Question about old addresses

[Perd Hapley]

I'm looking at an advertisement for the Katy Railroad, from sometime in the mid-twentieth century. The ad lists addresses of "Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines, St. Louis 1, Mo., or Katy Building, Dallas 2, Texas."

I'm puzzled by the numbers after the city names. Does anyone remember addresses being written that way? Did the numbers correspond to different parts of the city?

[rcnixon]

They are postal zones that were set up in large cities.  They roughly corresponded to postal stations in the city.  When zip codes came along in 1963, city postal zones moved into history.

Russ

[grampster]

What Russ said. 

Around the same time in larger towns the first two numbers in a phone number were letters that coresponded to names of various parts of towns.  For example (Glendale) GL 2-5550 was our home # and was the NE quadrant of the township.  LE (Lenox) was the SW etc etc.

Small towns didn't even use the first 3 numbers.  At our cottage the phone # was 652-2009 but all one had to do was dial 2009 and the call went through in the the 652 exchange.

[lee n. field]

I'm looking at an advertisement for the Katy Railroad, from sometime in the mid-twentieth century. The ad lists addresses of "Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines, St. Louis 1, Mo., or Katy Building, Dallas 2, Texas."

I'm puzzled by the numbers after the city names. Does anyone remember addresses being written that way? Did the numbers correspond to different parts of the city?

I remember them.  It's what they did before zip codes.

I speculate that they'd translate to a particular local post office.

[Perd Hapley]

OK, thanks old timers! I can't find much that's relevant when I look up postal zones on Google, but I did find something on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_code#Background

Interesting info.

[rcnixon]

What Russ said. 

Around the same time in larger towns the first two numbers in a phone number were letters that coresponded to names of various parts of towns.  For example (Glendale) GL 2-5550 was our home # and was the NE quadrant of the township.  LE (Lenox) was the SW etc etc.

Small towns didn't even use the first 3 numbers.  At our cottage the phone # was 652-2009 but all one had to do was dial 2009 and the call went through in the the 652 exchange.

Yep, those were the old step-by-step and crossbar telephone switches.  Since long distance was still provided by operators, there was no Direct Distance Dialing (DDD).  When DDD came along in 1951, it signalled the end of 4, 5 and 6 digit dialing.  I remember our phone number: PIlgrim 8-8796.

Russ