Wed Nov 27, 2013 3:02 pm
For the record, where I grew up in Battle Creek, MI, had a really strange address boundary. The south side of West Territorial Road (where I lived) has a normal "hundreds block" numbering system, counting blocks west from the north-south Southwest Capital Avenue (again, it's a consequence of weirdness, as the downtown area was on an NE-SW/NW-SE grid system, while the rest of the city is on an N-S/E-W grid system... but Capital, being pretty much the main artery through the center of the city, is signed as if it's in the downtown area even when it's running N-S). Both EAST Territorial and the first 10-ish blocks of the NORTH side of West Territorial used some sort of mostly-sequential system that didn't number by blocks. I lived at 419 W Territorial; the house across the street was 142.
This was a relic of a quirk of the city boundaries. Up until 1980 (or maybe a little later), West Territorial was the boundary line between the City of Battle Creek and Battle Creek Township, two legally distinct municipalities, each with their own standards, city services, school districts, etc. In fact, the *centerline* of West Territorial was the boundary, with the south side being in the Township, and the north side being in the City. (This even means that there are separate water mains, sewer mains, and power grids on opposite sides of the street, because those networks were laid out while they were separate.) In 1980 or so, the City annexed the Township, but due to inertia and public resistance, the streets were never renumbered.
And to bring it back around to sirens, just four doors down from my house was one of the Township fire stations, which had some sort of omnidirectional siren mounted on it. (I don't remember what kind; I was only about four years old when the annexation went through!) After annexation, since it was old, small, and in fairly poor condition, as was the nearby (like, maybe five blocks away) City fire station, part of the rationalization of City and Township services was to close both old stations and build a big new modern fire station about a mile further west. The siren didn't move with the new station, since the City already had an SD-10 on a water tower about four blocks north of the old Township station, plus the ANG base's Thunderbolt at the airport about two miles to the west, a couple more 4/5-port 1000Ts downtown (about two miles N and NE), and a couple of EOWS-612s scheduled to arrive in 1983 or so at schools about two miles SE and S, it was felt that the area was already sufficiently covered, and since the City used a full-time fire department, there was no need for a fire siren. It was, however, removed, and I suspect it was either sold to one of the suburbs or moved into an undercovered area.
The old Township fire station is now a podiatrist's office, and while I distinctly remember there being a bracket off the hose-drying tower that the siren had been mounted on, there's no longer any sign of it having ever been there at all. When the water tower to the north, with the SD-10, was removed and replaced by a ground-level water tank, the SD-10 was replaced with one of the city's new-siren standard rotating ATIs. The T-bolt at the airport has been replaced by two Mods, a quarter-mile apart(!). And I've not been to Battle Creek in almost ten years now. But apparently, three of the downtown 4/5-port 1000Ts are still in place, along with quite a few of the city's SD-10s, since the city EM's policy seems to be to only replace sirens if they break badly enough to be cost-ineffective to repair... and I'm rambling now, so I'll stop.
But yeah, my point is that strange address boundaries aren't at all uncommon, and usually relate to historic quirks of municipal boundaries...
