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For a moment there, it seemed like the economic downturn was going to bring a much-needed reality check to the world of real estate. But no. The Daily News reports today on the efforts of real estate brokers to re-brand supposedly undesirable neighborhoods by giving them more marketable monikers — like "GoCaGa" for the area between Gowanus and Carroll Gardens, "BoHo" for the Bowery south of Houston, "SunSlope" for the streets between Sunset Park and Park Slope, and "iTri" for the Iron Triangle in Willets Point. "These names are great selling points for agents trying to bring clients into a neighborhood that wasn't so hip before but sounds a lot hipper now," said Jean Charles, a senior agent at Bond New York, a major sales and rental firm.
This, of course, isn't the first push by the real estate industry to rename wide swaths of the city. Some new names like SoHo, NoHo, Nolita and DUMBO have become well established, while disputes continue over names like Clinton for Hell's Kitchen, and BoCoCa for Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens. Thankfully, the folks charged with cementing neighborhood names into the historical record don't jump in front of every advertising bandwagon. "We look at what the local residents and denizens call it, whether the city recognizes it and what the historical record says," said Marc Jennings, president of the map-making company Hagstrom. "There's something very fluid and generally cool about neighborhood names in New York, so we try and keep up with the changes."
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DumAss
Dear Realtors: FuKoF.
oh come on, you're much better than that. i've come to expect more from you, but as you can tell i keep the bar painfully low for myself.
Ghet To
dislike and it's stupid.
what's next neighborhoods sponsored by Starbucks?
starbucks-berg....
biteme
Not all neighborhood renaming is done by power hungry realtors. People living in the area between Park Slope and Sunset Park have seceded from both and regressed to the original - geographical and historical - name for the area: Battle Hill.
http://battlehillbrooklyn.blogspot.com/
Naming and claiming your neighborhood as your own helps develop a sense on community. With a public garden, public composting, a CSA, and vibrant coffee shops, bars, and restaurants this neighborhood has its own distinct identity and deserves its own name.
Really?! Did you go to Battle Hill High school?
Just another hipster trying to create a cool neighborhood name so that they can blog about the coffee shops.
LOL.
So true.
I've been living on 23rd St. in Brooklyn for four years and I've never heard it called Battle Hill. I've heard it referred to as Green Wood Heights, South Slope, and sometimes Sunset Park but never Battle Hill. Even though they reenact the Battle of Brooklyn in the cemetery every year.
Oh and I agree with the FiDi comment - that nickname is so stupid.
How I Met Your Mother had a cute episode about this a few seasons ago. A neighborhood was dubbed Dowinsetrepla to build up the real estate appeal -- too bad it stood for "Down wind of the sewage treatment plant"
Gotta love real estate agents. I looked at an apartment in Tribecca a few years ago and the guy showing me one building commented that this was the area where the "mature Murray Hill crowd goes when they have full time jobs or are recently married" as if that would somehow make it more appealing
Can anyone tell where the triangle is located in TriBeCa, the triangle below Canal?
"Iron Triangle" sounds so much more bad-ass and awesome than any place called "iTri." I'd totally live somewhere named the former; the latter sounds like a knock-off Apple product.
Also sounds like the hipsters who claim to live in "East Williamsburg" because everybody's getting wise to what a hellhole Bushwick is.
Almost as bad as renaming perfectly serviceable neighborhoods: claiming certain areas are in more fashionable neighborhoods when a blind and deaf dachshund puppy could see that's not the case. This past summer, a real estate agent showed me an apartment on Broadway and Walker, and genuinely tried to convince me that it was in TriBeCa. Son, that's straight-up Chinatown. Don't lie to me, Ohio.
East Williamsburg exists, separately from Bushwick. The border is Flushing Ave. East Williamsburg is mainly industrial, Bushwick mainly residential. What happens in reality is people in E Williamsburg claiming to be in Bushwick... trust me, I live here and see it constantly. Sorry, Roberta's pizza is 2 blocks from the Bushwick line.
The only time I tell anyone I live in East Williamsburg is when I want to get a cab home from Manhattan. Cabbies have yet to catch on!!!
Isn't the place between Gowanus & Carrol Gardens called...Gowanus? Seriously, there isn't that much neighborhood there to divvy up! Or are we talking the former pjs in that area? What is going on over there, anyway?
iTri to give a shit
In the 90s I used to call my neighborhood, at 29th and 10th in Manhattan, Wareho because it was all warehouses and ho's. The ho's are long gone, but the warehouses and taxi repair shops are still there. The high-line will kill these. It will probably be named HI-LI one day.
Where there will be an area to play Jai alai.
"DUMBO" was puerile and insipid ten years ago and still is. I'll take "Vinegar Hill" any day.
Vinegar Hill is not DUMBO; they are separate and distinct areas, historically,demographically and culturally. Vinegar Hill is an old, old neighborhood to the north of current DUMBO.
The name DUMBO was coined in the early 80s by activist artists who wanted to name their group by its neighborhood name, ran a contest, and selected DUMBO, precisely because it sounded so dumb that no realtor would try to market it seriously.
SoHo isn't a new name--it was coined in 1968.
i believe the name "Soho" in swinging London emerged in the 17th century, but i don't want to tell tales out of school.
Right you are! Thus is certainly should not be written as a "new" name.
I love when they call Spanish Harlem SpaHa.
Like putting a silk hat on a pig.
same as SoBro.
GoCaGa is the spanglish equivalent for go take a shit.
I shit you not.
You're right!!! Glad I'm not the only one who thought that.
Que ignorancia!
i love this. real estate agents will add anything to a neighborhood just to sell, them whores.
my favorite: EAST WILLIAMSBURGH (aka Bushwick). My agent even told me Stuyvesant Town was in Gramercy.
There's been an East Williamsburg for decades if not longer. They've just expanded it.
right
East Williamsburg is that industrial zone around the end of the English Kills. Bushwick doesn't begin until you cross Flushing (it is a mainly residential area). Look on any Department of City Planning map, note the city-designated East Williamsburg Industrial Park... as someone who lives there, the opposite is true-- people in the industrial zone around the Morgan stop say/think they live in Bushwick because some blog meme saying East Williamsburg is a made-up name. I think the reality is that realtors were calling areas in Bushwick proper that name. P.S. saying you live in Bushwick has a lot more cachet than having to have this discussion I always need to have about East Williamsburg... you obviously aren't someone who lives in the area.
nope, don't live there and hopefully never will.
you totally missed the point: no one said E. Williamsburgh doesn't exist. I merely blamed the agents who claim Bushwick is the more 'desirable' E.W.
Fool.
The one qualm I have with this is, can't the agents be a little more creative? I mean, invent an entirely new name rather than use the tired tactic of smashing together existing neighborhood and street names? Who the hell would want to live in a place called "GoCaGa?" That sounds like a horrible pop band.
For the record, the area between Park Slope and Sunset Park already has name: Greenwood Heights. And East Williamsburg does exist, it just doesn't go nearly as far east as the real estate agents want you to think.
riiiight. btw: are you a real estate agent?
"I mean, invent an entirely new name rather than use the tired tactic of smashing together existing neighborhood and street names?"
Agreed. It was one thing when there were just a few of these in use, but continually inventing new ones not only has made it completely lame but also means none of them are memorable. If they were to catch on within the given areas those would probably still be the only places where people would know where they were. For the rest of the city it just becomes a confusing mishmash.
StOo-Pid
how pathetic.
PS For the love of god The Financial District is not FiDi. That is retarded.
KNOCK IT OFF. Tell you f'n agents.
You know, I hate realtors as much as if not more than the next person. You kinda can't blame them for trying, and if the name doesn't catch on then they look like fools. But if people like the re-naming, it will stick and everyone will just think it was always named that. Remember, it was the realtors that renamed part of the Lower East Side to become the East Village only 40-50 years ago; Sunnyside, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens and a bunch of other places in Queens were created by realtors (Rego Park was created by the REal GOod Construction Company), and hell NY was renamed by the Brits because New Amsterdam wouldn't go over well in the homeland. So let the realtors play their game - most of the time their names don't catch on, so who really cares?
dowisetrepla
It's up and coming. What, you've never heard of it?
Oh no, of course.. pshhh. yea we have.
"TriBeTar" Triangle Below Target (flatbush and atlantic ave, near the target)
Give them a few decades. By then, every block will have its own name.
DoWiSeTrePla?
When you say GoCaGa, you are really engaging the uvula.
StuNewRea
Stupid Newbies and Real estate agents.
fuck off
Go Caca
So low brow
WestHobo
BushWhack
WilliamsBUG
Greenpernt
Go on Us
Go off us
Bay Wedge
HellHill
Hellheights
Broke-lyn
Me Hing-ho
solongo
Real estate agents are the major name bullshitters, but they aren't the only ones. Back in the 60s someone decided that "Lower East Side" wasn't good enough for Alphabet City and started calling it "Loisida", a supposed Hispanicization of "Lower East Side". When I first came upon this I went around to various Puerto Ricans and Dominicans I knew in the neighborhood and of course they'd never heard of it. It seems to have been the creation of pseudo-hip social worker types. Thankfully, it seems to have died a natural death after a few month's play in the pages of the Village Voice.
What's going to happen to Long Island City, now that it's being stuffed with gentry? "Loici"?
I was living in the LES when the name Loisada got popularized. It WASN'T coined by realtors (unlike the 'East Village'). To the contrary, it was coined by Hispanic activists, aka NewYoricans, as a cultural or nationalist statement of territoriality.
To be sure, I just Wikipediaed it and got this cite: "The term was originally coined by poet/activist, Bittman "Bimbo" Rivas in his 1974 poem "Loisaida"'
Just because the Hispanics you asked knew nothing about it, shows nothing except their lack of their own history and culture.
anyone who thinks "iTri" is habitable by human beings deserves the mutant rat-filled cesspool that he gets.
Rego Park, Queens' original acronym nabe.
On 5th ave and 58th St. there is a deli called "Sunset Ridge" deli. It's smart little name for that spot, as it is either pretty deep in Sunset Park or pretty shallow in Bay Ridge. That is the kind of circumstance a new neighborhood name should arise from, not rebranding.
Sesame Street is now SeSa.
I stole that, by the way.