House Numbering
In areas surveyed according to the grid system, there are typically baseline streets establishing a house numbering system throughout a city or county. All north-south streets are numbered starting at 1, or sometimes 100, at the east-west baseline, and vice versa. This is true even if a street begins far away from the baseline, so a one-block street could have four- or even five-digit house numbers. Hamden has the system generally used in New England where each street begins with number 1 at one end. To illustrate the difference between these systems: the first building on Dixwell Avenue north of Cherry Ann Street is numbered 834, but the first building on a parallel street, Alstrum Street, at Cherry Ann is numbered 12. On the grid system it would be about 834.
Major north-south streets tend to have increasing numbers going northward, as they extended out from New Haven. Shorter streets tend to increase leading away from a major street. With few exceptions on very short streets, odd numbers are on the right side of the street when traveling in the direction of increasing numbers, whatever that is. This seems to be the trend in most Connecticut towns. North Haven has even numbers on the right side, but Hamden streets extending into North Haven keep odd on the right.
House numbers usually increase by one per approximately ten feet of street frontage. Consecutive even or odd numbers are thus 20 feet apart, about the smallest practical width of a house. While it is common in large cities for houses to be that close, in most of Hamden they are further, often much further, apart, meaning the first houses on a street usually have larger numbers than 1 and 2, and the difference between the numbers of adjacent houses is much larger and variable. On a few of the newest streets, such as Morning View Court, adjacent houses have consecutive odd or even numbers even though they are much farther than 20 feet apart, a practice sometimes used in rural areas.
Numbers do not increase in increments of 100 at each "block" or intersecting street, as is common with the grid system elsewhere. Emergency services will sometimes describe an incident as occurring in, for example, the “1600 block” of Whitney Avenue, but its numbers in the 1600s span all or part of six physical blocks. However, all of Mountain Road, with numbers into the 800s, is one physical block.
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