On a walk around downtown the other day, I had the idea of photographing the address plates on buildings and houses as a sort of documentation of one of the compelling little mundanities of practical aesthetics: every building gets a number, and someone has to decide how to attach that number.

So this is an initial foray into documenting address plates.  (I suppose there’s a better word than “address plate”, but I don’t know the what the right term is.)  Here we go:

I was killing a little time this weekend near Saturday Market, in Old Town.  I was a couple block south of Burnside, and started snapping shots of the east side of the street as I wandered north.  This is very much business district territory; small office storefronts and such.

These five are under the arches above a partitioned row of spaces in a single building; the numbers are stickered (or perhaps painted) on the inside of the glass, probably 3-4 inches tall and about eight or nine feet above the street.  They’re not particularly easy to read.  (Nor, in the case of 118, easy to focus on, apparently.)

This spans a window; the full text takes up a lot of space but the “204″ itself is comparatively small.  There’s something about writing out the whole street name that I find kind of charming; I don’t know why. 

See 208 below for its big brother.

Hand-painted, white on purple.  Letters are about 6-8 inches tall, I’d say.  The light-on-dark is probably a good plan for visibility; you can imagine how this’d look if I hadn’t framed the reflected light below the numbers in the shot.

Unlike 204, this sign is actually huge.  That’s a great big storefront window; whatever is going on in 208, they don’t want you to have trouble finding the place.

One of a pair (with 228), these are wood attached to the wooden molding of the building’s front, probably 6 inches tall, perhaps a foot off the street.

And in between the matching 220 and 228, we’ve got rebelious 224 with the double whammy; a very simple white font number on the arch above the door, and then this colorful sticker more at eye-level.  Love the red-numerals vs. black-letters thing, especially with the use of “1st” instead of “first” to keep the sticker squarish and get more mileage out of the color theme.

220’s southern brother.

The only vertical address on this stretch; metal numbers screwed into the wooden siding of the building. 

And that’s it for those two blocks.  (Three, really, if you count the “00s” block I started on, which has no address plates facing the right way and thus no pictures.)  There are a whole lot of interesting variations in just this first handful — font, material, color, size, placement, consistency or not across shared storefronts.