The Answers Issue: Mary McLeod Public Charter School is located on the 1300 block of Jackson Street NE yet its address is 1404 Jackson Street. Why?

Your question stumped just about everyone. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs referred me to D.C. Public Schools, which referred me to the Department of General Services, which couldn’t come up with an answer. A Mary McLeod Bethune employee—who told me, “We get the question often”—referred me to the Office of Zoning, which referred me to DCRA’s Joe Bembry, who issues street addresses for the District. He did some research—and like everyone else, he came up empty. “It’s just an anomaly,” Bembry says. “It’s just an address anomaly. You can search and search and not even know when or where.” All I can really say is that in the city directory of 1973—the last year these directories were published—the school’s address was listed as both 1300 Jackson St. NE and 3200 14th St. NE (Bembry says it was also once listed as 3115 14th St. NE), and it wasn’t listed as 1404 Jackson St. NE in the Haines Criss+Cross Directory until 2000. So sometime between 1973 and 2000, for reasons still unknown, the address changed.