On a related note, lots of businesses on Manhattan still don't get it. They advertise their location as something like:
58th St 369
instead of saying:
58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av
It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located.
Yes I know there are formulas you can memorize to figure out cross streets but you're a business, you're supposed to be trying to make this easy for me.
If you're located on a grid and you advertise an address without giving cross streets, I guess you don't actually want my business.
"True" New Yorkers seem to have memorized which numbers are between which numbered Avenues --- at least my son has done this since moving there first for college, then a job.
This is one of those 90/10 rule things where just learning a post-it note worth of trivia covers you for over 90% of instances. I'm sure he's competent at navigating especially in the ordinary places reachable by ordinary subway ride. The corner that flummoxes me is that inexplicable void in the map. The big empty part of the subway system sandwiched between the EFMR and JMZ lines. That curious combination of Newton Creek, Highland park, an archipelago of like a dozen large cemeteries, more than a few heavy industrial zones, and freight rail tracks. I've seen parts of the map in this no mans land where numbered Ave's just straight up skip over a half dozen other numbers which I know exist elsewhere on the map. However the grid was zippered together, there is a seam in it and this is it.
There is actually an official algorithm for estimating the cross streets given any address within the Manhattan grid. I don't know if it still is, but it used to be published in fine print on bus system maps. It's a little too complicated to memorize, but you could easily keep it on a note card in your wallet and do the calculations in your head or with your phone calculator.
Right. Manhattan grid. That's easy. I'm talking about the grid in Queens. In particular the middle of Queens. It becomes extremely non-grid conforming in a way a calculator rule can't fix.
I can do this in Amsterdam as well, but there it is a lot more complicated, especially on the canals. But I usually can aim for the right block just knowing the house number, and even/odd says which side of the street or canal to be on.
Aren't addresses in Manhattan mostly east or west of 5th Ave, each avenue incrementing by 100? Meaning 369W is between 8th and 9th, while 369E between 2nd and 1st?
Building numbers ascend in the same direction as streets / avenues and usually the hundreds digit is incremented at the corner so that building 369 is (ideally) between 3rd and 4th. Something similar to that. Double check me on this. Its been a while but the relation between building number and location on the grid is def linear.
instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av
It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located.
I don't get it why they don't get it.