The Town With No Addresses
Near Carmel, California
Look around and you will notice something strange. Houses here long had no numbers, and there are no streetlights, no parking meters, no neon, and no mailboxes at the curb. For more than a century Carmel-by-the-Sea has refused to deliver the mail.
Residents walk to the post office downtown to collect it, and instead of numbers, houses wear poetic names. The village was incorporated on the thirty first of October, nineteen sixteen, and an ordinance from the nineteen twenties enshrined its character, banning streetlights, sidewalks in the residential districts, billboards, high rises, and chain restaurants. New buildings must be raised around the existing trees, for this is officially a village in a forest overlooking a white sand beach.
And then there is the famous high heel law. Since nineteen sixty three the town has technically required a permit to wear shoes with a heel taller than two inches. It was not vanity, but liability.
The tree roots buckle the pavement, there are no streetlights to see by, and the city wanted protection from lawsuits by anyone who tripped. The permit is free at City Hall, and the clerk will tell you that in all those years, not a single citation has ever been written.
