The Address Book

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
Humans have been living in cities for a really long time, but like a lot of things about the past, getting around cities used to be just needlessly difficult because we didn’t have reliable maps, or street signs, or even addresses. An address is something we all take for granted today, but in ancient Rome, if you wanted to go to a friend’s house, you had to use all kinds of context clues. Like you had to remember that the house was two blocks away from a big column, but if you reach the horse stables, you’d gone too far. And you had to rely on nonvisual cues, like smells and noises.

Deirdre Mask:
You had all sorts of noise and street hawkers, and you had different smells. You had the smell of, you know, a meat market.

Roman Mars:
Yes, sometimes you have to use meat smells to figure out where you were going.

Deirdre Mask:
Maybe one of the ways you navigate is you navigate much more by your senses. You can actually use what you’re seeing, and what you’re smelling, and what you’re hearing as a ways of navigating around the city.

Roman Mars:
This is Deirdre Mask.

Deirdre Mask:
I’m the author of “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.”

Roman Mars:
Deirdre’s book looks at how the world has changed since street addresses became popular during the Enlightenment. So today we’re going to take a tour through some of the many ways street addresses shape our lives, including how we fight disease.

[54 FRITH STREET, LONDON, ENGLAND. THE OFFICE OF DR. JOHN SNOW.]

Roman Mars:
So street addresses come up in the 1700s and they made all sorts of new things possible. And one of the first things they revolutionized was our approach to public health. So can you tell me how addresses related to the cholera epidemic in London?

Deirdre Mask:
A doctor called John Snow, this is in the Victorian London, he was actually a very prestigious doctor, but he lived actually right next to a slum. And when a case of cholera broke out in London, he was able to track the cholera in the slum. At the time there was no germ theory of disease, but he had this idea that it was spreading through water, and he was basically able to get death certificates, get people’s addresses, do some shoe-leather work himself, and trace where everybody was. And then, they sort of were clumping around this pump. John Snow took off the handle, or not John Snow himself, the government took off the handle of the pump. The cholera epidemic goes away. He was able to use the location and disease to find the source of the cholera, but speaking to modern epidemiologists, I learned that actually what John Snow did in two days in Victorian London is actually impossible in huge swaths of the world today.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. You mentioned the book that countries without good address systems have a much harder time fighting disease, and you bring up Haiti as an example. Tell me what happened there.

Deirdre Mask:
There was a terrible earthquake, as we all know, in Haiti in 2010, which was followed by a vicious case of cholera that spread throughout the country. And when I spoke to logisticians at Doctors Without Borders who were coordinating the response to the epidemic, basically they weren’t able to track down their patients in the same way that John Snow could track down the patients in this London slum, which severely hindered their ability to stop the spread of the disease. So, it’s a complicated story, but basically, if you don’t have a way of finely tracking where people are, you don’t have a way of finely tracking where disease is.

Roman Mars:
Addresses have a lot of positive effects, like tracing disease, and they make it possible for the government to provide services and things like that, but they also give the state a lot of power, and that power can be abused. So could you talk about the tyranny of addresses so to speak?

Deirdre Mask:
Yes. In the book I talk about the example of Austria during the Habsburg Empire, during the reign of Maria Teresa, who had an issue, a problem, which is that she was fighting all these wars and she needed good strong men to fight in the wars, but she was having trouble finding them. So she ended up sending out the military to number the houses in her kingdom, and while doing so, taking a kind of census. And people did not like these house numbers. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it, especially if you’ve never had a number before, because numbering is, as there’s a scholar named Anton Tantner who’s written about this extensively, it’s dehumanizing, nobody likes to think of themselves as a number, but also it has this function of if you were able to live your life in relative privacy, and then suddenly you’re revealed to the state by a number painted on your wall. There is something deeply upsetting in this. So this was a good thing in a sense to get numbered because often this ushered in positive changes like taxes and getting around, and people loved the post, but there are downsides to this as well because now the state can find you, it can imprison you. There are all sorts of negative aspects to being found as anyone who’s ever received junk mail or solicitations can know in a milder form. The story of what happened in Austria, and also across Europe as house numbers came up, is a story basically of the conflicting views we have about the state being able to find us and identify us.

Roman Mars:
I had never really considered the sinister side of addresses until a little while ago actually. I had a friend of mine who was a journalist for a long time in Cambodia, the government was trying to impose addresses in parts of Cambodia who within living memory had genocide and a purge of people. And the citizenry there was like, “(beep) that.” Like, “I do not want the government to have any knowledge of where I am,” and it kind of blew my mind because I thought of addresses… I mean, I really didn’t think of them at all. I thought of them as neutral things. Did you notice, in your research, that depending on how benevolently you viewed the government and viewed type of control, how people took to the concept of addresses versus people who didn’t have that experience?

Deirdre Mask:
It sounds very familiar to me. And so the way I got started on this whole project, the first thing I wrote about was about West Virginia, about a very rural county in West Virginia called McDowell County, which at the time had no street addresses. The state embarked on a huge project to give them street addresses. And so I went and I interviewed lots and lots of people. In some ways, it started out sort of like a quirky story, because people would fight over naming their street, Crunchy Granola Road, or there was a street, one official told me where a certain kind of older lady lived on that was called Cougar Lane. First, it was quite quirky, but then you started hearing stories about people who really didn’t want addresses, and you talk to the addressing coordinators, and they actually found their work really difficult. And there were reports of people coming out and meeting addressers with machetes in their back pockets. And people often would say, “Oh, those are just…,” you know, they would see them as being ignorant or backwards, but you know what, the more I read about addresses, the more I realized that they knew what a lot of other people didn’t knew that these addresses weren’t just designed as they were being pitched to provide emergency services. Even though that’s extremely important, I’m not denying that that’s not an excellent reason to give addresses, but they knew there were other benefits to the government of being able to finally track its citizens. This was seen as a violent act actually exposing them to the eye of the state. So I guess a lot of it comes down to how much you trust your government as well. And obviously, in the example you gave, if you’re a dissident, or you’re someone who the government’s not going to like for whatever reason, you’re probably not going to like addresses either.

Roman Mars:
Today it’s believed that over a billion people in the world do not have an address. That includes people without a home and residents of small towns and encampments. And not having an address creates a lot of problems.

[NO FIXED ADDRESS]

Roman Mars:
So you make a case that having an address is actually an equity issue, not about just having a home, but like having an address. So what does an address give you access to?

Deirdre Mask:
Well, this really comes up when I was researching homelessness, because in my head, I was like, who are the people who don’t have addresses? And obviously, it’s people without homes. And one thing I found from talking to experts in homelessness, but also activists, was that when people are asked, when people without homes are asked, what do you need? Well, by definition, they need a home, but what a lot of them said was they needed an address. And so there were stories of people saying that basically what they needed was a way of pretending that they weren’t homeless. When you apply for jobs, it lists address. Even though there’s no way you’re going to get mail to this address, or employer’s going to show up at your door, but they said they needed an address, even if they were just called.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. And when you’re homeless, it’s hard enough to get a job, but you can’t even apply for a job in many cases. When they have these mandatory address lines on an application form.

Deirdre Mask:
The World Bank has seen addresses as one of the cheapest ways of lifting people out of poverty because if you give people addresses, they have a way of pretending that they aren’t homeless and a way of accessing all kinds of services. So to go back to your question, there’s all sorts of things you can’t do. You’ll struggle to get a bank account, you’ll struggle to vote. Where I live in England, if there’s a national health service, almost all communication is done through letters. And when I was researching this, I was calling up GP practices to find out how you register while being homeless, and even though I am a person with a home, I found it incredibly difficult to even pretend for my investigating into homelessness. I found that incredibly difficult.

Roman Mars:
Is there a way to level the playing field for people without addresses?

Deirdre Mask:
Yeah. So one of the proposals that’s been made is something called “Ban the Address,” which has been modeled on this “Ban the Box” movement in the US, and by the “box” it means not allowing employers to ask about your criminal history. Basically stopping people from discriminating at first glance against someone, and there’s something similar to “Ban the Address.” There’s no reason that employers need your address. At least at those early stages of the interview process. There’s also a very clever way that’s begun to come up with in England, by a man named Chris Hildrey, where he’s basically teaming up with Royal Mail to use the addresses of empty homes. So that if you could just be assigned the address of an empty home, and you could use this and the mail does not go to the house, even if the home gets moved into it doesn’t matter. It’s the same way as if you move, your mail gets forwarded for months and the people currently living there will have no idea this is happening. And so people can get the letters that they need, but they can also use it as a shield showing to people that they have an address, which sometimes becomes a proxy for a productive member of society.

Roman Mars:
A street address can indicate that someone’s been fortunate in life. Many streets like Park Avenue in New York have become associated with luxury and prestige, while others have developed reputations as bad neighborhoods, reputations that are sometimes totally unfair.

[ONE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BOULEVARD, ATLANTA, GEORGIA]

Roman Mars:
There are hundreds of Martin Luther King streets in America. They’re often in neighborhoods that are less well off. Why is that? What is the cycle that has created the idea and the stigma of Martin Luther King?

Deirdre Mask:
I think the estimate now is 900 streets named after Martin Luther King Jr in America today, and they’re often interestingly enough, in the American South right next to the names of Confederate generals, and commemorating a street after Martin Luther King, who was obviously the most prominent icon of the civil rights movement, largely it was black communities that named streets after Martin Luther King as a way of commemorating him. Sometimes they were put in neighborhoods to “inspire” the residents, I put inspire in quotes. But in some of these situations, these were neighborhoods that weren’t particularly nice, to put a point on it, because of the forces of racism and poverty. And this meant that the name, for some people, was entrenched with this idea of poverty and crime. And it’s why Chris Rock, in his standup, had a routine in which I’m paraphrasing, but if you find yourself on Martin Luther King Jr Street, run.

Chris Rock:
“It ain’t the safest place to be. You can’t call nobody tell them you lost on MLK. ‘I’m lost, I’m on Martin Luther King.’ Run! Run! Run!”The media’s there.”

Deirdre Mask:
Everybody laughed. I admit, I’m Black myself, I laughed as well. But in a lot of ways, it’s not funny at all. And sometimes you can track MLK streets and find out about Black America, but also you can find about the perception of Black America as well because one thing I found in my research was that there are researchers, for example, who have found that if you compare the economic fortunes of streets named after Martin Luther King with streets named after JFK or even with just main streets, MLK streets aren’t that much economically worse off. They’re different. They have more churches for example, or they have more schools because these are white-collar jobs that were open to Black people, but they weren’t any worse. And one of the conclusions that I come to when I write about this, is that, yes, a lot of these streets have suffered, but also perhaps we think of MLK Jr streets as dangerous streets because they’re Black streets, and we’re always going to associate Black streets with being dangerous, and poor, and neglected. And thinking about that is another way of thinking about race in America today.

Roman Mars:
Today more and more streets around the world are named after famous people from history, and this is why street names have become a proxy for so many arguments about who we are and what we stand for.

[THE BRITISH EMBASSY AT FERDOWSI AVENUE AND BOBBY SANDS STREET, TEHRAN]

Roman Mars:
One of the stories that really fascinated me in the book was about the Bobby Sands Street in Tehran. And there’s this incredible tense history between the UK and Iran, and making a Bobby Sands Street seems like a real provocation. How did it end up that there’s a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran?

Deirdre Mask:
Yeah, it’s interesting. There is a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran, which is right by the British Embassy, and for anybody who doesn’t know, Bobby Sands was a hunger striker in Northern Ireland, a member of the Irish Republican Army. And so it was an unusual name to have in Tehran, especially by the British Embassy because the British really were Bobby Sands’s enemies. I’d heard the story about these teenage boys who had changed it. So I tracked one of them down who told me this amazing story that after the revolution, there were a lot of young people who were very politically involved, including himself. He’d gotten involved in politics at a very young age, and they were fairly wealthy residents of Tehran, so they were in quite a fancy neighborhood near the British Embassy, and they had this idea that they were going to change the names. It sounds to me as a bit like “Stranger Things.” They’re all on their bikes, going to the hardware store, and they buy this glue that they have to powder and mix water in, and they’re basically able to mimic signs. And they change the signs to read Bobby Sands Street. And this would’ve been shortly after Bobby Sands died after his hunger strike. The city later ratified it. And there’s Bobby Sands Street and weirdly enough for a hunger striker, there’s a Bobby Sands Burger Bar.

Roman Mars:
Oh my God.

Deirdre Mask:
Also in Tehran. And the reason I found this fascinating was that it’s just a light on commemoration. Why does this matter? And in fact, we know it does matter because the British Embassy actually ended up opening up a new entrance so that they didn’t have to be on Bobby Sands Street, which I believe used to be Winston Churchill Street. So they could have a new address because obviously they cared. So it sort of opens this window of what commemoration means and why we care so much really.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. They were angry at the British Empire, and they knew that Bobby Sands would be a finger in their eye basically. Just like it just would poke them.

Deirdre Mask:
Yeah. So there’s Bobby Sands Street Tehran, but there’s Bobby Sands streets all over the world. I think I counted five in France, for example.

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Deirdre Mask:
But the interesting thing I found was that there aren’t any actually in Ireland. So this is actually sort of a fascinating idea that you have this fighter who, for a lot of people, depending on your belief system, would have been a martyr and a great man, and yet you have all these names named after him elsewhere, but you don’t have any in Ireland. And basically the explanation I came to is that Ireland doesn’t have any consensus on Bobby Sands. Up close, his legacy is a lot more complicated than it was for those teenage boys in Iran. This whole idea of commemorating is really trying to figure out what we’re about and what Ireland has said by not giving a Bobby Sands Street, is that at this point, at least that’s not what they’re about. Bobby Sands’s Ireland is not today’s Ireland. And that’s really for me why there is no street named after Bobby Sands in Ireland. Or north or south.

[2211 FREEDOM STREET, HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA]

Roman Mars:
So right now there are lots of arguments about street names, especially in the US where they’re named after Confederate generals and historical figures like Christopher Columbus, and you spent months covering street names in Hollywood, Florida in particular. So what was happening in Hollywood, Florida when you were there?

Deirdre Mask:
Yeah. Well, in Hollywood, Florida, there were parts of the city that were historically Black. Part of the city called Liberia had three street names that were named after Confederate generals. And the worst of them of all, in the eyes of campaigners, was Nathan Bedford Forrest street. People knew who Nathan Bedford Forrest was, he was not only, he was not only a major figure in the Confederate War, but he was also seen as one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. And so you have these street names, not only in this part of Hollywood, Florida, that was really intended for Black people, when Black people weren’t allowed to live in integrated areas. And so there was an activist, a man who actually just recently passed away I’m sad to say, named Benjamin Israel, a really interesting man who’s from New York. He’s African-American, but also Orthodox Jewish. And he basically, just for months, just appeared at a city council meeting. And I watched many of these things where he would be talking about these street names while everybody else was talking about Airbnb regulations. And finally, it really started to click, and eventually they did overturn them. And it really, in a lot of ways exposed a lot of racism, but also a lot of other feelings about street names in the battle. And for me, one of the most interesting things was I’m African-American, in the book in general, I try to stay fairly neutral about these things, but I’m not really neutral on this. I thought the street names should change, but it was interesting hearing the other side. And I listened to many speeches about this, that there were people who would say things like, “I live on Lee Street named after Robert E. Lee, and I don’t care anything about Robert E. Lee but I met my husband on Lee street. My babies were born on Lee street. I want it to be Lee street.” In my head, I connected to that which makes a lot of sense, because in our brain we do tend to connect places in memory. So it makes sense to me. I’m not actually promoting Lee. I just liked the name Lee. And I think that now the conversation’s changed and it’s like, we can’t just rest on this nostalgia argument. Even if you say you’re not actually racist, and I actually believe this. I don’t actually think this, for a lot of these people, this was a show of racism, but just it’s this idea now that I think people are having to say, “Well, we just have to change them. You have to take action to change them,” which I think was often missing. But in Hollywood, Florida, they did change the street names.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. And so what did you think of the solution of Hollywood, Florida? They didn’t replace like Robert E. Lee Street with like civil rights icons. They replaced them with like Freedom Street and Hope Streets. So what do you think of that outcome?

Deirdre Mask:
This became a debate as well over the course of the talk because people wanted to name it after an activist, for example, who helped integrate beaches in Florida and the like. And there was even a suggestion at some point by one council member to just number the streets, obviously an American solution. And then nobody wanted that either. And then I would think about it. I was like, “Well, why is that?” So, I mean, just thinking about it from an objective standpoint, why is that such a bad solution to number streets? And the reason is that the street names have become like monuments. A way where we preserve our memories, and there’ve been a lot of historians, Pierre Nora comes to mind. If you talk about history moving incredibly quickly, this idea of the acceleration of history, that things just change so fast that we really have to start salting away and packing away our memories into things so that we don’t forget when things start to change again. And I think that’s why suggestions, like numbering don’t fly because it’s not just that people don’t want Robert E. Lee’s name down, they want to make a statement, and they want their street names to make a statement. So it’s not simply about the taking down, it’s the putting up as well. And so Hope, Liberty, and Freedom ended up being something that united people in some sense. But yes, the bolder move would have been to actually name it after an activist who actually fought against the principles that the Confederate generals were aiming for.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. And you think that solution is okay? Like that compromise of Freedom, Hope, and Liberty?

Deirdre Mask:
I mean, yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s not really for me to say whether it’s okay or not, but at the same time, people often decry, they say these arguments are terrible. I mean, I like these arguments. As I say in the book, arguments divide communities, but they make communities as well. If we didn’t have these arguments, if they simply numbered it, if they simply changed it. I think actually there’s a lot to be gained from people talking and listening. Even now, I know people don’t often listen, but there’s engagement there, there’s an exposure there. We’re trying to decide what these things mean for our society. For Hollywood, they decided that Hope, Liberty, and Freedom would be great. I mean, obviously, in a lot of ways, I think it would have been even better had they pushed it further from my own personal perspective. But I do like that there’s this process through street names often that exposes what people believe and what they believe their community’s about, and I think that’s valuable.

Roman Mars:
As more of our life becomes digital, are our physical addresses becoming obsolete? More with Deirdre Mask after this.

[BREAK]

[SOAK, HEAVY, POUNDS. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA]

Roman Mars: We don’t really need actresses anymore. You mentioned this, that there are ways to get a driver’s license or pay your taxes. You can do a lot of stuff online. Could you imagine a world without addresses in the future?

Deirdre Mask:
Oh, yeah. No, I absolutely could. And I mean, you can imagine in some developing countries that they’re going to bypass addresses altogether for something more digital. Yeah, and there are lots of companies that are really doing that. Google’s gotten an app. They’ve got a, you know, a great sort of digital system. There’s this company I describe called “What 3 Words” which is giving addresses in just three basically random words that they’ve mapped the whole world. So I can in some ways imagine it.

Roman Mars:
Could you describe “What 3 Words” and how it serves as an alternative to physical addresses?

Deirdre Mask:
Basically, this company has divided up the world. I believe it’s three meters-by-three meter squares. But I could be wrong about that. But very small chunks. And they’ve basically given every single one of these squares a three-word address. It’s not a street name like we think of. They’ve given it three words. So I clicked on a random spot not too far from where I live. That’s “create”, “door”, “statue”, you know, three entirely random words. And the point of this is that you can isolate things much, much quicker, you know, just three meters-by-three meters. And also you can find things that generally don’t have addresses like the middle of a park. You know, if you’re on a hike and you want to map out where you took a picture, you can use the What 3 Words address. But they’ve also been used in places that don’t have addresses. So they’ve been used, for example, in Mongolia, where there isn’t the traditional street addressing system that we’re familiar with, say, in the U.S.

Roman Mars:
And you can remember it because you can remember three words pretty easily, as opposed to like some map coordinates, which are very long and abstract strings of numbers. But what is the limitation of something like “What 3 Words”?

Deirdre Mask:
Well, I mean, one of the limitations, I think, of all of this is that I spoke earlier about how, you know, the state was in control of addresses, but in a lot of ways, we tended to trust states more than we trust companies. I mean, let’s see if that’s true anymore. But in general, in general, we do have this idea. So you have a company like “What 3 words”, which I think has come up with this sort of brilliant invention. But they are a private company. This “What 3 Words” technology is bound up in patents. Using it, you can’t use them as freely as you could use your addresses.

Roman Mars:
Right.

Deirdre Mask:
It does mean that you’re sort of beholden to a private company to find out where you are, in a little ways. And something about that makes me really uncomfortable. Also, it takes away the meaning. You know, we talked all about these commemorative street names that, you know, how street names have meaning for better, for worse. You know, addresses are sort of the way we navigate the world and we connect ourselves to other people. So one problem with a lot of these digital addresses is that you become a string of numbers or, in “What 3 Words” case, a string of words that don’t connect us to our neighbors or don’t connect us to our communities. So I think it has many uses, especially for places that don’t have traditional addresses or for these other uses. But I still would like to hold firm to our traditional addresses.

———

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. Music by Sean Real. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett FitzGerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Le, Abby Madan, Christopher Johnson, Katie Mingle, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 KLAW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the North American continent but will always be centered in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

You can tweet at me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit too. We have lots of new merch on the 99pi store, including Amabie masks and T-shirts with funiculars on them. Plus, we have links to purchase the 99% Invisible City. It’s the new book. It’s out October 6th. It’s all at 99pi.org.