by saghm | 2025-09-04 01:39:37+00:00
I have extremely strong personal feelings about how confusing Google Maps can be about something eerily similar to this. For several years up until earlier this year, I lived in apartment in Brooklyn that (along with several other apartments) was in a building that happened to be above a deli. The address of the deli was the same as our apartments, but with no apartment number. However, the entrance to get into the apartments was past the end of the deli itself due to having a small lobby area on the ground floor containing the staircase leading up to the apartments, whereas the entrance to the deli was situated very slightly around the corner that it was on, enough that the door essentially looked to be facing outward diagonally in person, but showing up as slightly on the cross street side when looking at google maps. Because the addresses were so similar, we'd sometimes get mail intended for the deli, and I have to imagine some of our stuff sometimes went there.

Frustratingly, Google Maps only considered the deli entrance to actually be the location of our building, and the visualization it gave depicted entering through the door of the deli despite there being absolutely no way to go upstairs from there (even in the areas not accessible to customers; it was fully separated from the apartments themselves). Due to an unfortunate coincidence, an apartment building slightly further around the corner from us had an address with the same number on the cross street (making up numbers here, but essentially our apartment was 123 4th Ave, and the apartment around the corner was 123 56th St). Street View did not have any address shown when viewing the actual entrance of my apartment building; as far as Google Maps was concerned, that door did not belong to any building. Quite frequently, people seemed to trust Google Maps and assume that the entrance must be on the cross street. When we ordered food for delivery, it was not at all uncommon for the delivery people to ignore the instructions I put (which got increasingly attention-grabbing over the years, ending up with several repeated lines in all caps saying "ENTRANCE IS ON <the name of the avenue>" and "DO NOT GO TO <the name of the street>") and ring the doorbell of the apartment around the corner. Once, an entire desk was even delivered outside of that apartment building around the corner (which was quite annoying due to it being quite heavy and that building being downhill from the avenue). This culminated in our neighbor literally storming into our building with the delivery person to yell at me for being an "asshole" for not being able to do anything about this (although they of course had absolutely no interest in listening to anything I had to say, let alone any ideas I had about how we might be able to work together to get this handled better once and for all).

In the aftermath of that incident, I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to get Google Maps to properly show where the entrance of our apartment was. When I tried to contact their support to get this handled, I was informed that they only supported marking a single location as the entrance for a given address, regardless of apartment number (or the lack thereof), and that my only recourse would be to get the city to give my apartment building an entirely separate address. I asked for them to just slightly move the entrance marker over to be on the same street as the entrance to my building, with the rationale that people would still have absolutely no trouble finding the entrance to the deli since they'd be looking at the corner itself and it would be plainly visible, but it would no longer mislead people into thinking that they needed to enter on the cross street, but my request was ignored. I tried giving feedback within the Maps app itself saying that the location of the entrance was incorrect and suggesting a different pin, but unsurprisingly nothing ever seemed to change.

tl;dr Please do not blindly trust Google Maps as a source of truth for the location of an apartment building's entrance in Brooklyn; I have the emotional scars to prove it. (Probably a decent rule of thumb for other cities too, but I don't have firsthand experience anywhere else).