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-south-new-address-area/ explains, the USPS will still deliver to leading-zero addresses after the year 2025. That article, done by OPB's Amelia Templeton, also links my 2005 Address Nerd entry on zero-hundreds as explanation, and you'd better believe I'm flattered by that!

The Return of South Portland: Welcoming the Proposed Sixth Sextant

3524A.

Don't look now, but Portland may be about to grow a sixth address area.

Actually, it already exists. Anyone familiar with the map of Portland knows that the Willamette River and Burnside Street makes a basic division of the address grid into NW, NE, SW, and SE quadrants; the veering to the northwest of the river north of the Burnside crossing creates an ample area on the North Portland Peninsula which is named, simply, N, and these areas form the directional part of every street name in town.

South of the city center, though, starting at about SW Jefferson St, the river dawdles more south-southeast rather than straight south. This is a topic I wrote about here back in 2005; and while the addresses increase southward in accordance with the southward address trend, you reach a point at which the zero-line ... then, SW Front Avenue, now SW Naito Parkway ... is actually several blocks east of the river. Rather than dubbing a new address district, back during the Great Renaming in 1930-33, the address planners counter-intuitively called for addresses to increase 100 to the block again, as you traveled toward the river, but with a leading zero affixed. These addresses I termed the zero-hundreds, but the term of art in the City is leading-zero addresses. Why they decided to take this approach rather than a mirror-image of the North Portland scheme is not recorded and presumably forgotten.

As an example, the home base of Portland's legendary The Old Spaghetti Factory, at the end of SW Bancroft Street, on the river, is 0715 SW Bancroft St, effectively seven blocks east of Naito but on the west side of the river, so SW.

Image: PBOT

It seems incredibly likely that that's all about to change in a local geography edit that, while is not as major as the original Great Renumbering, is quite remarkable and unprecedented in Portland's post-renaming street rationale. If approved by the City (and judging by the amount of work already done it looks quite likely), in 2020, the slender wedge of land with leading-zero addresses beginning just south of the Hawthorne Bridge and expanding to about a mile's width by the time you cross the Clackamas County line will lose the W in the directional and the leading zero in the address number. The Old Spaghetti Factory's address will become 715 S. Bancroft; Johns Landing's main drag will be known thenceforth as S. Macadam Ave, and SW Terwilliger blvd south of Lewis and Clark College will be S. Terwilliger Blvd. The PBOT 'Sixth Sextant' logo schematically summarizes the change, which was apparently catalyzed by the growth of a major urban neighborhood in the South Waterfront area and the collateral issues of city service and emergency service provision in an area where a caller will say "300 SW Whitaker" when they meant "0300 SW Whitaker".

If and when (let's be frank, or at least Meier & Frank ... when, this looks like a done deal) the change is applied, the new South sextant will come into being affecting 258 of Portland's estimated 19,502 street intersections (interestingly, I found that my home 'sextant', SE, has more than 6,600 of those intersections, about double that of the second-largest, intersection-wise ... SW).

I expect I'll embrace it with some excitement, though I'll have to admit that "South Macadam Avenue" doesn't have quite the ring "SW Macadam Avenue" did. And, though blander in character (the originally-named area was something of a center of lower-income and poor European immigrant communities) there is the thing that there will be, at long last, a real South Portland in Portland, Oregon.

Now for the info! Follow this link to the Portland Bureau of Transportation's (PBOT) South Portland Addressing Project: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/75814. Maps, tables of street name changes and address changes, FAQ's, the works!

Also, a tip of the hat to my incomparable friend Friday, who knows what I like and how to get my attention about it: she pointed me to this The Oregonian article and the rest, as they say, is Address Nerd history: http://www.oregonlive.com/roadreport/index.ssf/2018/02/sixth_sextant_city_considering.html