Hi Fran, What a great article! I was wondering where on SE 35th you took the photo of Marguerite St. My daughter's name is Marguerite, and I would like to make a rubbing of it for her. Thank you!
That numbering scheme (take last 2 digits, multiply by 5) doesn't work at all in my neighborhood, Kenton. E-W blocks typically go through two digits in the "hundreds" column. so for example house numbers on my block run from 2021 through 2131. So no way that formula works. Our residence is over three hundred feet from the next N-S street E, but your formula gives 65 feet.
The addresses were assigned in the early 30s, so of course that is not new construction. I meant things that were built in the 70s, 80s and beyond. Here is the quote from The Oregonian of July 16, 1933. 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 was adopted of 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.”
The distance is from your front door to the intersection closest to the river, which would be to the west in Kenton. Another thing: If you are in new construction, the address might not work.
I can't remember if I tried working out any addresses in N. Portland, but as I travel around the city, I've checked out dozens of addresses, and the formula holds for all of the older houses.
The formula is to take the last two digits and multiply by two-tenths, 0.2, which is the same as dividing by half and moving the decimal. So 2131 would be 155 feet from the intersection. 2021 would be 105 feet.
Nope. This two-digit formula cannot possibly work if the address ranges on a single block vary over three digits, not two. And this is an oldish area, gridded around 1910.
And what is "new construction"? Is 1930's new construction? Consider Ladd's Addition or Hazelhurst, both from the 30's whose streets are swoopy or diagonal.
I love the ghost street photos... fascinating. It sounds like the renumbering would have been very confusing (as well as the renaming of streets along the way). Did all those missing numbers really matter, I wonder? While not a technical definition (e.g., not in a dictionary), knitters also refer to ripping knitting out as frogging ("to frog").
I rarely visit Fota Wildlife Park but when I do, I love to hang out with the meerkats. They are fascinating to watch. The renumbering history is really interesting. A very Enlightenment vision. The world can be made orderly if we just try. I love the radial streets of Ladd’s Addition.
You have apparently never gotten lost in Ladd’s. I lose all sense of direction and sometimes end up where I started. I like to think I’m smarter than that.
Fran, I have more pieces to add to your history of Portland street numbering.
First, I want you to know that I met you around 2011-12 at Laurelhurst Park, I think, when Debilyn Molineaux had an organizing meeting for Coffee Party newsgathering. So when I saw you on Facebook, and now on Substack, I followed your writings. I appreciate reading your work, but for the first time I have a response.
I moved to Portland around 2005, bought a 1888 house near downtown a year or two later (I’ve since left it), and started to investigate the history of our houses and streets. I got a tour of some of the old streetcar lines (maybe from Dill Pickle Club AKA Know Your City or Architectural Heritage Center).
We heard that what are now Portland city neighborhoods used to be a collection of separate small towns, accessed by streetcars rather than by travel on streets, all with their own internal streets and a few arterials such as Asylum street/boulevard. I understood that the great renumbering in the thirties was part of bringing all the towns into the one city of Portland. They had to connect the neighborhood streets (often with offsets that survive to mystify us), decide on common names/numbers within the quadrants, as well as renumber the buildings’ addresses. It was so good to hear from you about the extra thought that went into choosing numbers. I’ve heard that other standards were 10 blocks east/west to each half mile, and odd-numbered building addresses on the north and west sides of streets.
I heard about the address renumbering, that those “plain” white number tiles were supplied by the city to everyone. (That’s lots of tiles!) AHC people often say that home buyers in the 2000s who remodel old PDX bungalows and Victorian houses often assume they will discard and replace their address tiles with some fancier design that they think looks more “traditional”; they don’t realize their original tiles’ authentic history.
A couple of years later I was back in the foothills of California to work on preparing my old house for sale. I attended a terra cotta arts festival in Lincoln (a town northeast of Sacramento) at the sprawling Gladding McBean clay factory. At the accompanying “open house” of their sprawling warehouse (it looks like: www.gladdingmcbean.com/?pgid=jvpj6cbx-936679ae-77e0-46df-a851-939e2b518f76), I saw samples and heard more about their projects in the 1930s. Their main challenge at the time was to produce all the clay roof tiles for the buildout of Stanford University in Palo Alto CA (where I grew up), which is a lot of red clay. A staff member said that equally challenging was another contract they were pressed to complete at the same time — thousands of white clay tiles for the city of Portland OR. Seeing those samples in Lincoln CA certainly closed the loop for me, to appreciate those plain little white rectangles on my very old house in Portland.
Wow, Jeanne, I so appreciate all this information. I didn't want to wade into the part about all the little burgs coalescing into one city. I think I might have forgotten to point out that Portland had 315,000 residents then. I think you know Asylum Avenue became Hawthorne, named not after the author but for one of the doctors at the asylim.
My parents were born in Portland, in 1919 and 1926. I remember my grandparents using the old names for some streets, just as we might say 39th Avenue instead of Cesar Chavez Boulevard. I volunteer at the Genealogical Forum of Oregon. People have asked us about the old numbering system. This is a link to the 1931 list of old street names and numbers with the correlating new information. https://www.khrissoden.org/history/1931StreetRenamingWeb.pdf
Classes on learning your house's history have been given by the Oregon Historical Society.
Our 4-digit street address ends in 50, so we should be 250 feet from the previous intersection, a numbered avenue. We are a corner lot at the next intersection, a numbered avenue, but I thought Portland's blocks were 200 feet long. Just checked; downtown blocks are 200 feet square.
Well, dang, April, the 0.2 worked with other addresses. Portland blocks are small compared with other cities; the idea was to provide more corners for businesses downtown. Did you know that 20 blocks equal one mile? So every two blocks is a tenth.
I found the hard copy of the link you so kindly provided at the reference desk at the Central Library. Did you look up the former number of your house?
Hilmar’s article is worth checking out. I found it through The Oregonian archives on the library’s website.
Yes, I'm going to check out Hilmar's article, and might add it to the GFO library. Although downtown blocks are 200 feet, I'm guessing the residential blocks vary in length.
Have you seen the little metal circles in the sidewalks? Those are property line pins.
Do you mean those metal rings? They were originally for hitching horses. They had such nostalgic impact that the city added them when redoing curbs even though the horses were long gone. I will write about those soon.
But the rings are on curbs. I haven't noticed other circle. I'll start looking.
Far as I know, most residential blocks are also 200, although some are double, an effort to discourage through traffic on minor streets. As you drive, check your od meter. Every two blocks, another tenth mile.
We have horse rings, and toy horses tied up, on our street. The little brass circles are in the sidewalk, about the size of a penny. Some call them surveyor marks. I found a photo when I searched for brass markers in sidewalk portland oregon.
Today I finally saw a circle. It might be steel rather than brass. But it is right in front of my house! I think it may indicate where the sewer line is supposed to go. They just dug up our street and put in a new sewer, and we have yet to connect it to our house.
Thank you for the fascinating lesson on Portland streets. Now I have to go see if my front door really is 190 feet from the previous intersection (that sounds about right).
When I bought my house in the Maxwell Park district of Oakland, California in the 1990s, I felt enough nostalgia for PDX that I installed the Portland address tiles to the front of my Craftsman bungalow (they looked proper).
Thanks for the reminder to look down as we roam our streets.
It's lovely to imagine what the city felt like when house numbers were delivered door by door. It felt very different when I arrived in 1987. Thanks for all of this history!
Learning this little nougat of PDX history in the Southeast Examiner brought me joy. Thanks, Fran! I'm happy to be introduced to your writing.
Hi Fran, What a great article! I was wondering where on SE 35th you took the photo of Marguerite St. My daughter's name is Marguerite, and I would like to make a rubbing of it for her. Thank you!
I believe it's at 35th and Grant, SE.
Thank you Fran!
That numbering scheme (take last 2 digits, multiply by 5) doesn't work at all in my neighborhood, Kenton. E-W blocks typically go through two digits in the "hundreds" column. so for example house numbers on my block run from 2021 through 2131. So no way that formula works. Our residence is over three hundred feet from the next N-S street E, but your formula gives 65 feet.
The addresses were assigned in the early 30s, so of course that is not new construction. I meant things that were built in the 70s, 80s and beyond. Here is the quote from The Oregonian of July 16, 1933. 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 was adopted of 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.”
The distance is from your front door to the intersection closest to the river, which would be to the west in Kenton. Another thing: If you are in new construction, the address might not work.
I can't remember if I tried working out any addresses in N. Portland, but as I travel around the city, I've checked out dozens of addresses, and the formula holds for all of the older houses.
The formula is to take the last two digits and multiply by two-tenths, 0.2, which is the same as dividing by half and moving the decimal. So 2131 would be 155 feet from the intersection. 2021 would be 105 feet.
Nope. This two-digit formula cannot possibly work if the address ranges on a single block vary over three digits, not two. And this is an oldish area, gridded around 1910.
And what is "new construction"? Is 1930's new construction? Consider Ladd's Addition or Hazelhurst, both from the 30's whose streets are swoopy or diagonal.
I love the ghost street photos... fascinating. It sounds like the renumbering would have been very confusing (as well as the renaming of streets along the way). Did all those missing numbers really matter, I wonder? While not a technical definition (e.g., not in a dictionary), knitters also refer to ripping knitting out as frogging ("to frog").
Oh, yes, I've heard of frogging but didn't think of it. So thanks.
I rarely visit Fota Wildlife Park but when I do, I love to hang out with the meerkats. They are fascinating to watch. The renumbering history is really interesting. A very Enlightenment vision. The world can be made orderly if we just try. I love the radial streets of Ladd’s Addition.
You have apparently never gotten lost in Ladd’s. I lose all sense of direction and sometimes end up where I started. I like to think I’m smarter than that.
Fran, I have more pieces to add to your history of Portland street numbering.
First, I want you to know that I met you around 2011-12 at Laurelhurst Park, I think, when Debilyn Molineaux had an organizing meeting for Coffee Party newsgathering. So when I saw you on Facebook, and now on Substack, I followed your writings. I appreciate reading your work, but for the first time I have a response.
I moved to Portland around 2005, bought a 1888 house near downtown a year or two later (I’ve since left it), and started to investigate the history of our houses and streets. I got a tour of some of the old streetcar lines (maybe from Dill Pickle Club AKA Know Your City or Architectural Heritage Center).
We heard that what are now Portland city neighborhoods used to be a collection of separate small towns, accessed by streetcars rather than by travel on streets, all with their own internal streets and a few arterials such as Asylum street/boulevard. I understood that the great renumbering in the thirties was part of bringing all the towns into the one city of Portland. They had to connect the neighborhood streets (often with offsets that survive to mystify us), decide on common names/numbers within the quadrants, as well as renumber the buildings’ addresses. It was so good to hear from you about the extra thought that went into choosing numbers. I’ve heard that other standards were 10 blocks east/west to each half mile, and odd-numbered building addresses on the north and west sides of streets.
I heard about the address renumbering, that those “plain” white number tiles were supplied by the city to everyone. (That’s lots of tiles!) AHC people often say that home buyers in the 2000s who remodel old PDX bungalows and Victorian houses often assume they will discard and replace their address tiles with some fancier design that they think looks more “traditional”; they don’t realize their original tiles’ authentic history.
A couple of years later I was back in the foothills of California to work on preparing my old house for sale. I attended a terra cotta arts festival in Lincoln (a town northeast of Sacramento) at the sprawling Gladding McBean clay factory. At the accompanying “open house” of their sprawling warehouse (it looks like: www.gladdingmcbean.com/?pgid=jvpj6cbx-936679ae-77e0-46df-a851-939e2b518f76), I saw samples and heard more about their projects in the 1930s. Their main challenge at the time was to produce all the clay roof tiles for the buildout of Stanford University in Palo Alto CA (where I grew up), which is a lot of red clay. A staff member said that equally challenging was another contract they were pressed to complete at the same time — thousands of white clay tiles for the city of Portland OR. Seeing those samples in Lincoln CA certainly closed the loop for me, to appreciate those plain little white rectangles on my very old house in Portland.
--Jeanne Bear jeanne.bear@gmail.com
And what has happened to the Coffee Party?
Wow, Jeanne, I so appreciate all this information. I didn't want to wade into the part about all the little burgs coalescing into one city. I think I might have forgotten to point out that Portland had 315,000 residents then. I think you know Asylum Avenue became Hawthorne, named not after the author but for one of the doctors at the asylim.
My parents were born in Portland, in 1919 and 1926. I remember my grandparents using the old names for some streets, just as we might say 39th Avenue instead of Cesar Chavez Boulevard. I volunteer at the Genealogical Forum of Oregon. People have asked us about the old numbering system. This is a link to the 1931 list of old street names and numbers with the correlating new information. https://www.khrissoden.org/history/1931StreetRenamingWeb.pdf
Classes on learning your house's history have been given by the Oregon Historical Society.
Our 4-digit street address ends in 50, so we should be 250 feet from the previous intersection, a numbered avenue. We are a corner lot at the next intersection, a numbered avenue, but I thought Portland's blocks were 200 feet long. Just checked; downtown blocks are 200 feet square.
Well, dang, April, the 0.2 worked with other addresses. Portland blocks are small compared with other cities; the idea was to provide more corners for businesses downtown. Did you know that 20 blocks equal one mile? So every two blocks is a tenth.
I found the hard copy of the link you so kindly provided at the reference desk at the Central Library. Did you look up the former number of your house?
Hilmar’s article is worth checking out. I found it through The Oregonian archives on the library’s website.
Yes, I'm going to check out Hilmar's article, and might add it to the GFO library. Although downtown blocks are 200 feet, I'm guessing the residential blocks vary in length.
Have you seen the little metal circles in the sidewalks? Those are property line pins.
Do you mean those metal rings? They were originally for hitching horses. They had such nostalgic impact that the city added them when redoing curbs even though the horses were long gone. I will write about those soon.
But the rings are on curbs. I haven't noticed other circle. I'll start looking.
Far as I know, most residential blocks are also 200, although some are double, an effort to discourage through traffic on minor streets. As you drive, check your od meter. Every two blocks, another tenth mile.
We have horse rings, and toy horses tied up, on our street. The little brass circles are in the sidewalk, about the size of a penny. Some call them surveyor marks. I found a photo when I searched for brass markers in sidewalk portland oregon.
I do remember those, although I haven’t seen one in a while. I’ll keep looking.
Today I finally saw a circle. It might be steel rather than brass. But it is right in front of my house! I think it may indicate where the sewer line is supposed to go. They just dug up our street and put in a new sewer, and we have yet to connect it to our house.
Thank you for the fascinating lesson on Portland streets. Now I have to go see if my front door really is 190 feet from the previous intersection (that sounds about right).
When I bought my house in the Maxwell Park district of Oakland, California in the 1990s, I felt enough nostalgia for PDX that I installed the Portland address tiles to the front of my Craftsman bungalow (they looked proper).
Thanks for the reminder to look down as we roam our streets.
It's lovely to imagine what the city felt like when house numbers were delivered door by door. It felt very different when I arrived in 1987. Thanks for all of this history!
Numbering info really interesting.