Before 1891, the area east of the Willamette River was not Portland. It was a separate town, creatively called East Portland. Where the Albina neighborhood is today, there was another town called Albina. Bent on becoming a Big Important City, Portland decided to instantly increase in size by eating the nearby municipalities. "Portland wanted to count the East Portland and Albina population," says Abbott, "so that when people compared its population to Seattle's, Portland's would still be higher. It was very much a promotion and image-making reason." Albina and East Portland saw some service upgrades when they became part of the big city, but it was mostly all about size mattering.

The newly huge Portland had a number of redundancies. For instance, there were multiple streets named after letters or trees. It would not do to have more than one Pine Street in Portland, especially if those streets were on different sides of the river. In 1891, Portland renamed several streets, mostly to eliminate duplicate names.

Curiously, it doesn't seem like many people complained about this. Abbott's assessment of the renaming was that people thought it was a fairly logical thing to do, and when I asked the city archives if they could find any angry letters to the mayor or city council about the project, they came up empty. It seems that hardly anyone in 1891 got too worked up about several streets changing names all at once.

That wasn't the end of it, though. Even though the street names were all in order, the newly coagulated Portland still had a mess of an address system. The addresses (as well as any street suffixes or prefixes that said "NE" or "SE") reflected the systems set up by three different municipalities-Portland, East Portland, and Albina. Starting in the 1920s, city planners embarked on a comprehensive plan to bring some sense to the city's addresses. In 1931, Portland was split into the five "quadrants" we have today, with address numbers counting up from either the Willamette River or Burnside. The city provided complimentary address numbers to everyone in Portland who had to switch out the numerals on their buildings, and we still use that system of X/Y coordinates today. (This has led to some curious numbering, though. Go to the John's Landing area, and you'll see addresses that start with zero. Their location is in a kind of negative space, outside the boundaries of the 1931 grid.)

Again, this was not too controversial when it happened. At the City Archives, I'd hoped to find angry letters to the city complaining about the change. It seems, though, that everyone went along with it. Abbott couldn't recall any controversy either, and said that the only people who really raised a stink were the postal workers, who'd taken the time to learn the old, convoluted address system.

To this day, though, you can sometimes find old, seemingly erroneous street names and address numbers pressed into concrete, relics of names and numbers that used to be.