Campus directions

Signs (without Mel Gibson) - watch more funny videos

How many times have you been the person in green? How many times have you been (or wanted to be) the person in black? Walking around UofM's campus (especially during the summer), one gets many opportunities to be the man in black. Unfortunately (for those of us who want to be that guy) or fortunately (for those of us who hate people being that guy), mobile internet and Google maps (and equivalent software) make such wanderings less likely, since you can get the street address from online (thanks to your mobile internet device) as well as driving (or sometimes walking - thank you Google maps) directions from where you are (if you happen to know the cross-streets or address of your starting location) to your destination (assuming that it is located any where need the street address).

Here are two (of many) examples of how street addresses and actual locations don't really correspond at the University of Michigan's Central Campus.

The School of Natural Resources and Environment is not physically located on Church Street. The address was changed from "East University Ave" to "Church Street" a few years ago, when the Post Office declared that East University Avenue didn't exist north of South University. (East U was called that because it used to be the street running along the eastern side of the campus, way back in the mid-1900s. It was pedestrianized over the previous decades, and now the only vehicular access to it is via an alleyway located just south of where the Google "A" is located.) Furthermore, although North University is technically "closer" to the building, the main entrance (which used to face East U) faces Church Street, thus 440 Church Street.

 

Here is the non-juxtaposition of the street address and the actual location of the Graduate Library. No strange weirdness here. Just an extrapolation of the final point from above: the library "faces" North University, thus it gets an address of "North University", even though is it much closer to South University (especially if you consider that the stacks (the building immediately to the south of the one with the arrow pointing to it) is also considered part of the Grad Library... Still, one gets the address of the street one faces. (Usually... since the Center of African and Afro-American Studies, located in Haven Hall -- which faces into the Diag -- has an address on State Street not Church.)