Monday, May 20, 2019

Decoding Manhattan addresses

“Cancel last figure. Divide remainder by 2 and add key number given below. The result is nearest street”: How to find a street nearest a number on any avenue (Ephemeral New York). It’s all on a little card, or was, and it works.

comments: 3

joecab said...

They used to always print this info in the front matter of the Manhattan Yellow Pages too.

shallnot said...

We have a similar way of finding the cross avenue for north-south running streets. Take the first two digits. Subtract 15. That’s the nearest east-west avenue to the south of the address.

e.g. 2940 Main St. is between 13th and 14th Avenues (avenue numbers increase going south).

The only thing that confuses things is that there are a number of named cross avenues.

Michael Leddy said...

Amazing stuff, isn’t it? The city as a system.