Where the Streets Have No Names (Only Numbers)

It’s often said—at least it was before the age of Google Maps—that you can find your way around New York as long as you can count. The city’s systematic grid of numbered streets and avenues, imposed in 1811, reduced navigation to elementary mathematics. Sure, there’s a certain charm and nostalgia to the historical names below Houston Street, but next time you’re lost down there, good luck charging your smartphone with sentimentality.

New York wasn’t the first major U.S. city to configure its streets with numbers. Philadelphia’s 1682 plan used numbered streets, as did the 1791 plan for Washington, D.C. (The global origin dates back to a 1281 plan in the British town of New Winchelsea.) Together these three places set a precedent for spatial logic and efficiency that many American cities came to follow—roughly half of them, according to the “first comprehensive, nationwide account” of street numbering.