1938 Almanac for New Yorkers

November 19, 2010 8:02 AM

Where will you be one week from today? "In this age of restless wanderings, how can you be certain where some urgent call may take you? What guarantee have you that a feeble cry in the night, a sudden emergency call, or a "date" will not summon you hurriedly to 431 Eighth Avenue?"

From the 1938 Almanac for New Yorkers, prepared by the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program. The above quote appears on page 113, and what follows makes my iPhone-weakened brain hurt:

"Here's how .... Drop the last digit in the street number, leaving, in the
case of 431 Eighth Avenue, 43. Divide this by 2 and then add the secret code number
given below for Eighth Avenue, and the result is the crosstown street
nearest your destination. In the case of 431 Eighth Avenue, the street is 31^
which gives you a choice of either 31st or 32nd. Now you try one."

posted by pollex (11 comments total)

you've been reading my dream journal again metafilter...
posted by The Whelk at 8:26 AM on November 19, 2010

That's a pretty sweet viewer.
posted by geoff. at 8:29 AM on November 19, 2010

Basically, an old-timey TimeoutNY, with just a bit more humor and class mixed in with the useful info. Like!
posted by adamms222 at 8:35 AM on November 19, 2010

How much would a revival of Federal One cost today? A 1% corn subsidy reduction? One F-35? Another week in Afghanistan?
posted by theodolite at 8:39 AM on November 19, 2010

Just checking my birthday, January 11, I find that "One might register for courses in Medicine or Dental and Oral Surgery at Columbia this week, if one wished" and "This day in 1907 a writer-to-the-Tribure complained that her three woman servants cost her $67 a month instead of the $50 a month they had been paid twelve years earlier, and she didn't like it."

I'm grateful to your for the delightful find, pollex, although I fear my productivity will suffer commensurate with my perusal of it.
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 10:26 AM on November 19, 2010

Going based on the title, I think most Americans will be at target, stomping each other for Paul Blart DVDs.
posted by djduckie at 11:16 AM on November 19, 2010

May 4: "New York's first cricket match was played about this time in 1751 on the site of Fulton Market. It was very dull."
posted by dngrangl at 11:18 AM on November 19, 2010

I was highly confused about the quote above. I had no idea what it meant, so I looked on page 113 and found nothing resembling the quote above. Well, I found out that there are two things that you might call "Page 113". There's the page # that the pdf viewer assigns, and there's the number printed on the page in the source material. It looks like the source material feels that the 113th page of the document is called "Page 103" or something.

Anyway, it turns out that the quote above is about how to use the street address to find the cross-streets nearest the address. They give a formula which includes a look-up table of numbers to add, in order to get the right cross-street.

I always thought that the addresses worked in such a way that, like, 431 Eighth Ave would be on like 43rd and Eighth, but apparently not.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 11:29 AM on November 19, 2010

Anyway, it turns out that the quote above is about how to use the street address to find the cross-streets nearest the address. They give a formula which includes a look-up table of numbers to add, in order to get the right cross-street.

Yeah, I got confused on the reader vs. book page numbers too, but quickly figured it out. That's pretty interesting, as far as locating street numbers.

I used to do the same thing in SF when riding the bus west/south of Van Ness.

Mission St. (or Folsom/Harrison/Bryant, I believe): divide address by 100, then subtract 4 to get the block (e.g. 2807 Mission is between 24th and 25th streets)

Valencia (or South Van Ness): divide by 100 and add 11.

It's still worthwhile if you don't have an internet-enabled phone. "1230 Valencia? Oh, that's on the west side of the street, between 23rd and 24th. Probably just past Buffalo Exchange."
posted by mrgrimm at 12:18 PM on November 19, 2010

I always thought that the addresses worked in such a way that, like, 431 Eighth Ave would be on like 43rd and Eighth, but apparently not.

In any city with a sane grid system, like, say, Chicago, it would.

But in those quaint eastern cities which were not engineered from scratch on the raw, sprawling midwestern earth, you need something like this
posted by jammer at 12:06 PM on November 20, 2010

FLASH MOB at 32nd st. watch out for the horse poo!
posted by ~Sushma~ at 2:04 PM on November 21, 2010