The trials of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (SE), Washington DC

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/14/the-trials-of-living-at-1600-p.html
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What’s mail?

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Yeah, the quadrants in DC addresses definitely confuse out-of-towners.

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No kidding…try living at 1060 NW Addison. I’m always getting surprise visits from the local Illinois Nazi group.

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Why? it’s perfectly predictable. Any building between 3rd and 4th street will have a number between 300 and 399, even on one side, odd on the other. Any building between C and D street will have a number between 300 and 399, even on one side, etc. Letters cross numbers. When you run out of letters, go to one-syllable streets in alphabetic order, then two-syllable, etc. Number streets run north/south, alpha runs east-west. Quadrants are… where they’re named after, separated by compass streets (East, South, North Capitol streets, emanating from… the Capitol) (Where West Capitol would be, is the National Mall).

Certainly easier than Minneapolis or Chicago, roughly equal to Manhattan.

Also: I live across Penn from the building in question, which should be 1550 Penn, period. It’s not after 16th street (which doesn’t exist there, thanks to the river), so it can’t be 16xx. Also, I miss the used car lot that used to be there.

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Not a famous address, but recently due to a new build mini-housing estate in the next town over we now have an epidemic of incorrectly delivered mail/parcels at our house due to an extremely similar address, it’s not much fun.

(Because i don’t want to give out my address, i’ll use ‘S’ for identical characters in the two addresses, ‘x’ for differences)
Address 1:

  • street - S xxx SSSSSSS
  • town - SSSSSSS
  • post code - SSSS xSS

Address 2:

  • street - S SSSSSSS xxxx
  • town - SSSSSSS xxxx
  • post code - SSSS xSS

Me /facepalms at whoever chose the new street name and postcode considering the also near identical town name… :unamused:

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I sort of feel sorry for whoever collects the mail at 1 1st St, NY, NY 10001 which is my goto address when I want to be incognito.

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Thanks! - NSA

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