American Address Standards
Hi Airry,
I hope I finally got your package delivery sorted out. I really helps to know how other countries address their packages.
As to your other observation about American addresses, yes they are very short . Partially that is because our country is very young, when compared with the history of all of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Our country started and evolved almost hand-in-glove with government bureaucracies. As bureaucrats are wont to do, they tried their best to categorize and organize and summarize everything as our young country grew and expanded.
You can see the progression of bureaucracy even in the way the borders of our states are laid out. As Europeans started settling in America on the East coast of the continent, the borders of the states are very irregular -- following natural barriers such as large rivers and mountain ranges.
As the white folk expanded their territory (always at the expense of the Native people, **sigh**), the bureaucrats were right there. By the time the expansion was halfway across the continent, many of the state's borders started to be straight lines. And as the expansion continued past the Mississippi River, states such as Wyoming and Colorado were laid out as near perfect rectangles. [I say 'near perfect,' because no one can draw a perfect rectangle upon the surface of a sphere.]
The triumph of the surveyor's tools over natural geography, in my opinion, has left the United States with less character, less individuality than the countries on the other side of the Ocean.
As the states were created, our government Post Office was installed also. Very early in our history, the Post Office bureaucracy decided there was to be a simple way to identify where people lived. They would all be grouped as living in a city or township.
A ‘city’ is any group of buildings close together -- the words 'village,' 'town' or 'municipality' -- although differing in political meaning, were all a 'city' in the eyes of the Post Office bureaucracy. A ‘township’ is a surveyor's measure of land. It is a 'square' of land, six miles on a side.
The Post Office also decided all cities and townships would have a name. All cities named themselves when they were first organized. But not all townships, because the surveyors sometimes just used numbers. The Post Office would refuse to deliver mail until the people inside the township would give themselves a name. Sometimes the word 'township' is just shortened to 'town.' In the 1960's the Post Office even began calling townships, 'city.'
I live in the village (city) of Fall River, it is within the town(ship) of Fountain Prairie. The Post Office decided there would be only two location names on the envelope: the city and the state names. Nothing else, as that would just confuse the bureaucrats.
All throughout the growth of America, there has been the idea that every house is located very close to a street or road. Whenever a new city is founded, just about the first thing done by the surveyors is to lay out an arrangement of streets. All streets get a name (or sometimes a number). Usually, the people of the city name their own streets -- although this can be very arbitrary as to who does the naming. My street, Lazy Lake, was named by the farmer who owned the land. He later developed it from farmland to residences. So he got to name all the streets in our area.
All houses must also have a number. This is usually organized by the bureaucrats of the village. This is very important not just for mail delivery, but also for emergency services. If I need the police, or fire department or ambulance to my house, they could not find it without the house number. It is so important, I must display my house number prominently on my house, or the village will fine me.
So in the eyes of the Post Office, an address is very simple: Name Number (of house), Street name City, State, ZIP code
They allow one extra address line, to be inserted just below the Name. It is usually for mailing to business addresses. The extra line can be anything that will help find the individual inside the business. If there are more than four lines in the address, the Post Office's computers will only read the bottom four. Anything above that will not be read, and the mail may not be delivered.
I may have gone on too long by writing about something that may be of interest only to me. I became interested when I started mailing things for the Gutenberg Project -- and I started to learn about why addresses are so different across the world.
Since the 1960's, the ZIP code has become much more important than any other part of the address. Computerization of the Post Office made the ZIP code mandatory. I could write another long e-mail only about the ZIP code, but I think I will just stop here.