I lived in Michigan for several years and had a couple of friends from tony Grosse Pointe. Then they came up with Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Woods…
I lived in North Bethesda. At least that’s what the USPS told me my address was. I get your point but it’s no more South Rockville than it is North Bethesda. It’s smack in between. It probably should be called something else altogether.
Now I live on the other side of the river. McLean is a little fancy (especially the riverfront properties) and seems to sprawl all over the place; it’s not incorporated so the boundaries are unofficial. You don’t need a West McLean when Mclean is wherever you want it to be.
Street names around here go as fancy as the developers think they can get away with. (we won’t discuss Mordor Drive) There’s one that has been driving me crazy since I first spotted it: “Sir Viceroy Drive”.
ARGH!! Sir is a prefix to a name, not a title. You might have “Sir John” who happens to hold the position of Viceroy somewhere. Or Viceroy Smith. Or maybe Viceroy Sir John Smith. But you would not have “Sir Viceroy” unless you happened to have a person whose first name is Viceroy.
Adding an ‘E’ to the end of things of course makes everything that much classier. “Towne” versus “Town”. And heaven forbid a specific subdivision have a mailing address of Springfield, it uses Alexandria (even though it’s much closer to Springfield).
I don’t know how popular this is elsewhere, but the McMansion developers in/around St. Louis around 2000ish got to thinking that more words in the name were better. And even better if you had two words at the end that usually denote what sort of street it is.
Columbia, Maryland is a planned community created in 1967. It’s split into ten villages, each of which is split into two or three neighborhoods. All the street names within a neighborhood come from a work of art or literature. There’s a neighborhood called Hobbit’s Glen where all the names come from The Hobbit. The names are ones like Tooks Way, Wood Elves Way, and Rivendell Lane.
Developments with silly themed names are a commonplace. I recall we did that thread many years ago. One of my favorites near where I was based in USAF was a small working class 1970s housing tract on the then semi-developed outskirts of Las Vegas. It consisted of Thisa Way, Thata Way, and Curdsen Way.
I now see the surrounding area has infilled a bunch; it used to be a small island in the desert. I also see that Thisa Way has been renamed as Better Way and Supreme Ct.
Lest you all think I’m kidding:
Thata Way is the small vertical segment leading up from Supreme Ct.
There’s a development a few blocks away from my parents’ house in suburban Green Bay, where the names of the streets were all created by my sister’s school class. The developer got permission from our school to come to one of the classes (hey, it was the 1970s, things were looser then), and have the kids come up with ideas for street names.
My sister’s class came up with a lot of really silly names, but the slightly-less-silly ones actually did get used.
When I was born my parents bought a house in SoCal in a tract where all the street names were private colleges, mostly ivy league or wannabes. We later moved to a tract named entirely for shore birds.
Not so whimsical, but it was useful. Once you knew the different tracts’ themes, you could peg someone’s age and socioeconomic status just by their street’s name.
Out on Boca Grande, there are three streets that are leftover from the old fishing village days. In keeping with the curmudgeonly nature of those old residents, they were named Damfiknow, Damficare, and Damfiwill streets. As a kind of obverse of the OP, the various new wealthy owners are trying to achieve the impossible goal of cramming multi-million dollar winter homes onto those streets while maintaining the rustic, Jimmy Buffet, backwater vibe.
I’ve mentioned this before… speaking of silly street names: in various areas of suburban Toronto, there are streets that must have all been built by the same developer in the early 1970s. The street names are all weird coinages along the lines of Windy Meadowway and Green Leafyway. The word “way” is joined to the previous word.
Edit: found some. Not the ones I was half remembering; these ones are worse.
In London, there’s also a trend of areas getting referred to by their old names as they undergo gentrification and hipsterication. Brixton and Peckham used to have poor reputations and nearby neighbourhoods would be said to be in an the area of some local park, even if they were blocks away from the park. You can still see places referred to as Clapham Park, even though they’re much closer to Brixton station than the park. But more affluent young people moved into those areas to take advantage of the affordable prices. The markets were upgraded, pubs were renovated, and trendy restaurants moved in. Now people want to live in Brixton and Peckham, and neighborhoods are referred to as being in those areas, rather than outside them.
In London there are boroughs that are known for old money and some very poor boroughs, quite nearby. Hampstead in north London is famously rich, but a poor area nearby is Kilburn. When it comes to property, Kilburn gets described as West Hampstead.
In South London, Deptford, which is poor is next to Greenwich. So to up the perceived value, it is referred to as West Greenwich for property marketing purposes. Greenwich does have a lot of poor areas, but it has some grand buildings and huge royal park, so it is often assumed to be affluent. Peckam, which is poor, becomes Dulwich borders. Lewisham (poor) becomes Blackheath borders. Not exactly gerrymandering, but trying to create a more positive perception by using the higher value name.
Where there is a lot of urban regeneration, which generally means building lots of high rise apartment blocks, the practice is to try to associate these grey buildings with some sort of cultural asset. London seems to sprout new ‘Artistic Quarters’ on a regular basis. What this tends to mean is that there are a few creative businesses in converted factory workspace and maybe a night club for students. This becomes quite laughable. Peckham, once the butt of many jokes in London now has mentions in the New York Times as being a funky area. Deptford has one dance school and much has been made of this by property developers. Lots of big photos of dancers in poses and happy shoppers in streetmarkets selling organic food. Deptford street market has a few new shops, but the signs of long term deprivation are still there. This comes as a surprise to a lot of international students and their parents who buy apartments in the big new blocks thinking their progeny are going to have a charmed existence and a fine education in funky London. They soon learn not to walk around carrying expensive laptops and smartphones.
This is a result of gentrification (or more accurately property speculation) and the student boom. The marketing reflects the aspirations of the customers. Students want funky and night time entertainment. Marrieds want to pretend that they live the countryside while still having a professional job in London. So we get areas in London called ‘village’. Maybe a couple of hundred years ago they were in fact villages outside a much smaller London. So we have Blackheath village, Hampstead village, Dulwich village…then a lot more invented by property marketeers.
Property is hugely overvalued in the UK and especially so in London due to a shortage of homes. It is re-purposed as an investment opportunity and it leads to all this marketing nonsense when there is some kind of urban regeneration going on in a particular area. Purloining the name of a more affluent area nearby seems just the first base in property marketing.
I suspect the real estate property marketing business takes the same kind of liberties with local geography everywhere. People invest a lot of their hopes and aspirations in a new home and they try to appeal to that in their descriptions, which can stretch the credulity of locals who know these areas well.
The usual etymology for the Manhattan neighbourhood of SoHo is its location “south of Houston Street”, but I’d bet that the intended association with the Soho area in London was part of the story.
Generally, New York real estate agents seem to be quite creative when it comes to making up and popularising names for neighbourhoods to add some cachet to the places they’re selling. Other examples are Tribeca (“triangle below Canal Street”) and Dumbo (“down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass”), although those are not intentionally modelled after an already existing affluent area.
Correction: if you follow along via street view, the sidewalk ends a block or so further along the road. So you can’t simply walk ALL the way into Mordor
In London, businesses in a couple of areas have been working together to promote their area under an invented name. “North Bank” is obviously a bit resentful of the success of the (now ragingly gentrified) South Bank. However another initiative to attract people to Bloomsbury/Holborn has been abandoned, because nobody understands (or much notices) “Midtown” (I suppose it would be open to misunderstanding if they were to do a New York and call it “BloHo” )
