Comments on: Paint by numbers

By: Victoria

Victoria — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:16:58 +0000

In Long Beach if the number of the house is 1067 then you know that it is between 10th and 11th using the street name for location. This is not true anywhere in SF! 1098 Harrison for instance is at the intersection of 7th and Harrison not 11th. It does not work in the avenues. Once this east coaster was trained in the west of the Mississippi number system in Long Beach it took a long time of getting lost in SF to not associate the address with the numbered streets or avenues. Lots of SF bay got filled in which is why all the streets bend where Mission Bay once was. So an internal grid system for these sections probably does not match the surrounding areas. Who ever did the numbering in SF was not thinking straight and did not ever try to match the numbers with the blocks of the numbered streets or avenues. And if you think you are on the 1200 block of one named street and go one block over to next the numbers do not match either. Boston is paved over cow paths that went around shallows of Back Bay etc The old part of downtown was Boston Neck a small peninsula. Except for the crazy hills SF is 7 miles square but even the level sections do not seem to have any discernible numbering system. Just makes you pay more attention and ask between which two streets and write it down there is no way to memorize it all.

By: Eric Fischer

Eric Fischer — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:12:10 +0000

What is going on with San Francisco is that every street starts numbering with 0 from its origin, like in Boston. There is no center to any of the grids; every street stands alone. (Yes, this is tremendously disorienting at first when you are coming from somewhere like Chicago.)

Chris, there is actually no annexation involved in San Francisco’s clashing grids. Some of them in the southern part of the city were laid out by subdividers rather than by the city, but the city limits have been stable since 1856, before these areas were built up.

By: Alissa

Alissa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:25:41 +0000

Wow, its like you are inside my brain. I used to sit around and think of this all the time, but I never imagined it in full color! I would love to see San Diego done because I think you will see interesting stripes in various patterns emerge.

By: Ghost in the Shell « Burrito Justice

Ghost in the Shell « Burrito Justice — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:16:07 +0000

[...] Friberg kindly points out Tim Sinnot‘s SF adaptation of Andy Woodruff’s paint-by-numbers idea — “displaying all addresses in a city by number, color [...]

By: Rhonda Friberg » Blog Archive » San Francisco Maps

Rhonda Friberg » Blog Archive » San Francisco Maps — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:34:37 +0000

[...] Sinnott used address data from DataSF to shade locations based on their address number. As you walk down a block, the color changes as the address numbers change. Cool map based on a cool idea. [...]

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:09:02 +0000

In the case of New Orleans, it might make sense to make a similar map with 1-99 in purple, 100-199 in blue, 200-299 in green, etc. That would show patterns that would only emerge further from the river. (A similar process in DC would probably make a neat Pride flag.)

By: Paint by Numbers – SF Addresses « The Swordpress

Paint by Numbers – SF Addresses « The Swordpress — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:56:49 +0000

[...] by Numbers – SF Addresses By tsinn Andy Woodruff has a great post called Paint by Numbers (go take a look!) on his Cartogrammer blog. Patterns emerge based on addresses, hinting at some [...]

By: Andy Woodruff

Andy Woodruff — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:08:31 +0000

Ah, and that explains the odd shape of Fulton County, too. Thanks Matt!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:03:20 +0000

For Fulton County (where Atlanta is), there used to be three counties that merged in the 1930s because of the depression in order to save money. (Ironically, the suburban counties wanted to merge b/c Atlanta(Fulton) had all the money and currently there are movements to secede because Atlanta is taking all of the rich inner suburbs’ money)

It’s pretty easy to see for Atlanta that there is a large grid that is part of the old Fulton County (A triangle shape with the Chattahoochee River as the hypotenuse and two very straight N-S and E-W lines as the sides forming a right angle)

As for the Old Milton County (the part north of the pseudo-isthmus), the county seat was Roswell, and you can see a lot of the purple coming off of the only straight road in and out of town (it changes names about 20 times within 10 miles, but it’s all the same road).

For the Old Campbell County (the southern part south of the E-W straight line), the last county seat before the merger was Fairburn, where there is a cluster of purple on the map. Most of the rest is just suburbia that make up their own numbering system.

By: Andy Woodruff

Andy Woodruff — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:56:46 +0000

And speaking of address conflicts from annexation, I don't know how much of an issue it is in other cities, but Boston's annexation of neighbor towns has meant that the city now has multiple streets of the same name because apparently nobody was particularly creative with street names around here. A Google Maps search for 100 Washington Street (included in purple on my map, of course) returns five different results, all on different streets, in Boston.