A follow-up post is here. Sorry about the copy of it that I deleted, thinking it was a draft.
Okay I know exactly what to use a long post on cohost for: it's to describe my search for the highest-numbered US street address. That is, in a street address like "50000 Main St" , how high can the number get, as an integer, without letters or hyphens or anything else?
I first started to ponder this useless question on a road trip when seeing all the 5-digit address numbers in central California. You don't see those much on the East Coast. So I started wondering how high the numbers can get.
The address in the header image is not the final answer.
I first started looking on long roads in California. El Camino Real seemed like a natural choice. That one fizzled: it starts over with every city it goes through and only gets into the four digits. Sparsely-populated state routes at least got into the 5-digits, like I'd seen, but I couldn't even remember what road I'd been on.
I considered other places where it made sense for the addresses to keep increasing, and one that I found was the Florida Keys. For some reason they're numbered with the lowest numbers on Key West, increasing toward the mainland. Here's 107900 Overseas Hwy, Key Largo, FL. I could do much better, but that was a good starting point to show me that 6-digit addresses exist.
A detour into fake addresses
I tried the strategy of just typing numbers into Google Maps and seeing what autocompleted. That led me to be distracted by Stratford, WI, where the street numbers get very large, very confusing, and (sad to say) very fictitious.
Here's an example. Are these houses really numbered in the 213-thousands?
When you actually look at the addresses they put on their houses, no, they are not.. Someone just hecked up the street number database that Google uses for this town.
If you type an address into Google Maps, Google will happily try to "find" it for you. It's not going to stop and tell you that it isn't real. And a lot of non-real addresses are in the data they show you.
Fake addresses can get really large! Many of these seem to be "addresses" of vacant lots that don't have a real address yet. Here's 9999999 N Argonne St in Denver, and if you send mail there I don't think they'll receive it.
A 250-mile road in Washington
If I'd stuck with my original plan of finding a long road with consistent numbers, I might have found Olympic Hwy in Washington. In fact, I just saw these addresses with my own eyes on my way back from my friend's wedding in Olympic National Park!
The addresses, sensibly, have the mile number followed by 3 more digits. Here's 243406 Olympic Hwy, which you can confirm visually if you're willing to squint.
County roads in Oklahoma
It turns out you can do better than a system where the addresses are numbered by mile numbers plus 3 digits: a system where the addresses are road numbers plus 2 digits. As long as the road numbers get really high.
And a place where they do that is the grid of county roads in Oklahoma.
Rural roads in Oklahoma are numbered from north to south and from west to east. The highest-numbered north-south road is D4819 Rd, on the east edge of the state, or actually in the Cherokee Nation.
That road should give us addresses numbered 4819xx, but there's a particular lack of buildings there. And the roads aren't remotely on a grid around there. But where a nearby road meets 1082 Rd, I can find 481485 E 1082 Rd.
They don't have Street View there, but the address system is so predictable that I believe it without visual confirmation.
481485 is the highest address I could find by following hunches like this. To find higher numbers, I would have to crunch some data.
Florida, where things don't have to make sense
It turns out you can just download a list of addresses in JSON form, from openaddresses.io. I downloaded their US data files and wrote a script to search all of them for high-numbered addresses.
And this took me back to Florida, land of American excess.
One address I'd overlooked was the Official Florida Welcome Center, on I-95, whose address is 751829 I-95.
Okay their full address is "751829 I-95 7 Miles North of Yulee on I-95 South, Yulee, FL". I guess they need the clarity if you're trying to find them. I bet at least once, someone trying to deliver them something has driven right by, because they drove north out of Yulee, on I-95 North.
But that's not the highest either.
My mistake before was that I looked for roads that would make inherent sense to have high numbers. But you can find some very high addresses on some very short roads.
The semi-explanation I've pieced together is that Florida has some long mail routes, numbered by the state, that have increasing address numbers based on the major road they're near, even if they're not on it:
- 4xxxxx addresses are near State Route 200
- 5xxxxx addresses are near US-1
- 6xxxxx addresess are near State Route 108
- 7xxxxx addresses are on Interstate 95
- 8xxxxx addresses are near US-17
- and 9xxxxx addresses are near a particular part of State Route A1A
and that last one got me the highest addresses I could find that are definitely real.
I found the 942631 in this post's header image, and then right after that I found 960194 Gateway Blvd, Amelia Island, FL:
but that was soon dethroned by this swampy residence at 961146 Buccaneer Trail:
You can look closely and see that they wish they were still number 4650.
The answer is 961687
And what I believe to be the single highest street number in the US is this strip mall, numbered 961687 Gateway Blvd. I can't confirm it with a street-level view, but it's on the same short street as 960194 was, so I believe it.
Anyway, Canada has us beat
I only looked for street addresses in the US. Other countries have different address schemes that could make the question make less sense. But Canada has the same kind of addresses we do.
As I started originally posting about this on Twitter, I got a reply from roncli early on, pointing me to 986039 Perth-Oxford Rd, Tavistock, ON. I have no idea what he did in particular to find it.
That house may be the highest-numbered house in North America. I wonder if they know.
Are there 7-digit addresses?
It's interesting that both the US and Canada's addresses stop just before a million. 7-digit addresses can't be real, it seems.
There are some that show up in the OpenAddresses database, and I had to pass them by because they seem as fictitious as the Wisconsin and Denver ones we saw before. It appears that there are no real 7-digit addresses in the US.
Addresses Georg, who lives in Hinton, WV and has eight 7-digit addresses on 3rd Ave with no evidence of physically existing, is an outlier and should not be counted.