The different neighborhoods that allow us to experience the city's beautiful multiculturalism is one of many things that makes NYC a great place to live. It is difficult to find a country or culture in the world that is not represented here. As I consider myself to be a lover of most things NYC, I must confess a slight irritation building within me. I'll call it "Acronymania". When I first moved back to NY, I was aware of 2 areas that had initials -
SOHO - South of Houston and
Tribeca - Triangle Beneath Canal. Over the years, new ones have sprung up -
NOHO - North of Houston,
NOLITA - North of Little Italy,
SoHA - South of Harlem (I prefer the original name of Morningside Heights) and now
DUMBO - Down Under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Overpasses - this one I particularly love because it is truly an acronym and flat out tells you who you are if you buy one of these overly-priced apartments:).
Now, the one that recently sent me out to pasture is NOMAD - North of Madison Square Park - seriously - where does is end?? Here's what I realize, when developers get together and want to immediately brand their new neighborhood as "cool and expensive", they develop an acronym/initials so that it can be instantly identified as a hip locale - this is the new apparently ongoing trend.
Although I enjoy the new beauty of these once neglected neighborhoods - do we really need to yuppify everything in NY? I seem to recall an interview with
James Breslin, one of my favorite NYC journalists, where the the gist of what he says is something like "what's wrong with a few prostitutes...can we stop the Disneyfication of Times Square" - in other words, let's not completely lose the grit in NYC. No wonder Law and Order has left the city and moved to LA!:). If you must redevelop, can't you take your cues from the
Meatpacking District - this area kept its name which connotes its history - there were meat packing warehouses and prostitutes who also packed meat :)- but both are gone now (well, at least the more obvious streetwalkers are).
Oddly enough, artists in NY who typically make these once unpopular seedy areas of the city cool, can no longer afford them once they are developed and renamed. Note to developers: Please come up with more creative names when renaming NYC neighborhoods and perhaps make some of the housing affordable to artists and everyday multi-cultural folks who made these neighborhoods cool in the first place. But I guess I can "fuggetaboutit", which is a term you'll never hear unless you visit the outer boroughs.
Check out the
NY Magazine article by Adam Sterbergh for a deeper dive on the issue. NY Times reporter James Barron wrote an article addressing a similar acronym issue in today's paper - read it
here.
