[Talk-us] Peculiar addressing in Burr Ridge, IL

Kristian Zoerhoff kristian.zoerhoff at gmail.com
Sun Apr 10 20:49:44 BST 2011


On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Kristian Zoerhoff
<kristian.zoerhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, rural Chicago addresses.
>
> Kane and DuPage counties use an arcane system based on the number of miles
> you are from State & Madison in Chicago. In this case, you in the 16th mile
> west of State. Within a given mile, addresses increase from 000 to 999,
> inclusive.
>
> What's truly maddening is that this is only for unincorporated areas, and a
> few incorporated municipalities that never created their own grids, so wild
> jumps like you describe usually involve a village/city limit.
>
> I happen to live in Kane County, so I'm used to this weirdness by now.

One other maddening quirk I forgot to mention: address always count up
from the baselines, so if a road is U-shaped, with two legs heading
north, and an eqast-west connector, addresses will count upward along
both N-S legs *simultaneously* - xNyy0 and xNyy5 might be on one leg,
xNyy4 and xNyy4 might be on the other - so you get the absurdly
hilarious situation of seemingly adjacent buildings actually being a
"block" apart in parallel, where that block might 1/4 or 1/2 mile.

Lake County, IL uses a similar system, but with the directional letter
removed. Parts of Wisconsin use *two* directionals, of the form
NxxWyyy, on similar grids.

-- 
Kristian Zoerhoff
kristian.zoerhoff at gmail.com



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