Trivia hunt!

[kickaha]

So we're watching South Park tonight, when gingko asks... "Where's zip code 10465? Harlem by any chance?" Turns out she's right. When I asked what brought that up, she mentioned that it's Chef's house number on South Park.

I'd noticed that the house numbers were... big... for a small town, but I never realized they were (almost) all five digits. (Butters' house is 1020.)

I've been looking for a list of the house numbers online, but haven't been able to... anyone?

Comments

[kimokeane.livejournal.com]

In Colorado, or at least in Denver specifically, you get a lot of house numbers like you see in SP, i.e. in the format "##-##,###". It's some kind of custom in that area, but I don't know it's origin.

I never tried to take the last 5 and make them Zip codes...

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Whahuh? Not just a single number, but something that looks like a coordinate? Wacky. Must investigate.

On the West Coast (WA/OR/CA) it's common to have a cartesian grid overlaid onto a county, and all numbers in the county be based off a standardized 'block size' from a common origin. In King Co (Seattle) for instance, you can navigate to a lot of locations solely from the address, no directions needed. There are non-regular roads in places, but the vast majority of the county adopted the same numbering system. Heck, if you're familiar with county a bit, you don't even need a city name, just the number and street.

Avenues run N/S, Streets run E/W. A compass 'point' in the street name gives you the box in a tic-tac-toe around the city center. So 4319 8th Ave NE is 43 blocks north of the edge of downtown, 8 blocks east from the eastern edge of the downtown section. You also know that the building is on the west side of the street, because the even/odd is very regular as well.

We used to be pricks to folks asking for directions and give them addresses that were, say, in the middle of a lake. :)

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

We used to be pricks to folks asking for directions and give them addresses that were, say, in the middle of a lake. :)

Used to be?

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Street numbers are often based from the nearest large city. There are plenty of 5-digit house numbers in Fall City, mostly on streets that run E-W. N-S streets are more likely to have 4-digit addresses, as Fall City is much further east of Seattle than it is north thereof.

So you don't have to feel bad that your wife is cleverer than you--you just subconsciously knew more about the way the world is arranged, so your curiosity wasn't triggered by the apparent aberration, because it really wasn't one. Snrk. (Sorry, I _almost_ made it through that with a straight face.)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, King Co is laid out that way, but no where else I've lived is. SLC was close, but they tended to go from each city center, even the small towns, so you rarely saw numbers over 10000. Most of central/west CO that I've been in is like SLC, with each town having it's own geographic center for the grid numbering, so the numbers don't *usually* get that high. It was one of those things that I noticed in the show, figured was an injoke of some sort, or Da Boyz imprinting a county-wide grid system on South Park, but never thought the numbers *meant* anything that might be discernable by the general populace.

Unfortunately, there is no zip code in the US of (I think it was) 41795, which was another house, so... *shrug*

Who knows, maybe it was sheer coincidence, but somehow I don't think so. :)