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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

Chicago has that, but only in some directions. The south and southwest suburbs continue the city numbering out for a long way; the northwest suburbs all have their own numbering. I think most of the north suburbs are also on their own (but possibly the innermost ones share the city grid). Not sure about west. :)

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Western Ave. is just shy of 30 miles in length. I’m not sure if that includes when the name changes to Asbury in Evanston. Also not sure if the changes at the Southern extents. Like a typical Northsider I rarely went South of Roosevelt.

North Ave. and Roosevelt Rd. go from the lake to about 2/3 of the way to Iowa. The names end at the DuPage/Kane county line, though. After that, they are just IL64 and IL38.

The numbering system for just about all Chicago roads ends at the Chicago city limits, except for some of the streets on the south side, which continue all the way down into Will County.

Even stranger is that there is a pocket of streets in Dyer Indiana that are numbered according to the Chicago system, as if they had expected the street grid to expand that far south and east. Expand to Hammond, Schererville, St John and you'll see east/west streets that are numbered in the 40s (the Gary Indiana scheme), then in the high 90s (Lake County Indiana scheme?), then the 210s (Chicago scheme), then the 70s (back to the Gary scheme).

EDIT - Chicago did a mass street renumbering (with a few street name changes too) in the early 20th century. It would be interesting to know if some of the suburban street numbering schemes for the roads that cross municipal boundaries are still using the old system and that is why the street numbers seem to reset once you exit the city.

> It would be interesting to know if some of the suburban street numbering schemes for the roads that cross municipal boundaries are still using the old system and that is why the street numbers seem to reset once you exit the city.

I was wondering about that, particularly for the named roads. I believe Pulaski/Crawford was always Crawford first until Chicago renamed their portion to Pulaski and Skokie kept the Crawford name. I recall my dad telling me that when he was a kid in the 50s Pulaski was Crawford all the way down. I think that might have been the case with Western/Asbury as well, but I’m not too sure on that one. I’m sure there are many other examples.

And here’s an unrelated yet interesting Chicago street fact for anyone still reading: Elston starts and ends at Milwaukee Ave., so there are two Elston/Milwaukee intersections.

> Not sure about west. :)

Unincorporated addresses in Kane and DuPage Counties do use a reference system based off State & Madison as baseline (although it's been codified based off county and township lines). Eg. 40W100 Keslinger Rd is a bit over 40 miles west of State St.

Those are also called fire addresses, because they were assigned by the fire department rather than the postal service. 6 or 8 decades ago, the post office decided to accept them as official rather than force people to change.

They have their own section in the postal addressing standards, under the "Unusual Addressing Situations":

https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/pub28apd_004.htm

Thanks for this. . . I've been writing lots of GOTV letters across the country and paying attention to the addresses, rather than simply writing them on the envelopes, help make the process interesting.

I spent 20+ years in Washington, DC so am used to NW, NE, SW, and SE with avenues, numbered streets, flower streets of two syllables, blah blah blah. But I now live in rural Virginia and state routes are the norm.

Your explanation got me to focus more on what and why. And, I learned something, so thank you.

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