Portland's 1931 Street Renaming Cross-Reference Book
Posted on April 20th, 2009
The city streets and addresses of Portland underwent two complete renamings, once in 1892, and a second time in 1931. The second renaming is what has given us our five quadrants. A good introduction to the renamings can be found here.
The second renaming didn't rename as many streets as the first did, but it completely threw out all of the old street addresses in favor of a more uniform version. This act was probably a huge pain at the time, but has proven to be a modern convenience; for example, we know by address that 1436 SE Stark (the building in which I live) is on Stark (which is in the SouthEast quadrant), and is located somewhere between SE 14th and SE 15th Avenues. The previous address of my building, by the way, was 594 East Stark Street.
This more mathematic naming convention is nice now, but it makes it difficult to ascertain addresses before 1931 - the modern convention doesn't apply, and there's no mathematical algorithm that you can apply to the current address in order to discern the old address. At the Central Library, up in Humanities, they have a bound cross-reference book of the old addresses against the new addresses, but in order to look at it, you have to turn in your Library Card or ID, and you can't remove the book from the Library. It's the sort of thing that I'd like to be able to refer to at anytime, preferably from the comfort of my own home.
Yesterday, I went to the Library, checked it out, and copied all 242 pages of it on the Library's copiers. Afterward, I took it to work and scanned it, but the PDF was huge - 115 megs. This morning I re-sampled it and OCRed it. So without further ado, for the twenty people that will be interested in this sort of thing: Here's the text-searchable PDF of the Crane Direct Mail Service's 1931 Street Renaming Cross-Reference. (It's still kind of big - 18 megs. Please consider right-clicking the link and saving yourself a copy.)
***UPDATE*** As of October 2013, the 1931 Street Renaming Directory has been converted to an easily searchable format on my website, LovejoyPettygrove.com. Please check it out!