STREET NUMBERING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 7

STREET NUMBERING

PRACTICAL SYSTEM ADOPTED IN PARIS. The visitor to Paris is ever grateful for an intelligent system of street numbering in that city. All houses in the streets are numbered with even numbers on the right and odd numbers on the left, and every street is numbered from the end nearest the Seine. In the case of streets parallel with the river, they are numbered from east to xvest, the direction of the current. The idea dates from 1800, when Auguste Leblond, a of mathematics, read a paper on house before the members of the Museum of Arts. He suggested also that numbers should be put ten metres apart, so that the enunciation of number 73, for instance, would indicate that it was 73 metres from the end of the street. Another of his proposals was that every lamp' in the city should bear the number of the house nearest to it.

A more recent plan for making it easy to find one’s way about Paris was the naming of streets in series. Thus streets , named after foreign capitals are all together, north of St Lazare railway station, and near - the Parc Monceau a number of streets are to be found named after famous artists. This was not found practicable and was abandoned.

One great boon in Paris is that the street name appears on every corner and on both sides of the way, however short the street may be. Quite recently all name plates of streets were lowered so that they might be visible to motorists inside their cars. The first time street numbers are mentioned is in a document dated 1426, wherein two houses are indicated as XIII and XIIII Pont Notre Dame. Numbering of houses was decreed in Paris in 1726. Hitherto shop signs had been the principal landmarks, and a number of them can be seen at the Musee Carnavalet, a museum devoted to the history .of Paris. Aristocrats, according to Mercier, objected to their houses being numbered, as putting them on a level with common citizens. It was not until 1791, preliminary to a census, that the numbering of houses was systematically enforced, but as streets had to be numbered within administrative sections, irrespective of their length, it happened that the same number appeared three times in the same street. In 1797 it was ordered that streets should be numbered up one side and down the other, so that in a street of a hundred houses, numbers 1 and 100 would face each other —a very awkward system.