Address

The post address is a fairly straightforward thing to break down. LA's grid extends all the way to San Pedro, and Main St. (later Wilmington, past Lomita) is the East-West dividing line, and 101 freeway kind of dividing things North-South.

So in Carson, since that's my focal point, going South on Main you'll see 223xx between 223rd and 224th. and so on. I used to work in an Ice Cream shop in a shopping center on Sepulveda at Main, and our adress was 1xx E. Sepulveda. Twenty some miles from downtown and on the same grid structure. Amazing! My house is on a N-S street, but I won't say between which two numbers, since I decided to make this blog semi-public.

Our house is in a cul-de-sac, separated by an alley from other E-W streets of the same name, and by train tracks from other N-W streets. A true true dead end. The street names in the area are really all over the place, we got named after a Spanish beach town. We're an avenue, which is supposed to be a broad, tree lined road, and we had Jacaranda Trees before my dad led a tree chopping revolution. Now we have a magnolia. It's sort of a shame, as the Jacaranda is a tropical American tree, with a lot of local history, and the Magnolia is an ornamental imported from the old world.

The City, well not much to say. Carson was incorporated 1959, it's mostly a residential community built around the 110 freeway, the 405, and the 91. Torrance is the closest major city, there's a small shopping mall and a city hall built off the 405, and the Home Depot Center built off the 91.

Zip Code. The 9 narrows it down to California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska. 900 is Los Angeles, 907 is Long Beach, 45 is our postal zone. As far as I can tell, in the old Postal Zone breakdown, Long Beach had it's own numbering system but we were too far west. And we were well south of the end of the LA postal zone. As far as I can tell, Torrance didn't have postal zones set up. But perhaps time will turn up something.