I know atlases and roadmaps were a lot more common, but from my understanding those give more of a broader view of a large area like major roads and stuff. If you needed to find a small subdivision or small road, how would you do that before the internet?
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Lots of maps lol. Maps for every city, every state, etc. the city maps had street number ranges on them if I remember correctly. And then we switched to printing pages and pages of mapquest directions. People have it so easy now. GPS get us everywhere and we don’t know how to get anywhere without it.
your understanding is incorrect, you would generally use paper maps or you would call up ask for the address, ask for directions, or look up in the yellow pages. but paper maps.
also Street: Usually runs East to West . Avenue: Usually runs North to South
many cities us a number and grid system vs street names and cow paths.
In the US at least, the phone company used to deliver a massive phone book to your door periodically. It was divided into yellow pages (which was organized by business category, e.g. you could look up plumbers in your area), white pages (businesses organized alphabetically), and residential listings (organized by last name). Residential listings gave phone numbers and sometimes addresses. Every home had a phone book, and every phone booth and gas station had one. This was how you looked up an address.
To drive to an address, if you were unfamiliar with the area, you would look it up on a road map, which included an index of street names organized on a grid system. However, most people who had lived in an area for a while would be familiar enough with the roadways to find an address without much help. Or you’d rely on word-of-mouth directions. It was common to get to your destination neighborhood and ask someone on the street for directions to a particular street or business. The attendant at a local gas station would also be a reliable source for directions.
Typically, when a person or business would give out their address, they would also tell you the closest cross-street to their address, or name-drop a major street close-by. For example, “1234 Stooge Street, corner Chaplin Avenue”. or “56 Allen Road, just off of Romano Street near Williams”.
Heck, it’s a good practice that many businesses still do in their advertising today.
I delivered pizzas in the mid-late 90’s. We used paper maps and if the place wasn’t on the map, we’d call them for directions prior to leaving the store. And if we got lost, had to look for a payphone or go all the way back to the store to use the phone there.
Delivery people now have it made. lol
Local phone books often had city maps in them. Ours had the small city and a few outlying towns. It was found in the front of the book or sometimes right before the yellow pages, often near the governmental agencies information and sometimes bus routes. Maps started to be phased out of some phone books about the time the print became so small you could barley read them.
UK here.
If going to a totally unknown place, I would use the road atlas to get there, then go into a local shop and look on the shelves for a local map. This would detail the town down to individual streets.
Hagstrom still makes binder type books by county. You’d have to know the street and town you were looking for then drive down the block reading house numbers. Carried at least 4 or 5 in my van for north NJ, southern NY
Go on like you’re going to that church but instead of taking a right hang a left instead. On down that road you’re going to pass a bunch of cow fields. Keep on going. When you get to that video game store that used to be an old gas station take a right. Keep driving for a long ways until it gets weird. When you see the water tower you’re there. Our house is the one with purple flowers painted on the fence. Come on in!
Every home was delivered a Phone book each year. These phone books contained the name, address and phone number of each person who had a home phone. This was called the White Pages.
There was also the Yellow Pages. Which was similar to the White Pages except for businesses. Businesses paid for these listings.
These gave you the address of places in the area the phone book covered.
On top of the White and Yellow pages these Phone books also contained maps of the area the Phone book covered. Once you know the street you need to head to it was just a matter of looking up that street name in the index of the maps and it told you what map to look at on Page X.
So the most common way people would find address were to look it up in the phone book and head to the map section and find the road they needed to travel to. So you then plotted out your route to get you to that road.
You could also buy complete maps of pretty much everywhere. These contained every road that was there when the current map was made. You could find these all over but just stopping at a gas stations or convenience stores, along with many other stores, in the area you were at was the easiest place to purchase one. These maps really weren’t any different that something like Google Maps, except they covered much smaller areas instead of everywhere.
You might not know exactly where to turn onto a street, but if you know the address it isn’t too hard to look at the posted addresses on any two building and see which way you needed to go to find the address. So if you saw address 123 followed by 125, moving in the direction you were traveling and needed to get to the address 324, you knew you needed to continue heading in the direction you were going until you found the building you were heading to, on the opposite side of the street, as odd addresses are on one side and even addresses are on the other(at least in the US).
If you were traveling a long distance, to say a city in a different state, you would start with an atlas and plot out the major roads you needed to travel to get you to the general area you were heading to. Then you would look at a local map of that area and find the street you needed to head to and plot a route from where you are to the road you needed. Then it was just a matter of looking at the addresses on the street and heading in the direction that would take you to the building you needed to get to.
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