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I need to distinguish between a Queens style address, from a valid ranged address, and an address with a unit#. For eg:

Queens style: 123-125 Some Street, NY

Ranged Address: 6414-6418 37th Ln SE, Olympia, WA 98503

Address with unit#: 1990-A Gildersleeve Ave, Bronx, NY.

In the case of #3, A is a unit# at street address 1990. THe unit# might be a number as well, for eg: 1990-12. A ranged address identifies a range of addresses on a street, and not a unique deliverable address.

So, the question is, is there an easy way to identify the Queens style address from the other cases?

---- UPDATE ---

Thanks, all. From your answers, it seems that there is no easy way to do this. I basically need to know if a street address in the form ABCD-WXYZ is a Queens-style address pointing to a single property, or if it is a ranged address.

How about some followup questions:

1) Are all addresses in NY City of the form ABCD-WXYZ? 2) Are there any other places in US where this style of addressing is used? Wikipedia seems to imply that is true, but does not give any examples.

j0k
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feroze
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  • Good luck. My sister-in-law used to live in Queens, and this sort of thing confused the hell out of me. – Syntactic May 06 '10 at 17:39
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    *"The standard Queens hyphenated address number format is XXX-XXX. An address number in this format is NOT an address range but rather a single address number of a specific building where the three digits preceding the hyphen generally reference the numbered cross-street (or if the cross-street is named and not numbered, what the street would be numbered) that intersects the given street segment. "* - wtf? Why does the post office allow this? – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft May 06 '10 at 17:41
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    @BlueRaja: Queens has been around far longer than the United States Postal Service; my guess would be that the weird addresses have too. – Syntactic May 07 '10 at 14:41
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    @BlueRaja: watch what you say about Queens street addresses. It's a very sensible system that allows you to find any location - the addresses contain X and Y coordinates. The only problem is dealing with streets with names instead of numbers, which I used to hate, growing up in Queens. – John Saunders May 19 '10 at 01:36

4 Answers4

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This is from the memory of growing up there, so beware:

An address like

198-16 100th Avenue, Hollis, NY, 11423

Can be deciphered first by deciding whether the 11423 zip code is in Queens. If not, then punt.

Next, it says "100th Avenue". That implies that the "198" is referring to "198th Street": Streets always run North to South, and Avenues always run East to West. You get some interesting things with "Road" and "Place" and such, but "Place" is a "Street", and I believe that "Road" is an "Avenue".

To find the building, start at 198th Street, on the South side (even numbers), and start counting. You'll find that 198-16 is on the corner of 199th Street and 100th Avenue, just like it was when I lived there, because if it was on the other side of 199th street, it would have been 200-something.

As to how to distinguish, you could start by applying the above rules, and seeing if you come up with something that makes sense. Maybe the Street never intersects the Avenue? Maybe the numbers don't go up that high (I don't believe there is a 300th Street, and I'm not sure about a 300th Avenue). Maybe the building number is too high (you'd live on a very long street if you lived at 198-200 100th Avenue, especially because the distance from 198th Street to 199th Street on 100th Avenue isn't very great: it's a short block in that direction).

John Saunders
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Unfortunately addresses don't have enough to "verify themselves" like a mod 10 checksum on a credit card. This means that without external information, there really is no way to know for sure how the address is supposed to look in a standardized format as compared to the original, unprocessed input format.

This is where something like an address verification web service would come into play. For a few dollars a month (usually about $20) you can verify your address database and clean it up and also prevent bad or duplicate addresses from getting into your system and spreading through it like a cancer. Most address validation web services will standardize the format of the address and expose the various component parts of the address so you can do additional process or inspection or whatever.

Just so you are aware, I'm the founder of SmartyStreets. We offer an address verification web service API called LiveAddress. You're more than welcome to contact me personally with questions about addresses whether you're a customer or not. I'm more than happy to help.

Martijn Pieters
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Jonathan Oliver
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  • So, does your service correctly verify my address, as given above? – John Saunders Oct 13 '11 at 02:33
  • 19816 100TH AVE / HOLLIS NY 11423-3316 – Jonathan Oliver Oct 13 '11 at 02:38
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    Not bad, but put the hyphen back. The correct address is "198-16 100TH AVE", whether the rest of the world likes it or not. – John Saunders Oct 13 '11 at 02:59
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    The official/legal records on file with the USPS actually removes the hyphen. The hyphen is probably used now as more of an unofficial convention that never went away. I think it looks better with the hyphen, but in order to "standardize" and be ready automation mailings, the hyphen should go. – Jonathan Oliver Oct 13 '11 at 03:05
  • I suppose anyone dealing with mailing in the USA needs to bow down to the USPS, but I grew up at the address with the hyphen in it. I still have quite a bit of family in Queens, and they all have a hyphen in their address. I suppose if USPS wants to insult 2.3 million people by telling them they live where they don't, then I suppose they're big enough to do that. – John Saunders Oct 13 '11 at 03:11
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    Who knows how long they'll be around... But then again, maybe they're "too big to fail." – Jonathan Oliver Oct 13 '11 at 03:18
  • @JohnSaunders normalized USPS addresses ignore hyphens so the address would be: 19816 100th Ave Hollis, NY 11423-3316 – abriggs Jan 16 '14 at 13:55
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    @JonathanOliver I allow customers to type in their hyphens, periods, commas and # symbols, but strip all of them except the first occurrence of a hyphen. Some software might allow hyphens, but the one I use (Avalara) strips it. This is also consistent with the USPS normalization. Zip codes have turned this borough addressing system into legacy, but from a human-readable standpoint, I think the hyphenated address is so simple to understand. We wouldn't really have much need for GPS if all addresses were like this. – abriggs Jan 16 '14 at 13:59
  • @abriggs: yeah, that's what I said. It's an insult to the people of Queens. But I guess they figure there are more people who do _not_ live in Queens than people who _do_ live in Queens, so that makes it all right. Typical government thinking. – John Saunders Jan 16 '14 at 13:59
  • @JohnSaunders Yah, but for the standard layman - taking the time to learn the extra bit just won't happen. The conformance can be annoying, and blind at times, but at-least it provides some conformance which makes our lives as programmers simpler! – abriggs Jan 16 '14 at 14:05
  • @abriggs: I would have preferred that the USPS achieve performance without insulting 2.3 million people, but what do you expect from Government? – John Saunders Jan 16 '14 at 14:10
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    @JohnSaunders Ya'll are not alone... Hawaii and SoCal are addressed like that too. It's actually harder to understand what 19816 means vs 198-16. Completely agree. – abriggs Jan 16 '14 at 17:50
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Well you would know that the second address isn't in Queens because the X-Y format is based on the streets and avenues of the borough. There aren't 6414 avenues or streets in Queens (less than 280 of each). The house number shouldn't go much over 100 because they reset every numbered cross street/avenue. So the X and Y would rarely have the same amount of digits. Ultimately though, a valid address would have the house number, street name, city, state/province if available, zip code or address code, country if international, otherwise they won't be sent, so you rarely would be given just the house number, if the other information weren't clearly implied.

The system was created to avoid confusion with the other boroughs before we had the Zip code system. I mean, there are some locations in Astoria, that if you don't give a zip code or a neighborhood name (or use the dash system), google maps will point to Long Island City and that's within the borough. No other borough in the city uses this system. It's just a Queens gem. Outside of the state, however, I believe (don't quote me on this) that Philadelphia uses this system. I know this is an old post, but I just saw it and wanted to give my two cents.

Keviolah
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Generally, you can't distinguish between these different address styles, without additional information. Fortunately, the remainder of the addresses provide some clues as to what address style is in use.

Your first example is a Queens style address. Knowing that the address is in NY, and knowing that it has a specific street name, you might be able to infer that it's in Queens, and treat accordingly. If you had the ZIP code, that would be even better, because then you could restrict treatment of Queens style addresses to only those that have specific ZIP codes.

Jonathan Bailey
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