Senses of Place

[captainsblog]

I was somehow reminded of one other really geeky thing in the life of our reading the New Yorker.  When Eleanor and I first moved in together, it was to a townhouse just outside the City of Rochester I'd been renting and which we eventually bought.  It was in the adjoining Town of Brighton, in which we would remain until we moved here in 1994.

When I filled out the change of address form, I put down what I thought was the correct designation: Brighton, New York 14618.  This no workee, and we went New Yorkerless for several weeks until I called them and discovered I'd committed a major postal no-no:

Although we lived in Brighton Town and were serviced by Brighton Fire, Brighton Schools and Brighton Ambulance, as far as the Post Office was concerned, "Brighton" was nowhere near us, but referred mostly to a section of the City of Rochester much closer to my original apartment off of Park Avenue.  While most people thought of the centre of Brighton as being the convergence of three major highways near the middle and high school known as Twelve Corners, to primordial postal thinking "Brighton" was a few miles to the north and a jog to the west, essentially in the immediate vicinity of the East Avenue Wegmans.

There's even a sign- across the street from the renovated store, the only Wegmans remaining within the city limits:



There actually still is a "Brighton" post office, around the corner from that store, serving not the 14618 zip code covering most of the town but a different zip code altogether- and one which, at most, a few neighborhoods of the actual town are in.  And strictly speaking, you're not supposed to call it, or anything with a zip code starting with a 146, anything other than "Rochester."

I told you this was going to be geeky.

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To really make this make sense and probably put you to sleep, you need to understand how zip codes work, at least in New York State.  Don't worry, you can skip the part under the....
 

Every zip code in New York begins with a 1. (Except the three that don't. Don't ask.) The second digit moves north and west from zero (NYC) to four (the westernmost portions) after a brief detour onto the Oiland for the 11's.  The third digit is where it gets weird.  Some third digits are assigned exclusively to Big to Biggish Places: from Manhattan, which has 100, 101 AND 102 all to itself, to Niagara Falls, which has 14301 through 14305.  The zips with the other third digits- here, they're 0, 1, 4, 5, 7 and 8- make up alphabetical lists- which, within the 14's, consist of little towns with strange names like:

Bliss (14024)
Burt (14028)
Niobe (14758)

but not the far-flung Isles of Langerhans.

These result in some strange conjunctions and disjunctions: Clarence and Clarence Center are right next to each other, geographically and numerically; but East Amherst and East Aurora, 20-odd miles apart, have adjacent zip codes.  (Let's not even get into the Village of East Aurora being 90 miles west of the Village of Aurora; that's not the Post Office's doing.)
 

In some places, zip codes respect city, town and county boundaries, but it's usually scattershot.  That's how the 146XX designation of "Rochester" goes well into many surrounding towns and the "Buffalo" 142XX reaches at least one other city (Lackawanna), at least three villages (Kenmore, Blasdell and Sloan) and more towns than I can count.  In theory, this is all fine, because it's the federal government and it can do whatever it wants. (Just ask him.)  What's weird is how differently these designations are used and refused in the two biggest centres of the Land of the One-Four.

As my New Yorker experience proved, Brightonians are strictly forbidden from using the name of their town in their mailing address, to their peril.  Oddly, for at least a time once we straightened out the address issue, our magazine labels said "Twelve Corners, New York 14618," the designation of the then-location of our local postal branch.  Similarly, the large towns of Irondequoit and Greece are diced and sliced among various 146 zip codes and use of their names on mailing labels is verboten. 

Here in and around Buffalo, though? Hey, whatevs!  Our 14221 home address gets mail addressed to Buffalo, Williamsville and Amherst.  My 14226 office can and does get deliveries addressed to Buffalo, Amherst, Snyder or even Eggertsville.  The non-Buffalo city and villages within 142 use Lackawanna, Kenmore and the others on their envelopes with civic pride.  And even when a town's acreage is partly outside 142 and partly within (Tonawanda's 14223 and 14150, for one, or Getzville or East Amherst's separate 140 numbers), people write Tonawanda or Amherst on mail to them with utter disregard to the sorting machines or ADD clerks they are driving completely crazy.  Even weirder, those letters magically all get here! (Mostly.)

It was even weirder when I first lived here.  The town of Amherst has been my home here for all but a few months, but in 1981, with UB still under construction and wide swaths of the town still being swamp, things were in a bit of flux.  Nobody QUITE knew how to address the rapidly growing northern reaches.  Buffalo's 14228 was assigned to much of it, but what did you call it? Just Amherst? "West Amherst" was the term on my original lease, but that was a creature of whole cloth that never stuck. Making it even stranger, the Postal Service, in a fit of geographic logic, determined that a northwest section of the town (affectionately known as "Looney Acres" after a prior farmer AND coincidentally many of its residents ::waves::) was much closer to the City of North Tonawanda than it was to Amherst's then central post office built in Eisenhower years a couple of blocks from my current office.  So for a good chunk of 1982, my Amherst zip code was 14120.  Years later, this caused consternation in my law practice when I would try to garnishee Looneys living in that zip code, only to find out that the sheriffs considered it a no-mans land because North Tonawanda is in Niagara County and those Amherst neighborhoods are in Erie.  (They've long since fixed this and made that whole end of the town 14228.)

The final weirdness is that a few years ago, Buffalo, despite being the bigger metro and more on the beaten path of major highways and air travel, lost its sorting of local mail to, you got it, Rochester. Now a letter from my house to my office, barely two miles apart, takes a 140 mile detour to Jefferson Road in Henrietta (sorry, ROCHESTER 14623, not Henrietta 14467) before it gets here. Despite that, the 146 Address Police continue to respect local traditions and process all that mislabeled mail as quickly and efficiently as they ever did! (Which is to say, not really all that much, but no worse, either.)

Now would you like to learn about the rules of the NHL play-in tournament?

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ETA. I just remembered that my roots have an even older connection to this confusion.  Remember how big and sorta-big places get their own three-digit prefix and everyone else just marches in alphabetical order?  As with everything else, there seem to be exceptions.  Here's a list of the prefix of my birth:
11501 Mineola
11507 Albertson
11509  Atlantic Beach
11510 Baldwin
11514 Carle Place
11516 Cedarhurst

Wait, what? How did an M get at the start of an otherwise nicely ordered list? Well, Mineola is the county seat of Nausea County, so they probably bought some extra Nixon stamps in  1960 when this was all being designed.  From there, though, it proceeds normally until you get to, where else?, where I came from:

11518 East Rockaway
11520 Freeport
11530 Garden City
11531 Garden City
11535 Garden City
11536 Garden City
11542 Glen Cove
11545 Glen Head
11547 Glenwood Landing
11548 Greenvale
11549 Hempstead
11550 Hempstead

11551 Hempstead
11552 West Hempstead
11553 Uniondale
11554 East Meadow
11555 Uniondale
11556 Uniondale
11557 Hewlett
11558 Island Park
11559 Lawrence
11560 Locust Valley
11561 Long Beach

and so and so and so and so and so. But what's with those weird jumps around the alphabet from West Hempstead to Uniondale to my very own East Meadow and back, before things resume their normal course in Hewlett?

Apparently, I was born into another Rochestery land, where the names West Hempstead, Uniondale and East Meadow were supposed to be suppressed and just referred to as branches of Hempstead- but, Long Islanders being the stubborn buffoons we are by our birth, nobody went along. And so we break the numerical beauty of a system that should have served literally thousands of permutations.

It gets weirder. (Are you surprised?)  West Hempstead is an unincorporated statistical area which,  for some unknown reason, is located to the west of the Village of Hempstead- both of which are within the Town of Hempstead, which are all pronounced here like the cannabis derivative and not "HAMPstead" like the much fancier UK Heath after which they were all named. It is also not to be confused with East Meadow, my own home town, which is not a town but another unincorporated hamlet to the east of that village, and which was referred to in some old local documents as East Hempstead but the Meadow name stuck.  What West Hempstead IS confused with, though, is a section of 11552 which the Post Office designates as It Which Shall Not Be Named: it's known to locals as Lakeview, probably because of it bordering on something called (but not really terribly lakey) Hempstead Lake.  There may have also been some unfortunate racial redlining that went into which parts of 11552 were called what.  I vaguely remember Newsday tales from the 70s about some controversy about the naming- mainly, that the Post Office was bound and determined to send any mail bearing a Lakeview address to a place named Lake View.....

which is part of the Town of Hamburg, or Hamberd if you prefer, located a mere 20 or so miles from where I live now.

Come back tomorrow night.... we're gonna do overlaying area codes!