Well, sure, but in the way US addresses are normally stylized, it is a little quirky. We don’t usually put neighborhood names instead of the city name on them (at least we don’t in Chicago and most other big cities that I’ve written to–Los Angeles might be another exception. Pretty sure I’ve seen Hollywood, CA, and Beverly Hills, CA, in addresses.)
Of course, when we talk about where we’re from, sure, that’s different. But that’s not what is registering as quirky to me. If you read through Wendell’s link, you’ll see that the neighborhoods of Brooklyn just all get addressed as “Brooklyn, NY,” while the neighborhoods of Queens go by “[neighborhood], NY.” And they are all part of New York City, NY, but they don’t get (traditionally) addressed that way by mail.
Not that it matters with the postal code system–you can write whatever you want, but it’s interesting for me to see what the conventions are.
I think Brooklyn has the oldest distinctive personality of the outer boroughs. Manhattan has “New Yorkers,” Brooklyn always has had “Brooklynites” and the other boroughs just sort of reflect Manhattan’s vibe. It’s a distinct culture within a culture (within the culture of “America”) and prides itself on being so.
Always been a little proud that my dad was born in Brooklyn, even though he was moved to Northern California at age 2.
This may be a stupid question, but it’s one I’ve wanted to ask for a while: where is downtown Brooklyn? Where is the most important central business district? Exploring on Google maps hasn’t really helped. I’ve walked from the the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, but I don’t think it’s in that area.
In one or 2 early episodes of Mad Men, Peggy goes to bars in Brooklyn that are very busy with young people. Where would they have been?
No matter where you live on the island of Manhattan (Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Soho, Morningside Heights, whatever) your address is “New York, New York.”
Similarly, no matter where you live in Brooklyn (Greenpoint, Flatbush, Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy), you are in “Brooklyn, New York.”
Same with the Bronx and Staten Island.
Queens alone is different. If you wanted to send me a letter at my old address, it would be in “Astoria, New York.” Other people live in “Forest Hills, NY” or “Flushing, NY” or “Maspeth, NY” or “Elmhurst, NY” or “Jackson Heights, NY.” A letter addressed to “Queens, NY” might arrive if the ZIP code is correct, but it would be very unusual.
Many cities in America are divided by neighborhood as to postal service. New York is, of course, humongous, but even the suburban city I grew up in,–in a different state–had thirteen little “villages”, each with its own name and zip code. One could write either the name of the city or the village and male would get there either way, true just about everywhere in America.
Many cities are divided up this way, including the city I live in, Boston. There are local customs and neighborhood pride in many places in the city, though that’s fading now with gentrification and immigration. The neighborhood that’s probably best known for pride (or “pride”, if you will) is South Boston, aka Southie, which, due to its proximity to the financial district, has changed, as to its demographics, dramatically in the past fifteen years, and it’s not really Southie anymore.
Richmond Hill and Jamaica are next to each other. My RH zip code comes up as Jamaica on a bunch of automated forms - I guess it depends on which information source map the coder used. Anyway, for my 1/2+ century, we’ve always used the neighborhood in our Queens address, and it has gone from rare to extremely extraordinarily rare to see something addressed as “Queens, NY”, or even “Queens, neighborhood, NY”. As for Brooklyn addresses, as people get more uppity about what section of Brooklyn they are in, I see more and more addresses indicate the neighborhood rather than just Brooklyn.
Another problem in Queens is that, absent a zip code or neighborhood, some of the street and house numbering is very, very similar for different parts. I don’t know if Brooklyn has the same issue, but before zips became ubiquitous, having the town helped (and don’t even get me started on areas where one has 66th Road followed by 66th Street followed by 66th Lane - what a pain giving directions in the era before smartphones).
No, the other boroughs do not reflect Manhattan at all. You may find tiny pockets of people who wish they were Manhattanites (especially late teen, early twenties) but can barely afford the MetroCard to get into Manhattan, let alone live there, but the only two boroughs that are close in general personality are Queens and Brooklyn. And even in all the boroughs, there are distinct neighborhood personalities. Prospect Park and Red Hook, both in Brooklyn, might as well be different cities in different states as far as personality goes. The same can be said for Manhattan, though to a lesser extent (IMHO).
Interesting. Here, within the city limits, everything is Chicago, IL. Yes, every zip code has its own post office and name. I live in Archer Heights; my mail is collected at the Elsdon post office. But everything is addressed as Chicago, IL. I have never seen a piece of mail anywhere in Chicago with the neighborhood name or community area name on it (sometimes they are the same, sometimes different.)
So mail to neighborhoods within Boston also get addressed with neighborhood names, or am I misunderstanding?
Downtown Brooklyn is centered around Atlantic Terminal. That’s where you’ll find the federal and state courthouses (our federal district court is separate from the one in Manhattan because of course it is) Borough Hall (formerly Brooklyn City Hall), and lots of old office buildings and former manufacturing districts, plus a lot of new development, including the Atlantic Yards complex. Whether downtown BK still constitutes the most important business district in the borough is debatable, but it’s a very lively area.
Some of them do but not all of them. Brighton and Allston, for example, are neighborhoods in Boston proper but they have their own names and mail is addressed with those names rather than Boston. However, Boston itself avoids much of this problem by being relatively geographically small. Most “neighborhoods” like Dorchester or Somerville really are separate cities and towns. Even Boston and Cambridge are run as separate cities even though you can easily walk (or swim) from one to the other.
That’s wrong. The Bronx (I’m a native Bronxite) is much more like Brooklyn in vibe than it’s like Manhattan. In fact, the divide is between Manhattan and the “Outer Boroughs.” As attested by Saturday Night Fever, Manhattan is a world apart for the “Bridge and Tunnel” crowd.
Wen I grew up mail came to me either as Cleveland Ohio or Shaker Heights Ohio. It didn’t seem to matter. This was particularly true after the introduction of pre-zip postal codes. It was Cleveland 22, Ohio or Shaker Heights 22, Ohio.
That 22 got incorporated into our zip cop of 44122.
But then Cleveland, like many midwest cities had the convenient arrangement that your 4 or 5 digit address also told you what north-south or east-west line you lived on. All the 2700s were about due east or west of each other.
I was made the mistake of mentioning that Brooklyn was on Long Island within earshot of someone from there. Hooboy was she offended, as only a New Yorker can be. :eek:
Yes, in LA, the neighborhoods are typically addressed directly (only the zip code matters to the post office). Note that Beverly Hills actually is its own city, but that hardly matters. To Angelenos, the whole metropolis is called “Los Angeles” and the difference between a neighborhood in the City of LA and an “independent” city across the street is minimal. (There’s also unincorporated parts of LA, too–still called by name as if they were a city.) Municipal boundaries, zip codes, school districts, etc don’t always coincide anyway.
Here’s a nice map to drill down into the different subdivisions of “Los Angeles”.
From my visits there, my impression is that Manhattan has the banking and urban elite assholes, Brooklyn has the pretentious hipster assholes, and Queens is just everyday run-of-the-mill assholes. Haven’t checked out Staten Island and the Bronx enough to say what kind of asshole inhabits them.
I kid, I kid! (Besides, no true New Yorker cares what a Chicagoan like me thinks.) I like NYC, but they do pride themselves on directness and a rather brusque manner.
New Yorkers living in the outer boroughs have traditionally described traveling to Manhattan as “going into the city”.
As I recall, this convention was also observed in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, where residents of Calm’s Point (the Brooklyn equivalent), Bethtown (Staten Island) Majesta (Queens), and Riverhead (Bronx) considered Isola (Manhattan) “the city”.
