How a Machine Gave UC Davis an Address

I have a riddle for you: 

You can send me a letter, but you can’t knock on my door. 

Where am I? 

One Shields Avenue! 

One Shields Avenue is the official mailing address for the UC Davis campus, yet it does not belong to any particular street or building. 

So how did we get this address? Mail has long arrived at a central campus location before UC Davis employees from the Logistics Department deliver mail to individual departments. Until 1997, the address looked like this: 

Department Name
University of California
Davis, CA 95616 

Notice what’s missing? A street address. 

That became a problem when new Postal Service machines used optical character readers to sort mail. They needed a street address they could recognize. The solution was to give our sprawling campus one common address: One Shields Avenue. Mail would still arrive centrally, and Logistics would still handle the last leg of its journey. 

The name honors Peter J. Shields, a Sacramento judge and champion of agricultural education who helped secure the 1905 legislation that established the University Farm, which became UC Davis. He also bred prize Jersey cattle. Today, his name graces our library, the road beside it, an oak grove and … an address that cannot be found on a map. 

The announcement about this change in 1997 encouraged departments to use up their old stationery before ordering more with the new address but also because, concurrently, the area code for the campus was switching from the 916 to 530. 

One Shields Avenue is a small reminder that adapting to technology and change in general is nothing new. Today, I see that same willingness across FOA to embrace change, try new approaches and find better ways to work. I’m grateful to the people who make those improvements happen, often behind the scenes. 

What began as a solution to a postal problem became part of how the world finds UC Davis.