The Camas Address Grid As It Seems To Be Now

3745

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.