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?
In: 27
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
When I was temping in the mid 90s as a college student, every time I got a new assignment the agency would give me specific directions, which I would write down.
If I had to be somewhere new and no one had given me directions, I would break out the big atlas-style map of the city and find the road in the index, go to the proper page, and look for the grid numbers (like Battleship).
When Mapquest first showed up, it was groundbreaking stuff. You would just print your Mapquest directions before any trip and you’d be good to go. If you didn’t have a printer, you just copied them by hand.
I hate having to look at a phone when I’m driving now, because listening to directions on Google or Waze doesn’t help me much. I have to look at how the road name is spelled to find the correct sign.
Car GPS units were my favorite. But now my car GPS is shit compared to Google or Waze.
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.
City maps were pretty commonly available. And most cities are organized so that streets are split between those with names and those with numbers. So maybe north/south streets are called 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. East/west streets have names like Main, Rood, White, etc. if you want to find 740 Rood Street you know it is on Rood between 7th and 8th Street.
Stop at a phone booth to look up the address in the phone book. Then reference that to a map book people usually kept in their vehicles. Or if you heard of the place from someone else they would give you specific directions where to turn of the street name wasn’t a well known one.
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