To solve this problem, Maria Theresa invented house numbers, changing many aspects of the way people have lived since.

Her officers counted 7 million people over the course of a winter, and painted more than 1.1 million numbers on the outside walls of homes in thick black paint “made of oil and boiled bones,” according to “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power,” by Deirdre Mask (newly released by St. Martin’s Press).

While we take house numbers for granted, Mask quotes historian Anton Tantner, whom she calls “perhaps the world’s leading expert on house numbers,” as saying they “can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment.”.

The existence of house numbers has countless effects on our everyday lives.

“An address, today, is an identity; it’s a way for society to check that you are not just a person but the person you say you are,” she writes.

One of the many effects of house numbers and street addresses has been in helping combat infectious diseases.

With the address of every victim before him, he was able to see that “almost all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the Broad Street pump.”.

Mask cites Mark Twain’s writings about the unhelpful building numbers in late 1800s Berlin, which seemed randomly chosen.

The first American house numbers came from the British, who used them to “keep track of revolutionaries.”.

One step toward standardizing them came in 1790, when Clement Biddle, an adviser to George Washington, invented “the Philadelphia system,” which consisted of odd numbers on one side of a street and even numbers on the other.

William Penn, a Quaker, furthered this by adding numbered streets to the Philadelphia grid, which Mask notes is a “peculiarly American phenomenon,” and that “seven out of the 10 most common street names in America are numbers.”.

and a major local landowner, suggested changing the numbered avenues to “the names of the newest states and territories,” which would have changed Eighth Avenue to Montana Place, Ninth to Wyoming Place, 10th to Arizona Place and 11th to Idaho Place.

His fellow landlords rejected these, selecting the current names of Central Park West, Columbus, Amsterdam, and West End Avenue instead.

As a consolation, Clark “had to be content with naming his new luxury apartment building at Central Park West and 72nd Street The Dakota.”.

It’s no accident that Central Park West is an expensive address; the name was specifically chosen to be expensive.”

In 2016, Mask writes, developers William and Arthur Zeckendorf made a deal to pay Park Avenue’s Christ Church $30,000 a year for 100 years for the rights to 520 Park Ave., even though their building at that address “does not even have frontage on Park Avenue; it is actually on East 60th Street, 150 feet west of that avenue.”

“The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000, to apply to change the street address to something more attractive,” Mask writes

She highlights the occasional insanity of this by noting that, in the area surrounding Madison Square Garden, “the numbers of the Penn Plaza addresses, in order, are 1, 15, 11, 7, and 5.”

Mask cites an Australian research project where high-school students identified 27 streets with silly names, including Butt Street, Beaver Street and Wanke Road, and found that “property on these streets costs 20 percent less than [on] adjacent streets — on average, about $140,000 in savings.”

“In the 18th century, residents protested violently when officials marched through their villages painting numbers on their homes,” she writes