How to Name a Neighborhood

[krulltime]

From NoChel to NoCal: How to Name a Neighborhood

By Eric Marx, May 2004

Like tiny Eastern European breakaway republics, the plethora of newly named neighborhoods carved out of older, existing neighborhoods is emerging as these enclaves proclaim their own identity, their own independence and their own real estate price brackets.

Yet how, when and by whom these emerging enclaves get pegged with an appellation is hardly a science. In fact, it’s more of a free-for-all, with names sprouting up first amongst real estate brokers, developers and then the media. A case in point is the neighborhood between Chelsea and Clinton, which has been called everything from Chelsea Heights to Hell’s Pantry and NoChel.

Typically, the allure of being associated with the happening neighborhood next door explains why brokers seek to rebrand existing names such as Chelsea Heights or North Chelsea.

Abbreviated geographically based names such as SoHo, TriBeCa and NoHo have spawned lesser offspring as well, in hopes (usually the hopes of real estate brokers) that those neighborhoods will also attain a certain cachet.

Take NoBat, for example, or North of Battery Tunnel, a name recently coined by a broker (pictured on cover page; also see "Post 9/11 Transplants Say ’Yes’ to NoBat" in this issue).

That approach appeals to brokers like Tim Melzer of Douglas Elliman, who said he wanted to call the area now known as Hudson Square by the catchy appellation NoCal, for north of Canal Street.

The approach doesn’t work in all cases.

"That sounds like a soda pop to me," said Jason Pizer, director of commercial leasing with Trinity Real Estate, which, as the largest real estate owner in the area, is credited with currying favor with the city in order to get the Hudson Square moniker to stick.

"It’s been called Hudson Square for about 200 years," Pizer said. "I like the way it sounds - strong, sophisticated, and from a historical perspective it identifies the area by its true name. It’s not something we invented. We just dug it out of the files and dusted it off."

Of course, attempting to resurrect a historical name doesn’t guarantee it will catch on. For years, the Rose Hill community association labored in vain to revive that name for the area between 23rd and 34th and Madison and Third Avenues. The Rose Hill farm ranged through the area in the 1870s, but has since been subdivided into Kips Bay, the Flatiron District, Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. The revival attempt has met with only limited success.

Elsewhere, community residents have been successful in setting their neighborhoods apart from neighboring blocks. In Hudson Heights, an enclave in the northwestern section of Washington Heights, residents have effectively established a separate identity, with an eye to property values.

"It wasn’t real estate brokers who came up with the name," said Simone Song, owner of Simone Song Realty. "It was the shareholders up here who gathered together to form the Hudson Heights Owners Coalition. They wanted to keep up their neighborhood."

Over in Brooklyn, Lee Solomon of William B. May says a slew of new neighborhood names are popping up, fueled in part by booming real estate values that continue to push folks further and further out into the fringes. According to Solomon, everyone from homeowner associations to residents and the city landmark commission have influenced the delineation of "new" neighborhood boundaries.

"I think it’s happening organically," she said, "and I’d like to think that’s because there’s a great deal of concern for the existing community."

Copyright 2003-2004 The Real Deal

[krulltime]

A HILL OF A NEW AREA

By ANNE BECKER, May 29, 2004

EVER clever Manhattan developers are used to conjuring Up fancy new names for neighborhoods they're trying to promote - Chelsea Heights anyone?

Ergo, meet "Gramercy Hill" - an enclave knighted by some downtown developers to promote their condos of the same name. "We thought it'd be kind of catchy to come up with a new neighborhood, so we coined the phrase," says Kenneth Horn, president of Alchemy Properties, which is developing 120 Gramercy Hill.

The condos, at 129 E. 29th St., are actually five contiguous 1880 brownstones that Alchemy's spent $9 million to renovate. They brought in an architect, gutted the original buildings down to the walls and added a couple extra stories in height. "They had been stripped of their grace as a hodgepodge of office buildings," Horn says. "We wanted to maintain the look of the neighborhood before it was converted from its original look." So sometime in December, that original look will be back, along with 25 one- to four-bedroom condos, ranging in size from 1,002 square feet to 2,659 square feet.

Prices start at $675,000 and go up to $2,400,000. After just six weeks on the market, half of the units were already spoken for. Six ground-floor duplexes score private gardens and storage space, and 11 other apartments get private terraces or balconies. And all that's in addition to the 1,650- square-foot common roof deck.

The extra-special penthouses get built-in Miele coffee systems, fireplaces and oversized refrigerators.

Alchemy designates the Gramercy Hill neighborhood as a Gramercy Park/Murray Hill hybrid between 25th and 31st streets, bounded by Park Avenue South and Lexington Avenue. In recent years, the area's seen a bevy of restaurants such as Dos Caminos and Blue Smoke sprouting on and around Park Avenue.

"The neighborhood will definitely change over time for the better," says Anne Tschida, who recently bought on 120 Gramercy Hill's fifth floor. "It's becoming hot with retail." Tschida, 31, and her husband currently live just a block away in a one-bedroom on 29th and Third. But they had enough faith in the 'hood's future to hunker down and invest there when looking for bigger digs.

Just don't ask the communications consultant to agree to the new nomenclature. "Maybe the name will catch on in five or 10 years," she says. "But I don't know if it'll make me change how I call it. It's definitely a marketing tool for the building."

NYPOST

[Merry]

Oh, dear .

Not ready for BoCoCa, GoCaGa or BoHo? Boo-hoo! Brokers behind push to rebrand city's neighborhoods

BY Kevin Deutsch



What's in a name? Plenty if you're a hipster or a real estate broker who thinks the old-fashioned neighborhoods of New York are a bit too passé.

From BoCoCa to Gramurray, the Big Apple is being sliced and diced into fresh-sounding quadrants all the time - and some of the new names are actually sticking. Even mapmakers have adopted DUMBO for the loft-laden area down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.

SoHo, short for south of Houston St., and Tribeca, for the triangle below Canal St., have been around for decades and are as bona fide as Greenwich Village. NoHo, north of Houston St., and Nolita, the abbreviation for north of Little Italy, are newer but well-established.

You'd be hard-pressed, though, to find many people who call the Bowery below Houston St. by its new nickname - BoHo.

The shorthand for the "iron triangle" of Willets Point in Queens - iTri - seems destined to go the way of the Mets' postseason hopes.

BoCoCa, an amalgamation of three old-school Brooklyn neighborhoods - Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill - never caught fire.

GoCaGa for Gowanus and Carroll Gardens invited ridicule. So did SunSlope, a name invented by a broker trying to sell condos in Greenwood Heights, which some consider a fancier name for Sunset Park.

The force behind the rebranding is the real estate industry. Brokers are known for pushing boundaries: Park Slope must be twice as big as it was 30 years ago, and newcomers to Bushwick are told they're buying in East Williamsburg.

Sometimes they go even further by renaming a community - Clinton for Hell's Kitchen - or creating one out of whole cloth.

"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.
They're not the only culprits. Bloggers can create a groundswell for a name change, too. The Web site Curbed.com decreed that the unnamed swath east of Fifth Ave. between 23rd and 34th Sts. should be called Gramurray.

The practice is as old as the Brooklyn Bridge. In a city obsessed with real estate, property sellers have been playing fast and loose with names since the 19th century.

"They're hawking a whole other city, and it's been happening for a long, long time," said Joseph Ditta, a librarian at the New-York Historical Society who penned a book about Gravesend, the city's gloomiest-sounding 'hood.

Kathleen Hulser, public historian at the society, said, "It was and still is a way of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders."

Citing the morphing of Bloomingdale into the upper West Side, she said, "People want to put their mark on a place by changing its name."
For mapmakers, the threshold's a bit higher, but they're still open to suggestion.

"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 Hagstrom.

"There's something very fluid and generally cool about neighborhood names in New York, so we try and keep up with the changes."

http://www.nydailynews.com/real_esta...#ixzz0WMCSgDJm

[Merry]

Soho. Nolita. Dumbo. NoMad?

Branding the last unnamed neighborhood in Manhattan.

By Adam Sternbergh

Close your eyes and picture Broadway between 23rd and 30th Streets. There’s a good chance you’re either drawing a blank or you’re envisioning a long strip of wholesale perfume retailers, luggage liquidators, and stores that specialize in human-hair wigs. This is not the most picturesque area in the city, nor the most easily romanticized. Instead, it is famously the neighborhood, south of Herald Square, north of Flatiron, and east of Chelsea, that, on the classic New York taxi maps, stood alone as officially nameless. It was simply an unlabeled rectangle. And brown.

Now close your eyes and picture NoMad.

NoMad isn’t a neighborhood, not yet. In fact, there’s not really much to NoMad so far, except a few scattered restaurants, a handful of rental buildings, and, of course, the Ace Hotel, that humming new hotel–restaurant–bar–coffee shop–sandwich emporium–fancy clothing boutique that stands, like a planted flag, at Broadway and 29th Street. From the street, at night, in a downpour, you might peek through the steamed-up windows of the Ace and get a dreamy glimpse of the people inside, lit by lamplight, perched on armrests, cradling drinks. A clipboard-equipped doorman, studiously scruffy, might then helpfully redirect you away from the entrance for Hotel Guests Only, toward the Stumptown coffee, to an interior door, which will be locked. A barista, wearing cat’s-eye glasses, will regard you, not without pity, and say, “We’re at maximum capacity.”

How do you make a neighborhood? Can you conjure one out of thin air? If the crowds at the Ace are any evidence, then yes, you can, sort of, at least for a moment. The Ace opened officially one year ago, and it’s now the heart of the district called NoMad (North of Madison Square Park), insofar as any such neighborhood exists. Like never-never land, NoMad is a place that can only be visited if you believe in it hard enough.

In 1963, Chester Rapkin, a University of Pennsylvania professor and urban-planning expert, sat down with a map of New York. He was preparing a study for the city government on an area of downtown Manhattan that was full of landmark architecture but faced widespread demolition, since much of its former industrial life had drained away. Rapkin hoped to persuade the city to save the area as an urban incubator, where small and mid-size businesses might thrive. On his map, the area in question was marked SOUTH HOUSTON INDUSTRIAL AREA; Rapkin shortened this to Soho and used this nickname in his report. And in this one act of graceful (and ultimately successful) preservation, Rapkin not only helped save the area; he loosed the viral idea that in New York City you can essentially call a neighborhood into existence with sheer will, imagination, and a catchy acronym.

Of course, Rapkin had lots of help on the ground—the artists, for example, who colonized the area’s cheap lofts; the galleries that followed the artists; the restaurants that followed the galleries; the resultant boutiques, and so on, in the cycle of urban regeneration now so familiar to New York. This cycle repeated itself in Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal), a name that was coined in the seventies and later took on the luster of a brand—literally, in the case of the 2006 car model named the Subaru Tribeca. Since the coining of Soho, dozens of Balkanized slivers of Manhattan and Brooklyn have been diced up, claimed, and either renamed (Nolita, Noho, Soha) or simply reimagined (the meatpacking district, Williamsburg, Park Slope). Three years ago, on How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom set in New York, two characters bought into the trendy and up-and-coming DoWiSeTrePla neighborhood, only to find out later that it stood for “Down Wind of Sewage Treatment Plant.”

The nameless neighborhood in that brown taxi-map rectangle—roughly bordered by Madison Square Park to the south, 34th Street to the north, Broadway to the west, and Second Avenue to the east—has always resisted such neighborhoodification, despite boom times and persistent attempts. Back in 1996, some plucky Silicon Alley entrepreneurs tried to christen the area Soma, partly meaning “South of Macy’s” and partly in homage to San Francisco’s neighborhood of the same name. (No mention of Aldous Huxley.) The name didn’t stick. Then in 1999, the Times ran an article titled “The Trendy Discover NoMad Land, and Move In,” picking up on a popular coinage that seems to have appeared that year. That one didn’t stick either. By 2001, this magazine declared that NoMad “has fallen out of use,” with Leonard Steinberg of Corcoran explaining, “The connotation was bad, like you’re in no-man’s-land.” (It didn’t help that Madison Square Park, the area’s jewel amenity, was not fully revitalized until 2001.) In 2007, Times theater critic Charles Isherwood, who lives on Madison Avenue, wrote an essay in which he called his neighborhood simply “the Brown Zone” and lamented the “shaming fact of its namelessness.” NoMad, both the name and the neighborhood, lay dormant. Then Andrew Zobler took a taxi ride downtown.

Zobler, the 48-year-old CEO of GFI Development, recalls riding down Broadway late nights from his office in midtown to his home in the West Village, and as he passed through the Brown Zone, he often wondered: Why are the buildings on Broadway so stately but the storefronts so ticky-tacky? In 2007, GFI acquired a run-down hotel on 29th, the Breslin, named for its original proprietor, James Breslin, who opened it in 1904. The company formed a partnership with the Ace Hotel Group, a successful venture in Seattle and Portland, and agreed to bring a branch of the Ace here. GFI also purchased the Johnston Building, at 28th and Broadway, to develop into a separate hotel, which Zobler decided to call the NoMad.

He’d seen a Times article referring to the neighborhood as Soma but he hated that name. “We didn’t think of ourselves intellectually as south of Macy’s,” he says. “We think of ourselves as extending, if you will, the Zeitgeist of Madison Square Park north.” Zobler claims that GFI came up with the name NoMad, and when I suggest it had a brief previous life, he says, “I didn’t know that. If it has a history, even better.” Either way, when GFI unveiled plans for its NoMad Hotel in 2008, it announced that the hotel would be located in “the newly established NoMad district,” which “consists of upscale residences, retail shops, creative agencies and renowned restaurants.” The only wrinkle was that, at the time, there was no such place as the NoMad district. If it was newly established, it’s because GFI established it. Typically, someone discovers a happening new neighborhood and decides to give it a name. NoMad was a name in search of a neighborhood.

It’s not impossible, of course, to create a neighborhood from scratch. David Walentas famously did it in Dumbo. “But Dumbo was unique,” he says, “totally different from other neighborhoods that have gone through transformation and gentrification in the last 30 years.”

Walentas, who is 71, started Two Trees Development in 1968. He bought buildings in Soho in the early seventies and Noho shortly after. Then Walentas asked his staff, “Soho, Noho, what’s next?” Someone told him “Dumbo.” Walentas said, “Where the **** is Dumbo?” He decided to pay it a visit.

What he found was a largely vacant district of warehouses and factories on the Brooklyn waterfront, zoned for industrial use. He bought eight buildings, 2 million square feet, for $12 million, in 1981. “I got lucky. No one else wanted it. I bought the whole neighborhood.” It took seventeen years for him to persuade the city to rezone the area. After that, he assumed the role of “benevolent dictator,” as he says, “with a vision for the whole neighborhood.” He lured stores like Jacques Torres Chocolate and West Elm by offering them a few years’ worth of free rent. “That way, we created the neighborhood. We could give space away because we had so much, it didn’t matter. And it made my other properties more valuable. If you only owned one building, you would never do that. If you own one building, you take care of one building.”

It was a rare experiment in SimCity-style neighborhood building, but it worked, right down to the goofy name. Most people assume Walentas invented the acronym Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), but it predates him. “I loved it, but my lawyers and consultants said, ‘What are you, crazy? No one will ever want to go there.’ So they came up with ‘Fulton Landing.’ I said, ‘Fulton Landing? That sounds like it’s on the Ohio River. That could be ****ing anywhere.’ ”

An area like the Brown Zone—or, as it’s often called, the wholesale district—has been resistant to transformation in part because it’s not a blank slate like Dumbo. Everyone who owns one building there is only taking care of that one building. The lack of amenities like cafés and shops discourages residential development, which in turn discourages new cafés and shops. The area itself feels dingy and inhospitable—an online commenter once suggested it be called “DoNeNo,” for Down Near Nothing. When Bar Breton, a new venture from Michelin-star-earning chef Cyril Renaud, opened at Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, a reviewer located it in “a grungy zone between Koreatown and the Flatiron district that’s quiet in a decaying, rather than leafy and cloistered, kind of way.” Of course, other less-than-picturesque neighborhoods have been remade; Smith Street in Brooklyn in the nineties was not exactly the West Village. But cheap rents encouraged restaurateurs to take a risk there. There are no cheap rents in midtown Manhattan.

So to change a neighborhood like that, “you need one landlord who’s willing to cut a deal for a new kind of tenant,” says Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of retail real estate at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “If you can find someone who owns more than one building, you have a much better chance.” Otherwise, when the blocks are dominated by fast-food outlets and stores selling perfume, jewelry, and wigs, there’s not much incentive to open anything other than a fast-food outlet or a perfume, jewelry, or wig store.

In fact, the only way to jump-start that kind of neighborhood is to (a) buy up as much real estate as possible, in a kind of mini-Dumbo-fication; (b) bring in a business that can serve, like a mall, as an all-in-one destination to attract outsiders; (c) undertake a campaign to remake the image of the neighborhood in the minds of the public; or (d), as is the case with GFI in NoMad, all of the above.

Residentially, the NoMad area has always been a nondescript no-man’s-land. As president of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association, Gerard Schriffen led a long effort to officially name the neighborhood “Rose Hill,” after an eighteenth-century farm, but those efforts have flagged of late. “A lot of young people have moved in,” he says of the neighborhood’s changes. “They work so hard to afford Manhattan that they don’t get involved in the community the same way family people would.” Cheap rents lured a postcollegiate cohort down from Murray Hill, causing the neighborhood to swell, with mixed results: For example, it’s led to a mini-boom in the kind of nightlife you might expect to find in Murray Hill. Along Broadway, the historic architecture is more interesting, but few of the blocks are zoned residential. It’s not unusual to hear of people renting apartments in the area only to come home to find a notice from the city informing them they’re illegally living in a commercial building. A few condo developments have clustered around the park; when a 60-story luxury tower at One Madison Park was announced in 2008, it seemed like a glamour magnet. Now that building looms forlorn, like a giant glass filing cabinet, and is headed toward foreclosure.

The neighborhood itself exerts a weak pull. One long-timer, now moving out, told me his reason for doing so was simple: “It doesn’t feel like a neighborhood. It has no charm.” A real-estate broker who recently moved into NoMad told me he loves it—though what he loves most is how close it is to other areas. “You’re in the Village in five minutes or you’re in the Fifties in five minutes.” Then he adds, “Truthfully, I wanted to be further south. Gramercy is ideally where I’d want to be.” Thomas Gensemer, a managing partner at Blue State Digital, bought in the area in September. “When people would say, ‘Where did you buy?’ I’d struggle,” he says. “It’s definitely a community longing for an identity.” When I asked Charles Isherwood if he or any other locals actually call the area “NoMad,” he said, “I’m practically the only local I know.”

Unlike Williamsburg or Park Slope—neighborhoods that are ultimately defined by the character of their residents, often to the point of cartoonish cliché—NoMad isn’t defined at all by NoMadders. As of now, NoMad is defined, appropriately, by its nonresidents; specifically, its hotels. There’s not only the Ace and the NoMad but a clutch of nearby boutique hotels: the MAve, the Carlton, the Hotel Roger Williams, the Gershwin, and a new branch of the Gansevoort going up at 29th and Park. Many of the area’s hotels advertise themselves as being in either the Flatiron district or Chelsea. (The promotional material for the new Eventi hotel and rental complex, which will take up a whole block of Sixth Avenue between 29th and 30th, currently places it in Chelsea, though “Penn Station Heights” might be more accurate.) The folks behind the Ace and the NoMad, however, had no interest in stretching the boundaries of some attractive adjacent neighborhood. They decided to create a new one all their own.

Despite all the destination hotels, GFI is careful to explain that NoMad won’t become another meatpacking district—a tourist-choked amusement-park parody of a neighborhood. “We want NoMad to be a neighborhood for New Yorkers. And we want the Ace to become a ‘living room’ for the neighborhood,” Zobler says, and even at 8:30 a.m. on a weekday, there is a lot of living going on. The Breslin, the in-house restaurant, with its hunting-lodge-and-tartan vibe, is filling up with a local breakfast crowd. (It opens at 7 a.m.) It’s run by Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield, proprietors of the Spotted Pig in the West Village, which, like the Breslin, marries the unpretentiousness of a no-reservations policy with the quiet exclusivity of never actually being able to get a dinner table.

As a destination, the Breslin is crucial. The restaurant is always the catalyst. “First food, then fashion. Fashion always follows food,” Consolo explains. Retail wants to cluster near retail, but people will travel for a hot restaurant, whether to far-flung Vinegar Hill or Broadway south of Herald Square. And once they get there, they’ll also find, all under the Ace’s roof, a Stumptown coffee shop (for the morning crowd), the No. 7 Sub Shop (the lunch crowd), the Lobby Bar (the after-hours crowd), and a branch of the chic clothing store Opening Ceremony (the skinny-jeans-and-geometric-spectacles crowd). The Ace is negotiating to bring in an upscale nail-art salon, Valley. Normally it would take years for one hot neighborhood to develop that diversity of hip attractions. But with the Ace, the whole thing comes preassembled. It’s like a hot-neighborhood starter kit.

Joey Arak, senior editor of the real-estate blog Curbed.com, marvels at the genius of it. “It’s so much easier to kick-start something when it’s a hotel-driven development patch, because then restaurateurs and store owners have a built-in client base,” he says. “I can’t imagine Ken Friedman saying, ‘I’m going to cruise 29th and Broadway to see if there’s anywhere I can open a restaurant.’ But the Ace Hotel is its own entertainment multiplex. It’s a self-contained pleasure dome of fun.”

Last month, eleven years after the term’s debut, NoMad returned to the Times, in the headline “In NoMad, a Bar With a Pub Vibe,” about the scene at the Ace. The Guardian in London called NoMad “a hipster hub in midtown Manhattan.” Even David Walentas said of NoMad, “We’re looking at a building there. But we’ll be just another asshole.”

There are other dots to be connected as the rough borders of NoMad are sketched in: There’s Bar Breton; the Eventi; and Eataly, a 32,000-square-foot skyscraper–cum–Italian artisanal market going up at the southeast corner of Madison Square Park, which will feature an 8,000-square-foot rooftop garden and six (!) restaurants under the guidance of Mario Batali. There’s also, of course, Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack in the park, where I once stood in line while a homeless man jeered, “Look at you! You’ll wait 40 minutes to pay $8 for a cheeseburger!” I wanted to correct him: The double cheeseburger is only $7, and I’d been in line for an hour and a half.

If the Ace is a neighborhood starter kit, then massive projects like Eventi and Eataly are the same approach taken to a Vegas-level extreme. It’s like creating a whole new neighborhood—complete with residences, restaurants, bars, shops, and a steady flow of tourists—inside one towering building: the neighborhood-as-biosphere. Gone are the days when you might reimagine an underused industrial zone on a map, or stumble on a bunch of vacant warehouses on the waterfront, or find some funky frontier in which to rub two sticks together and hope to ignite something new. There are no new frontiers, save the ones you carve out or conjure yourself, starting with the right magic word. “We all might be saying NoMad sounds dumb now,” says Arak. “But if 10,000 people keep repeating it for five years, who knows?” He corrects himself. “Maybe not 10,000 people. Maybe 100 trendsetting Ace Hotel regulars.”

Eventually the name, and the neighborhood, and the idea of the neighborhood, will drift out into the city, and make its way into more headlines and tourist guides and maybe even taxicab maps—everywhere, it seems, except across the street, on 29th, where two shops stand side by side. One bears the enigmatic name City Group King Star, though a neon sign explicates further: BELT LIGHTER WALLET hat. Judging from the window display, they could add LED BOB MARLEY LIGHTER SKULL BONG SNOW IN A CAN.

Next door is M.K. Sterling & Watches. Inside, I ask a clerk how long they’ve been here and he laughs. “Here? We just moved. We used to be there—” and he points across the street to the corner of 29th and Broadway, which is now the prow of the Ace Hotel building and is currently covered in plywood, awaiting a new tenant. “We got kicked out,” he says. His name is Umang. His boss, the owner, also gives only his first name, Shappy. (To be fair, his business card uses only his first name; that’s how you do business in the wholesale district.) Shappy’s had a store in the neighborhood for 25 years. Recently, he’s seen other shops pick up for New Jersey or, in an odd echo of the Victorian mad wife stashed in the attic, move to the upper floors of the local skyscrapers when the storefronts got too expensive. Most of the storefronts on the east side of Broadway between 29th and 28th are now for rent. “Small people can’t survive no more,” Shappy says. He likes the Ace. They’re decent neighbors. They even put planters out in front of their bar to obscure revelers and appease a mosque on the block. “They’re busy,” Umang says. “They bring good crowds,” though few of those people wander over to shop for wholesale watches. “What we sell is inexpensive. They sell T-shirts for $150.” I think of Remington Guest (yes, his real name), a 21-year-old who lives in Hoboken and was written up in a Blackbook article on the Ace. “I mean, look at the area it’s in,” Guest said. “You walk outside and there’s some guy trying to sell you suitcases for five bucks.” Correction: The Ace used to be in that area. It’s in NoMad now.

http://nymag.com/realestate/neighborhoods/2010/65365/

[Merry]

Neighborhood Overkill

I'm man enough to admit when I make mistakes, especially after readers point them out to me. I misnamed an entire breed of dog in one piece, and got the name of the Gray Line sightseeing company's marketing director wrong, even with his business card sitting right in front of me.

But I was fairly confident I had the neighborhood correct for the Sylvia Center, a nonprofit that promotes healthy eating, in a recent piece about cooking classes for children at P.S. 171. Its address is definitely 304 Hudson St. Well aware of my fact-checking disability, I searched on the Internet and found it situated slightly south of Houston Street on the west side of Manhattan, yet decidedly north of TriBeCa. My rather strong impression was that this part of town is called SoHo.



Yet as soon as the story appeared, I got an email from Shane Kavanagh, a p.r. guy for something called Hudson Square Connection, a business-improvement district. The email stated, "You wrote the kitchens are in SoHo, when in fact they are in Hudson Square."

To be honest, I was a bit miffed. Not only because I thought I'd managed to make it through an entire piece error-free, but also because it seems to me that the last thing the city needs is another neighborhood. I'm still trying to get to some of the old ones, especially in Queens and Brooklyn. I frankly think we've got SoHo pretty well wrapped up in a bow.

But I agreed to meet with Mr. Kavanagh and his client Ellen Baer, Hudson Square's president, if for no other reason than to head them off at the pass before they did something foolish like create cutesy signage or come up with promotional baseball caps or umbrellas with the BID's logo.

By the way, we can argue about whether we're in SoHo or Hudson Square, but the area in question runs from West Houston to Canal Street. It's bordered by Sixth Avenue on the east and Greenwich Street on the west and includes such commodious north-south byways as Varick and Hudson streets.

As we sat around a conference table in the BID's Varick Street office, Ms. Baer explained to me why the area needs its own corny name. "You want to understand its uniqueness," she explained. "There's a different vibe here, a creative vibe that's very, very strong."

I won't deny that. But wasn't the creative vibe what SoHo was all about, at least until it got turned into an upscale shopping mall? "The physical space lends itself to creative collaborations," Ms. Baer went on, citing companies that have moved into the neighborhood—New York magazine, Saatchi & Saatchi, WNYC. "The floor plates are very open, very large, a lot of sunlight coming through the building. It's not Mayberry, but it's got a special charm."


Don't get me wrong. I have a soft spot for the area, which was once the center of the city's printing industry. My wife and I had, I believe, our second date there, at the Ear Inn. But that's not why. There is something unique about the area. It's very rectilinear. It ought to be in Chicago or Detroit. It's straight out of a Dreiser novel—big, broad-shouldered buildings. Wide side streets. Few if any of those precious cobblestone alleyways and mews that call themselves streets in places like the Village.

I still didn't buy the need for a new neighborhood. Ms. Baer listed among its benefits "a sense of comfort. People being able to say where they work. I honestly think people didn't know what to call this place. Some of the street names change here. Seventh Avenue is Varick Street. Prince Street is Charlton Street."

I used to work for New York magazine. Its offices were on Madison Avenue and 49th Street at the time, but I never got the impression that, whatever neuroses and insecurities the writers and editors suffered from, associating more strongly with a particular neighborhood when they headed off to work in the morning would have solved their problems.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's skeptical about lopping off an entire part of town and renaming it. Ms. Baer and Mr. Kavanagh confessed that they have yet to convince search engines such as Google and Yahoo or the map maker Hagstrom to put them on the map—literally.

"They're interested in reflecting the reality of where the neighborhoods are," Mr. Kavanagh explained delicately. "We've been going back and forth with their people. You'll get a response: 'We're looking into it.' They were helpful. Now it's a matter of keep clicking refresh until you show up."

I wouldn't hold my breath. I think part of the problem for the BID, which came into being through legislation passed in 2009, is its name. They gave me a baseball cap (yes, they went ahead and had baseball caps made) with the BID's logo to help me remember it: it's a bunch of colored squares (or maybe they're floor plates) super-imposed on one another that create the impression of, well, nothing much at all. "The logo evolved from Art Deco elements of the buildings," Ms. Baer said, noting that the colors symbolize "the sunlight, the water, the streetscape and greenery we aspire to."

Indeed, I needed the baseball cap as a memory aid. As soon as I left the meeting and dropped by the Ear Inn to use the men's room for old time's sake, I couldn't remember what the neighborhood was called. Hudson Valley? Hudson Commons?

I had suggested something more evocative, more logic-based, something that sounds less like it was invented by real estate brokers or the people who created Celebration, Fla. "What about WeHo," I said, though that wouldn't be accurate either. It would have to be WeSoHo. WeSo. That's it! WeSo. It's got a certain ring.

Say this for Ellen Baer—she didn't kick me out of her office. "At least there's a discussion about the name," she said amiably. "Hudson Square is clearly in the mix. Call it WeHo or whatever—they're talking about it."

There was one final bit of unpleasantness I felt obligated to bring up—the Holland Tunnel. Varick Street is perhaps best known to outbound commuters as one of the main arteries leading to the tunnel. At 5 p.m. on a typical afternoon it's basically a parking lot.

"It is what it is," Ms. Baer said. There's no reason why the area couldn't be both "an important regional transportation hub," as the BID's president put it, and a sort of urban Shangri-La, where you attend an edgy, independent movie at the Film Forum, then have dinner and hear music at SOB's. She talked of "making places for people, not just cars."

A slogan, I thought: What the BID needs is a slogan. "Hudson Square: Places for People, Not Just Cars."

As our meeting adjourned, the late-afternoon sunlight spilling across the BID's office's large floor plates, I liked to think I was helpful. And I look forward to joining Ms. Baer, Mr. Kavanagh and the rest of the neighborhood as soon as they start planting trees along Varick Street, as they say they're planning to do.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...TTopCarousel_1

[Merry]

What’s in a neighborhood’s name?

Written by Laura Gabby

Spacious rooms, ecologically forward-thinking, post-war apartment. Location: Cloister Park.

Cloister Park? Is that in Brooklyn? New Jersey? Pennsylvania?

Nope. It’s in Manhattan. At the crux of Washington Heights and Inwood, to be exact.
The apartment building at 37 Nagle Avenue was recently advertised by Stein-Perry Real Estate as resting in the ‘Cloister Park’ neighborhood.

According to Matthew Bizzarro of Stein-Perry Real Estate, ‘Cloister Park’ sits at the foot of the Cloisters, stretching north from the intersection of Bennett Avenue and Broadway, west of Bogardus Place and south of Dyckman Street.

“The popularity of the neighborhood has exploded in the last five years,” said Bizzarro. “We wanted to put a name to it that sticks out and fits with the neighborhood.”

Bizzarro says units in ‘Cloister Park’ have experienced a 500- to 600-percent increase in real estate prices over the past five years. Nonetheless, first time homebuyers will still pay $50,000 to $100,000 less for an apartment there than they would for a similar home up the hill on Fort Washington Avenue.

A Stein-Perry one-bedroom apartment at 14 Bogardus Place a block off Nagle Avenue has an asking price of $299,000. The apartment comes completely renovated and is environmentally-friendly. The renovations were done with recycled materials, and are toxic-free.

Bizzarro said a lot of people come to look at this particular building because it is green and forward-thinking.

Indeed, the courtyard behind 37 Nagle Avenue suggests a connection in vegetation and greenery with the nearby Fort Tryon Park, where the Cloisters sits high above the neighborhood below.

Bizzarro said that the need for a name arose because the area is neither part of Hudson Heights nor part of Inwood. Bizzarro defined Hudson Heights as stretching from Fort Washington Park to Fort Tryon Park, or from 175th Street to Bennett Avenue and Broadway. Inwood, as Bizzarro defines it, runs from Dyckman to W. 218th Streets.

The boundaries and definitions of neighborhoods have been fluid over the years, and often the boundaries and names are not entirely agreed upon by everyone.

Some say Inwood extends from Nagle and Broadway to W. 218th Street.

Some call the neighborhood surrounding Dyckman Street, ‘Dyckman City.’ Some lump all of Inwood and Washington Heights together, calling it simply the Heights.

“During the late 80s and early 90s, Washington Heights was being associated with every single crime north of 96th Street,” said Gus Perry, Stein-Perry Real Estate’s principal broker. Community groups started calling the area from W. 175th to W. 190th Streets Fort Washington. It has now been dubbed Hudson Heights by some.

It is uncertain where the name Hudson Heights came from – which group or individual first came up with it. It may have first spread with the founding of the Hudson Heights Owner’s Coalition. According to Perry, this was the point that brokers began using the name.

“Part of it is to be trendy and for the mystique of it, part of it is to be able to identify and section different areas,” said Bizzarro. “It’s important for areas that are up and coming to have a name and identification.”

Bizzarro said that the area is still extremely undiscovered, and that there are still many hidden gems in the neighborhood.

The building’s board has most recently polished the gem of 37 Nagle Avenue by replacing the windows. The newer, energy-saving bay windows have reduced yearly heating and oil bills by 40 percent. In addition, all air conditioners installed are energy efficient.
Be it Cloister Park, Inwood or Washington Heights, the building’s board plans to continue to make decisions with the environment in mind, including the possibility of adding a green roof in the future, according to Bizzarro.

“You don’t always have a lot of choice in social responsibility in buying,” said Bizzarro.

http://www.manhattantimesnews.com/in...id=398&lang=en

[NYatKNIGHT]

This guy Bizzarro could not have had it easy with that name, especially during the Seinfeld years..

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
Halfway through the article, I was set to post something about Bizzarro.

[Ninjahedge]

Me think you should have Monkey Zip!

Me would have Happy been!

[Merry]

All of Lower Manhattan Now Called 'CanDo,' Says This Guy

December 8, 2010, by Joey Arak



The Financial District, Battery Park City, Tribeca, SUPPLE (Suspicious Urban Pockets in the Pussycat Lounge Environs)—with so many names for the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, tourists get confused, and the identity of the area as a whole gets lost. And so Clive Burrow, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Marketing Association, has come up with a new nickname: CanDo, short for Canal Downtown. Upbeat!

Burrow thinks the moniker will help distinguish this part of the island from uptown, midtown and downtown (which he insists starts at 23rd Street and ends at Canal). So what's wrong with "Lower Manhattan?" No Soho-style pizzazz! The name already appears on maps being distributed in hotels, but so far we have yet to hear of any incidents of a cab driver punching someone in the face who said "Take me to CanDo!"

Marketing group labels 'Canal Downtown' as CanDo to boost interest [NYDN]

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/1...s_this_guy.php

[Ninjahedge]

Stupid.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Even dumber than FiDi, which always reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara.

[BBMW]

Or GraPUS (Gramercy Park-Union Square) for the area along and around Irving Place.

[lofter1]

Or maybe Gram-PUS

[MidtownGuy]

That's just wroooong.