Let’s say you are a local historian and you are on the trail of a very successful woman named Belle Curry who owned a house during the 1880s at 180 Broadway.

Let’s say you want to discover whether Madam Curry’s house still exists. If you proceed to 180 Broadway today, you will find yourself standing underneath Columbia Parkway south of Third Street and north of Pete Rose Way. Problem is, you are blocks away from the actual location where Belle Curry’s house stood.

To see the location today, you must find 526 Broadway, which is about two-thirds of the way up the block dominated by the Procter & Gamble complex north of Fifth Street.

Why the discrepancy?

The short answer is, today’s Cincinnati street addresses didn’t exist before 1895. Between 1895 and 1896, Cincinnati renumbered every building in the entire city, so any pre-1895 address will not line up with today’s addresses. This is a handy piece of information if you are into genealogy or local history.

Cincinnati was decades old before it adopted any sort of system for numbering buildings at all. If you look up someone in any of the pre-Civil War city directories, you will find addresses like “e.s. Broadway bet. 5th and 6th,” meaning “east side of Broadway between Fifth and Sixth streets.” Presumably, the postman – or the neighbors – knew everyone who lived on the block. Gradually, landlords and tenants began posting numbers on their buildings, but the pattern was almost random and not very helpful.

In September 1865, Cincinnati’s city council tried to codify an organized system of addresses by setting the zero point at Main Street down by the Ohio River. Any building east of Main Street got an “East” designation and any building westward got a “West” designation. Any building on the riverbank was numbered “1” and each building northward got a sequential number. The problem was, some buildings were narrow and some were wide, so 522 Main Street was the same distance from the river as 454 Walnut, and both of those addresses were up near Thirteenth Street.

In 1891, two members of city council, Charles Wuest and M.B. McIntyre, were nominated to draft a plan to renumber all of the city’s addresses. They liked parts of the 1865 system and recommended keeping such conventions as placing even-numbered addresses on the east and north sides of streets, while odd-numbered addresses were assigned on the west side and south side of the street.

Wuest and McIntyre recommended moving the centerline of the city from Main Street to Vine, which really is more in the center of the downtown area. Each block was now allocated only 100 numbers, so numbers north of Fourth Street began with 400 and numbers north of Fifth Street began with 500, and so on. Although City Council adopted the new system on 18 March 1891, Council did not allocate funds to implement the change until 1895. Edwin E. Kellogg, a clerk in the city engineering department, was quite pleased with the new plan:

“This plan or system seems to be satisfactory, and while it does not apply perfectly on account of the irregularity of the streets in some localities, it applies as perfectly to this city as any other system known. By this method the numbers indicate the locality of any block on any street relative to the starting-point for numbering.”

While Clerk Kellogg was happy with the plan, his boss, H.J. Stanley, the chief engineer, found a few areas that needed attention:

“In this connection we deem it advisable that the Board of Legislation should so change the names of certain streets that one name shall be given to two or more streets which are a prolongation of each other. For illustration, let us take a few streets divided by Central Avenue: Fifteenth and Everett should be called by same name; so Fourteenth and Betts, Twelfth and Clark, and a number of others. On Vine Street we have Fifteenth and Mary, Fourteenth and Allison, and so on.”

Most of these confusing names no longer exist, because most of the streets west of Central were obliterated by urban renewal.

Of course, the new system required all property owners to place new numbers on their buildings, and that meant opportunity for the grifters and con artists. The Cincinnati Post [5 April 1895] reported:

“When the renumbering gang reached Fourth Street they were informed by a number of the merchants that their houses were already numbered. Clerk Kellogg of the Engineer’s Department, upon investigation, found that in every case the new numbers were wrong. It appears that as soon as the B. of A. [Board of Administration] adopted a resolution to renumber the houses in the city some smooth individuals started out to sell numbers to the owners of property.”

Another scam was uncovered in Northside, where a shady salesman followed the renumbering clerk down the street and, as soon as the clerk assigned a new address to the house, the grifter knocked on the door and told the occupant that they were required to buy the type of numbers he himself was selling, and no others. The city clerk chased him off.

The city mandated no particular style of number, so long as it was legible. (Although there was a suggestion that the new numbers should glow in the dark.) The Cincinnati Post found a lucrative sideline, selling aluminum numbers on an oxidized coper plate, only 65 cents for a three-numeral address, and that included installation! One wonders if any of these 1895 numbers can still be found around the city.

