Book review: "The Street Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power" by Deirdre Masks

I love love love love this book. Some of my favorite book things are 1) maps and 2) super super specific nonfiction. And this book gave me both of those things. (Look how the cover art has a crease on it like it's a folded map - be still my heart). Each chapter is it's own topic but the theme throughout it all his street addresses!

I have so many postit notes in this book - sorry in advance for how long and disjointed that this will be, haha.

Also, quick side note, I think if we think about people who don't have a street address we think that either those people are a)homeless or b) living in a squatter or slum kind of situation. Not true! A lot of folks in the good old USA are living in rural roads that don't even have names let alone house numbers. Okay. Now we will start.

- "In recent years more than 40% of all local laws passed by the New York City Common Council have been related to changes in street names". That's...SO MANY.  

-This is a fact not related to street addresses - the British Empire trafficked over 3.1 million Africans in the slave trade.

-Do you know what the "zip" in zip code stands for? Zone Improvement Planning. For as much as I play trivia I can't believe that's never come up. 

-A bunch of roads in Belgium are named after their food specialties - Passage of Speculoos. (I want to live on a street named after a cookie) 

-Only 2.6% of streets are named after women. These folks are on it. 

- Most europeans didn't have permanent last names before the 14th century. You know why those were established? So people could get drafted and taxed. SURPRISE SURPRISE. 

- A bunch of teenagers in Iran were anti-British so they decided to rename the street that the British Embassy on from Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street. It caught on so quickly that the British embassy made another entrance to their building so people coming to the embassy didn't enter on that street. If you didn't spend your childhood elbows deep in books about irish politics - Bobby Sands was.uh..incredibly anti-British and was held as a political prisoner by them when he died of a hunger strike as a very young man in 1981. 

- I've been to DC several times and I thought I was pretty confident in the city's layout and spoke and wheel thing that it was designed around. Somehow missed: "numbered streets run east to west, lettered streets run north and south...diagonal streets were named for the states of the Union (15 at the time) with longest avenues given the names of the three largest states at the time (PA, MA, VA) and now every state in the union has a street named after it.

-There's a great chapter about renaming or un-naming street names because of wars, revolutionaries, scandals and more. Russia has more than 4000 streets named after Lenin, equaling 5363 miles which is a longer distance than Moscow to Minneapolis. In a few different european countries that have streets that translate in English to "Jew Path". The streets don't cut through the middle of the cities, Jews were forced to use these paths that were far out of the way, to isolate them from others.