hats off to Scott Fybush

[Scott Fybush]

On 11/2/2013 12:52 AM, A Joseph Ross wrote:

> But if a letter is addressed to "Brighton, NY," and there is no such
> post office, how would the post office know where to deliver it?
>

Someone writing to my house in the pre-zip code era would have addressed 
it to "Rochester 18, N.Y."

Someone writing to the Adirondack Brighton would have addressed it to 
"Paul Smiths, N.Y."

It's much the same way that someone who lived in the town of Perinton, 
just east of Rochester, would have received their mail addressed to 
"Fairport, N.Y." (and later "Fairport NY 14450"), since the post office 
was in the village of Fairport, even if it also served the larger town 
of Perinton that surrounds (and includes) the village.

This is further complicated in New York by the towns that surround 
villages of the same name (like Pittsford and Webster and Victor in the 
Rochester suburbs).

To bring this back to some bare shred of broadcast relevancy, the FCC 
prefers to use villages instead of the surrounding towns as "communities 
of license" in upstate New York, and so there's a "Fairport" allocation 
but not a "Perinton" one, and the "Webster" station shows 70 dBu 
coverage over the village of Webster, not necessarily the larger 
surrounding town.

(Confusingly, though, there's also a Brighton allocation, which is to 
the town. There's no village of Brighton. There once was - but the area 
that was the incorporated village of Brighton was absorbed into the city 
of Rochester in 1905, a few years before the state made annexation 
nearly impossible.)