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Nowadays Portlanders enjoy the luxury of going about their business on a fairly intuitive grid of numbered streets and addresses.聽 If you have a passing familiarity with the city, you can get an address and usually know how many blocks away from the river it is (if it鈥檚 a named street) or from Burnside (if it鈥檚 a numbered avenue). There are exceptions to this, but mostly the city is an array of very nice X and Y coordinates that make finding locations as easy as pointing to something on a graph. Compared to several other cities, Portland鈥檚 address system has all the ambiguity of a chessboard.

Prior to 1931, though Portland’s numbering was a counter-intuitive mess. Anyone who had to find an address or deliver a letter first had to navigate a Byzantine system of street and building numeration that was incomprehensible to anyone who didn鈥檛 live here. The problem was that the initial address system was conceived not for Portland, but for several smaller cities.

For much of the late 1800s the piece of the map known as 鈥淧ortland鈥� was only what we now would call downtown and Old Town.聽 St. Johns, Albina and East Portland all started out as different municipalities. Albina and East Portland were absorbed in 1891, and St. Johns joined in 1915. You can see map of 1866 Portland here, and here鈥檚 a larger 1879 map showing Albina and East Portland. Both maps show the different settlements, and street grids that would grow outward without any relation to each other.

Prior to 1891 there were several streets with names like 鈥淔irst鈥� and 鈥淪econd鈥� that were in wholly different areas of the metro area. Albina’s First Street had nothing to do with downtown’s for instance.聽The various settlements had constructed competing alphabetic grids as well, with numerous 鈥淎鈥� and 鈥淏鈥� streets. (Curiously, the area that would become Portland also hosted several streets named 鈥淐edar.鈥�) When Albina and East Portland joined up with the city in 1891, many of the numbered and alphabetic streets were renamed, imposing a bit more order on the area. (Fun related fact: this was when the alphabetical streets in Northwest were named after various Portland founding fathers. Prior to that, Lovejoy was simply L Street, and Pettygrove was P.)

However, even after the renaming, a decentralized number system remained, and until 1931 Portland addresses were fractured and inconsistent, reflecting a series of smaller grids that no one actually used anymore. The number on a building had little if anything to do with where it stood within the now-larger city as a whole.

City Commissioner Asbury Barbur (the man for whom Barbur Boulevard was named) pressed for a reform of the numeration system. He was supported by interests such as the local post office’s, but business interests in the city were generally opposed to the renumbering. Think of all the business cards, custom stationary and signage that would have to be reprinted! It was similar to the controversy surrounding Rosa Parks Way or Caesar Chavez Boulevard, but magnified to encompass the entire city.

It took years of debate until the city passed an ordinance dividing up Portland into five zones and then numbering buildings into neat rows of 100s. Several of the numbered streets were shifted around to reflect the newer, more consistent system which is why . The nice, clean consistent city grid that all planners, developers and visitors to the city benefit from didn鈥檛 spring up by accident – they had to be made that way.