How can 1555 Hover St. be on Longmont’s south side?
HI JOHNNIE >> I was checking for the address for Oskar Blues restaurant, and several sites listed it as 1555 Hover St. This address would lead me to believe that it is on the north end of Hover Street.
Why is the address for Oskar Blues restaurant on Hover Street, near the railroad tracks, not listed at 1555 South Hover Street? — Judy
HI JUDY >> The restaurant’s address is indeed listed as 1555 S. Hover — just not where you were looking.
Google does not include the “S” in the Oskar Blues address. Visit Longmont’s list of local restaurants does not include the “S.” Even the Oskar Blues Homemade Liquids and Solids website does not include the “S.”
But Boulder County property records include the “S,” and the United States Postal Service recognizes the address as being on South Hover. No matter. Since there is no 1555 Hover St., on the north end of town, “mail addressed with or without the ‘S’ will arrive safe and sound as in our database both addresses have the same ZIP plus four,” USPS spokesman James Boxrud said.
“People probably started sending (mail) to 1555 Hover instead of their physical address,” he said. “My guess is, someone put into our address management database that anything addressed to 1555 Hover is delivered to 1555 South Hover.”
As I’m sure you’re aware, Judy, addresses that are north and west in Longmont are not denoted with “N” or “W.” Only south and east streets are labeled, with “S” and “E.”
So, why is it that some websites list the address without noting that it is on South Hover? Because there’s nothing official about those websites.
I turned to one of our inhouse social media specialists, who noted that the internet “can pull addresses from various sources, including regular people submitting.”
Even the assistant manager at Oskar Blues who I spoke with wasn’t aware the restaurant’s website listed the address as 1555 Hover St., noting that the business’s IT is handled remotely.
Assistant manager Maddy Artayet was kind enough to spend a few minutes with me during an early evening, as customers — like the mail — were arriving safe and sound at the restaurant.
No one has ever told her they had a hard time finding the restaurant, she said.
After all, there is a large silo next to the building, quite visible from the Diagonal Highway, with the words “Oskar Blues” painted on it.
It’s not likely that the “S” will ever matter, because the west side of the 1500 block of (north) Hover has no room for anything but a bus stop, so I cannot imagine there will ever be another 1555 Hover St.
There you have it, Judy. Thanks for the … wait a minute. Plus four? What exactly is that?
“That’s the four characters after the ZIP Code,” Boxrud said. “What it does is allows us to sort that mail for delivery.”
Some people add those four digits when addressing an envelope. If they don’t, then machinery at the post office reads the addressee’s name and prints a bar code on the envelope representing the plus four.
Why does that matter? Imagine yourself to be a mail carrier, having just left the post office with stacks of letters, bills and parcels to be delivered. It’s most efficient if the mail for the first houses on your route are toward the front of the stack, the mail for houses in the middle of your route are in the middle of the stack, and the mail for the houses at the end of your route are at the end of the stack. That’s where “plus four” comes in.
To see how this affects my mail delivery, I went to the USPS ZIP Code lookup website and looked up my own neighborhood. The houses in my block on my side of the street all have the same plus four. The houses on my block on the other side of the street all have their own plus four. It makes sense. In each ZIP Code, the Postal Service can have up to 10,000 such micro delivery areas, organizing mail down to the block.
“We’ve even had two more digits added onto that in the last couple of years,” Boxrud said, noting that apartment complexes can add so many addresses to a ZIP Code that “we wouldn’t have enough numbers. We have more than 10,000 addresses in each of those.”
Thanks for the question, Judy, and for the opportunity to provide an answer that roamed a bit.