Have you ever thought about street numbers and how they came to be? If so, check out this article from Preservation in Print’s October 2012 issue, “Addressing Urban Disorder” by Richard Campanella:

The number on your door may seem like a minor part of your municipal identity, but in it are clues to centuries of urban geography and decades of modern city planning. The seemingly simple task of enumerating houses in a consistent and inversally recognized manner took the better part of two centuries for New Orleans to master–and that’s a pretty good record compared to other cities which grapple with it to this day.

Read the rest on page 16. http://www.prcno.org/programs/preservationinprint/piparchives/2012%20PIP/October%202012/0.html

I guess I’m old school because I prefer cities where street numbers didn’t go through that 911 re-numbering that places like Biloxi did, where they eliminated the West and East and North and South from streets and just started at one end of town and numbered up and up until they hit the other end of town. Jackson’s street numbers work pretty well, and I hope no city planner gets the idea that we need new numbers any time soon.

Categories: Historic Preservation