1931-1933 Portland's Great House Renumbering

Have you ever noticed the house numbers around Portland that are white ceramic tiles with black numbers? They look something like this:

These numbers were placed on every home and building throughout Portland in 1933. Portland had grown rapidly in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Each new neighborhood was using their own street naming and numbering conventions, which became rather chaotic and challenging to navigate. As a result, the city passed an ordinance in 1931 to assign new addresses to every building in Portland. Five person crews were sent out to walk the entire city assigning new addresses (and sometimes street names) throughout the city. The process took 23 months and each building was labeled with these new ceramic house number tiles. The newspaper article below from The Oregonian on July 16, 1933 includes a photo showing this process.

The Great Renumbering is how we got the five divisions of Portland that are still used today–NW, N, NE, SW, & SE. If you are curious to know the old address of a building that was built prior to 1933, you can search on PastPortland.com to quickly identify the pre-1933 address. If you really want to nerd out, follow this link to take a look at the city's official directory from 1933 for the renumbering project. It is a 243 page PDF that isn't searchable... so buckle up.

Many homes throughout Portland

still sport their original black & white ceramic house numbers. If your home no longer has this style of house numbers, you can purchase reproduction as a nod to the history. The tiles and the brackets that hold them can be purchased at Hippo Hardware or Schoolhouse.

Before purchasing them, consider poking around in your attic or basement first. One of my colleague's clients just purchased a home that had new more modern house numbers, but they found the original 1930's black & white tiles sneakily displayed in the basement!

If this inspires you to replace the house numbers on your home, send me your before and after photo! (It is something that has been on my to-do list for a while, so stay tuned.)