By Fran Gardner
Did you know that your street address, if it’s in the city of Portland, contains a secret code?
Take the last two digits and divide by 0.2. That figure will be the distance in feet from your front door to the last intersection, that is, the one closest to the river.
For example, my address ends in 16. Divided by 0.2, that’s 80, which is how many feet we are from the corner. Try it. It should work if your house is in the same place it was in 1933. New construction sometimes moves the location of the front door, so the calculation won’t be accurate.
The code is secret only because nobody knows about it these days. When I was doing research about “The Great Renumbering” of the early 1930s, I came across an offhand mention of the code in an article in The Oregonian dated July 16, 1933. It was about the renumbering effort.
The Great Renumbering consolidated the hodgepodge of street names and addresses from the smaller settlements that comprised Portland—Albina, Linnton, St. Johns and Lents, for example. Portland had grown to about 315,000 and needed to end the chaos that made addresses hard to find and mail impossible to deliver.
At the same time, the city implemented the “quadrant” system, creating NW, SW, SE and NE. The fifth “quadrant” is North—an area too far west to continue the SE-NE avenue grid. The dividers between quadrants became the Willamette River, Burnside St. and, to set off North Portland, N Williams Ave.
In The Oregonian story about the renumbering, Hilmar Grondahl, who was an engineer for the city, wrote: “Strictly speaking, there are not 100 numbers to a block in the new system. With a few exceptions, each block begins with a new hundred number. 908 comes between Ninth and 10th; 1215 between 12th and 13th, etc. But the blocks in Portland range in length from less than 100 feet to considerably more than 200, so it was necessary to arrange some scheme of secondary numbers to accommodate the majority of cases. The idea adopted was measuring the distance in feet, multiplying that distance by two-tenths and thereby finding the last two digits of any given house number. For instance: a doorway 60 feet from 15th Ave. became 1512; one 40 feet from Ninth became 908, and so forth. Conversely, a delivery boy may now determine the approximate number of feet he must go beyond the start of 100 block to find the given address simply by dividing the last two numbers of a house number by two-tenths. For example, he immediately determines that 3218 is a doorway 90 feet from the 32nd Ave. Streets run east and west. Avenues run north and south.”
In the renumbering process, some north-south streets lost their names, among them Marguerite St., which became 35th Pl.; Kenilworth Ave., now 28th Pl.; and Glenn Ave., 32nd Pl. I published my full findings about the code in an article called Ghost Streets, found at frangardner.substack.com/p/ghost-streets.
One other thing that happened during the Great Renumbering was that city workers visited every house to install four white tiles with black house numbers in an aluminum holder. You can still see these numbers on houses throughout the city.
Nobody I approached at the City of Portland knew of this numbering scheme. All the lots in the city have addresses assigned, and that’s enough. The secret code underlying those addresses was forgotten. But now you know.
Although Marguerite St. has been renamed 35th Pl., the original name still exists on the pavement. Photo by Fran Gardner.
