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The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released the name breakdown yesterday for the the 124,099 babies born in New York City in 2004 and the numbers are pretty crazy. Michael and Emily are still the top names, but not by nearly the same margins that they once were. As the Times put it:
New York City has had more baby girls named Fatoumata than Lisa, more Aaliyahs than Melissas, more Chayas than Christinas. There have been more baby boys named Moshe than Peter, more Miguels than Jefferys, more Ahmeds than Stanleys.
Gothamist always gets a kick out of name statistics and every time we read about them we find ourselves going back to the the Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager. And if you haven't read Freakonomics yet, there is a great excerpt on Slate about the fate of California children with "super-black" names. Finally, in case you were curious, there were 27 Katrinas born in New York last year.
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Among female names:
Britney: 350
Katrina: 281
Angelina: 60
Apple: unranked (out of the top 1000)
On a similar note, Garth is unranked among boys.
I'd recommend checking out a documentary called The Sweetest Sound. Filmmaker Alan Berliner explores what's in a name, and how we attach our personas to our names.
He visited the "Jim Smith" convention, which had hundreds of men and boys named Jim Smith. Very odd.
He also searched for every man who had his same exact name, and invited all of them to have dinner at his place. An interesting scene.
After watching it, I vowed to remember to name my future children names that are unique, because the "same name" syndrome seems to strip away individuality.
I like the way my name has clawed its way from nearly the very bottom of the list to its mirror image at nearly the top in just 30 years. At this rate, it may not be too long before I can say, "We're number one!" Then again, when I was growing up, it was a rare but not strange name. That distinctiveness is gone now with so many being given the name.
And then there's New York City's biggest contribution to baby names: Madison, first sprung on an unsuspecting public when Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah passed Madison Avenue in "Splash" 21 years ago. I'm surprised the Times didn't mention that Madison, while #3 in the country, is quite a bit further down in NYC and paradoxically is more popular for Black girls than other ethnic groups, despite having been coined for the lily-white Hannah.