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