How to distinguish a NY "Queens-style" street address from a ranged address, and an address with a unit#

Question

I need to distinguish between a Queens style address, from a valid ranged address, and an address with a unit#. For eg:

Queens style: 123-125 Some Street, NY

Ranged Address: 6414-6418 37th Ln SE, Olympia, WA 98503

Address with unit#: 1990-A Gildersleeve Ave, Bronx, NY.

In the case of #3, A is a unit# at street address 1990. THe unit# might be a number as well, for eg: 1990-12. A ranged address identifies a range of addresses on a street, and not a unique deliverable address.

So, the question is, is there an easy way to identify the Queens style address from the other cases?

---- UPDATE ---

Thanks, all. From your answers, it seems that there is no easy way to do this. I basically need to know if a street address in the form ABCD-WXYZ is a Queens-style address pointing to a single property, or if it is a ranged address.

How about some followup questions:

1) Are all addresses in NY City of the form ABCD-WXYZ? 2) Are there any other places in US where this style of addressing is used? Wikipedia seems to imply that is true, but does not give any examples.

Answer 1

Generally, you can't distinguish between these different address styles, without additional information. Fortunately, the remainder of the addresses provide some clues as to what address style is in use.

Your first example is a Queens style address. Knowing that the address is in NY, and knowing that it has a specific street name, you might be able to infer that it's in Queens, and treat accordingly. If you had the ZIP code, that would be even better, because then you could restrict treatment of Queens style addresses to only those that have specific ZIP codes.

Answer 2

This is from the memory of growing up there, so beware:

An address like

198-16 100th Avenue, Hollis, NY, 11423

Can be deciphered first by deciding whether the 11423 zip code is in Queens. If not, then punt.

Next, it says "100th Avenue". That implies that the "198" is referring to "198th Street": Streets always run North to South, and Avenues always run East to West. You get some interesting things with "Road" and "Place" and such, but "Place" is a "Street", and I believe that "Road" is an "Avenue".

To find the building, start at 198th Street, on the South side (even numbers), and start counting. You'll find that 198-16 is on the corner of 199th Street and 100th Avenue, just like it was when I lived there, because if it was on the other side of 199th street, it would have been 200-something.

As to how to distinguish, you could start by applying the above rules, and seeing if you come up with something that makes sense. Maybe the Street never intersects the Avenue? Maybe the numbers don't go up that high (I don't believe there is a 300th Street, and I'm not sure about a 300th Avenue). Maybe the building number is too high (you'd live on a very long street if you lived at 198-200 100th Avenue, especially because the distance from 198th Street to 199th Street on 100th Avenue isn't very great: it's a short block in that direction).

Answer 3

Pass the address through official USPS CASS software like that http://www.semaphorecorp.com

You'll get the address back in standardized form, with any apartment properly parsed and segregated, and flags indicating whether the house and apartment number actually exist or not.