Carmel chooses convenience over charm as addresses loom

City Hall in Carmel-by-the-Sea soon could have this address: 662 Monte Verde St.

- BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS

HOMES in Carmel-by-the-Sea use whimsical names instead of street addresses. GenaroMolina Los Angeles Times

Seems pretty standard, right? Not in this wealthy little town on the Monterey Peninsula that has never had street addresses.

For 109 years, residents have used directional descriptors — City Hall is on the east side of Monte Verde Street between Ocean and 7th avenues — instead of building numbers. And they have given their homes whimsical names such as Sea Castle, Nut House and A Turn of Fraise.

But this spring, every government building, business and house in the town of 3,200 people will be assigned a number. After decades of debate, city officials this month released a draft map of the one-square-mile town with proposed addresses, which could be implemented as soon as May.

The address issue has long been contentious in artsy Carmel-by-the-Sea, where residents once threatened to secede from California if they were forced to number their homes. They argued that the lack of addresses — along with other quirks, such as having no streetlights or sidewalks in residential areas, leading many to walk at night with flashlights — added to the vaunted "village character."

But the complaints about missed packages and mail-order medications, as well as trouble setting up banking accounts and utilities, kept piling up. And in the aging community where the median age of 69 is nearly double that of the state as a whole-there have been growing fears about emergency responders being unable to find people in the midst of a crisis.

Plus: The California Fire Code requires buildings to have and display addresses.

Carmel-by-the-Sea has long been out of legal compliance.