The Story Behind Portland's Ceramic House Numbers
When we bought our house in Sellwood in 2005, it had them above the front door. We did not give them a second thought at the time, the way you do not think much about the details that have always been there.. Four white ceramic tiles in an aluminum bracket, black numbers on a white field, the same ones you see on older homes all over Portland. When we repainted and updated the exterior a while back, they came down. But I held onto them, and coming across them recently sent me down a rabbit hole I had been meaning to go down for years.
The first time I really noticed them was when a longtime Portlander mentioned them in passing, the way locals mention things they have always known and assume everyone else has too. There was apparently a whole story behind those tiles. I filed it away and finally looked it up.
Before the Numbers Made Sense
Portland in the early twentieth century was a navigational mess. The city had grown by absorbing surrounding communities, including East Portland, Albina, and St. Johns, each of which had its own street naming conventions and numbering logic. By 1891 there were twelve streets called A Street, twelve called B Street, twelve called First Street, and nine called Cedar Street spread across different parts of the city. Finding a specific address required local knowledge that visitors and newcomers simply did not have.
The numbering was equally chaotic. Different neighborhoods used different baselines. Only twenty numbers were assigned per block in some areas. An address of 401 might place you at the corner of 10th Avenue on the west side of the Willamette but off Fifth Avenue on the east side. Letters got lost. Deliveries went to the wrong houses. Even postal carriers struggled.
The Plan
By the mid 1920s, city engineer Olaf Laurgaard and City Commissioner Asbury Lincoln Barbur had seen enough. Barbur assembled a group to study how other cities had solved similar problems and landed on a system modeled in part on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which had developed a logical grid-based approach.
The plan used the Willamette River as the east-west baseline and Burnside Street as the north-south baseline, dividing the city into quadrants. Streets were renamed and renumbered so that each block received 100 numbers, and any address on any street would tell you roughly how many blocks you were from the center of the city. It was elegant in its simplicity, and on September 2, 1931, the city council passed it unanimously.
The Work
What happened next is the part of the story that stays with you.
Portland was in the depths of the Great Depression. The city allocated $10,000 to pay for ceramic number tiles for every house and building in the city and put unemployed men to work installing them. From the fall of 1931 through the summer of 1933, crews fanned out across 66 square miles of Portland, pulling wheeled carts loaded with ceramic tiles, aluminum brackets, hammers, and nails. Workers had to be, as one 1933 Oregonian article put it, young and spry enough to mount stepladders.
The winning bid to supply 150,000 house numbers went to Gladding, McBean and Co. at 4.75 cents per number. Aluminum frames were supplied by Portland Metal Spinning Works. A two-digit frame cost 10 cents. A four-digit frame cost 6 cents. The whole project took 23 months.
Not everyone was pleased with the results. Some residents were unhappy to be assigned addresses containing the number 13.
What It Gave the City
When the Oregonian covered the completion of the project in July 1933, the paper summarized the community response this way: the new system meant a logical and simple way out of a puzzling network of miscellaneous addresses for business owners, tradespeople, and ordinary citizens alike.
It also gave Portland something that has quietly shaped how the city feels to navigate ever since. The quadrant system, the sequential numbering, the predictable logic of knowing that an address in the 3000s is roughly 30 blocks from Burnside, all of it came from that two-year project. When people say Portland is easy to get around, this is part of why.
The Tiles Themselves
The original black on white ceramic tiles in aluminum brackets have outlasted most of the decisions made in the 1930s. You still see them on homes throughout Sellwood, Woodstock, Irvington, Alameda, and other established Portland neighborhoods. Some are original. Some are reproductions. Clay Factor Ceramics in Portland still makes faithful replicas. Hippo Hardware has carried them. Rejuvenation sold a version for years.
Our tiles came down when we repainted. They are sitting in a box now, which feels like the right place for them. Part of the house's history, even if they are no longer on it.
If you walk Portland's older neighborhoods and pay attention, you will start seeing them everywhere. Each one is a small remnant of a two-year civic project that put people to work during the Depression and made a complicated city legible. That is a lot of history for four ceramic tiles in an aluminum bracket.
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Kim Campbell, Realtor | PSA, RENE | Licensed Oregon Broker
Francisco Salgado, Realtor | MCNE, EA | Licensed Oregon and Washington Broker
Campbell Salgado Real Estate Group with Soldera Properties
