True Queens is different but a little more complicated, as noted above. For a long time the post office sorted mail in Queens according to one pre-unification ‘city’, Long Island City, and four old ‘towns’: Far Rockaway, Floral Park, Flushing and Jamaica. Zip codes were laid out according to those towns in the '60’s and from then on it didn’t really matter what people put for the city. Putting the neighborhood name (other than the 5 old city/towns) is a convention postdating zip codes, so has never mattered to the USPS.
And as I mentioned above it’s still common for addresses in small neighborhoods in northern Queens (like Utopia) near Flushing to be styled ‘Flushing, NY’, similarly in the south for Jamaica. And it’s not actually that rare for an address to be listed as just ‘Queens’ in some smaller neighborhoods*. IOW it’s a bit of a jumble, though I agree the general idea in recent times is [neighborhood], NY. And yeah, if the zip code is right it doesn’t matter.
*for example The Steinway middle school, in the Ditmars Steinway neighborhood next to Astoria, gives its address as just ‘Queens, NY’, though has a Google Maps window giving it the old way, ‘Long Island City, NY’ (as Astoria also used to be written). http://www.is141.org/about-us
There’s no such thing as a Brooklyn accent anymore, if there ever really was. I say that as descendant of several generations of Brooklynites. To some degree what people identify as ‘Brooklyn accent’ was always ‘working class NY accent’, or variations of ethnic accents. Italian-NY is the one people from outside NY usually to imitate as ‘the NY accent’. Irish and Jewish weren’t exactly the same. Nor was it necessarily closer among groups in Brooklyn than people of the same background in Queens, Manhattan or Hudson County NJ for that matter. Then it differed by education and social class too. With the outer boroughs now such a high % non-white, foreign born (especially Queens), and/or ‘hipsterized’ (especially Brooklyn) it’s an obsolete concept IMO. At most you’re back to the Italian American working class accent in some neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
I also doubt there’s a real Brooklyn personality for the same reason. One that spans immigrants from the Mideast, Central America and young white hipsters compared to otherwise similar people in Manhattan? Manhattan has a huge concentration of rich people unparalleled almost anywhere: it’s really different than the outer boroughs (again except to the extent Brooklyn, and Hudson Cty, are becoming more and more like it). But finding a deep distinction among the outer boroughs is more of an affectation IMO. ‘Proud of Brooklyn’ is fine but I don’t much social reality to it. NY as a whole does have a personality in my view, descended all the way from the Dutch in some respects, also in part from being the Jewish capital of the world outside Israel, and from being immigrant mecca over again and again in successive waves from every direction.
Cincinnati seems to be an oddball in that everything gets addressed to “Cincinnati, OH” whether in the city itself (like Chicago), OR nearly every other jurisdiction within Hamilton County, whether unincorporated township or independent incorporated suburb. So if you’re in downtown or the city neighborhood of Hyde Park, “Cincinnati, OH”. If you’re in Anderson Township, “Cincinnati, OH”. If you’re in the suburbs of Blue Ash, Indian Hill, or Mariemont, “Cincinnati, OH”. What’s up with that? Of course if you’re across the river, then it’s “Covington, KY” or “Newport, KY” or whatever. I think people do tend to address stuff to Loveland, OH as you’d expect, and they’re always super busy processing outgoing Valentine’s Day cards with their own heart-shaped postmark.
My daughter lives on 5th St. between 5th Ave. and 6th Ave. In Brooklyn. 'Nuff said? Actually, I’m not sure there is a 5th St. in Manhattan, but there certainly are a 4th and an 8th St. in both boroughs.
This is the correct answer. Mail is sorted by zip code.
If you have the correct zip code & a valid street address within that zip, you could put “Hell, NY” or “Heaven, NY” or even “Chicago, NY” and it would get delivered. The sorting is all automated via computerized optical readers, and nobody at the post office would even notice the city name you used. Except when it gets to your actual local carrier; he or she might get a chuckle out of that, if it’s noticed
Well, the city name can’t be completely ignored, because a letter with the wrong zip code will still usually eventually make its way to the correct destination.
Well, sure. It basically acts like an error check in case the ZIP code is wrong or illegible/misread/whatnot. But for correctly addressed mail, the city/state can be safely ignored. I’ve sent mail with street address and zip code only when I was in college just to see if it worked, and it worked fine. Or with what I thought were oh-so-clever abbreviations like “EV IL” for “Evanston, Illinois.” Yeah, I don’t do that anymore.
Another interesting case is Silver Spring, Maryland. If you consider it as a city, it’s the fourth largest one in the state by population and the second largest one in the state by area. The problem is that it’s not a city. It’s just a mailing address. I frequently go to downtown Silver Spring, and I (and most people) always think and talk of the place as being Silver Spring. Something like nine high schools draw their students (at least partially) from the area considered to be Silver Spring. The area considered to be Silver Spring includes parts of a number of incorporated towns and some non-incorporated area. So despite not being an incorporated town or a school district, it’s recognized as being a distinct place by pretty much everyone in Maryland:
Well, yes and no. Los Angeles is a single incorporated city which happens to be the second largest city in the country. You can use either Los Angeles or the names of some of what are actually neighborhoods of the city as the mailing address. Silver Spring is nothing but a mailing address, even though people think of a certain area as being downtown Silver Spring. I just noticed that certain other places in Maryland which people think of as being cities are also just mailing addresses - Columbia, Germantown, Glen Burnie, etc.:
Well, it’s a big state with no fewer than four U.S. district courts:
From time to time I address envelopes to addresses in Shaker Heights, Ohio with “SHO 44120” or to East Liverpool, Ohio with “ELO 43920,” and they always get there.
Interesting about Chicago mail system… As to Boston, yup, but not for every neighborhood. The use of neighborhood name is probably a survival/vestige of the city having annexed many towns in the 19th century, thus many sections of the city have “identities” of their own, which is to say characteristics unique unto themselves. My neighborhood is one such, and one of the last if not THE last of the old annexed sections of the city (1905, I believe).
Most of the northern and central part of the city, in and around the downtown/uptown, are just Boston, MA (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, North End, etc.). These kinds of arrangements seem unique to certain cities. I wonder if it’s less common elsewhere (Midwest, Far West). In older cities there was often a problem of their being surrounded by cities and towns with histories of their own that didn’t, in many cases, want to join the larger city. A local example if this is the town of Brookline, which Boston wanted to annex just as it had annexed next door Roxbury, but Brookline residents chose to (literally) secede from Suffolk county and join Norfolk county, thus removing it from potential “takeover” (so to speak).
It used to be (don’t know if it’s still true) that there were three or four “main” post offices in Queens and the others were somehow connected to one of them- so that all the 113XX zips were part of Flushing and 114XX was part of Jamaica, etc. That’s why mail to any of he 113XX zips might say Flushing , NY and any of the 114XX ones might say Jamaica NY.
And just to point out something I believe was mentioned earlier - zip codes don’t necessarily have anything to do with any other boundaries, whether it is neighborhood, county or city. Rikers Island has a Queens mailing address because that’s the PO that processes and delivers its mail- but it is actually part of the Bronx.
Despite living in Queens for the majority of my 1/2+ century, I did not know either. Thank you (and Corry El). Rikers is also part of Queens Community Board 1, and the only bridge onto the island goes to Queens, but politically it is part of the Bronx. How that works in the dysfunctional world of NYC politics, I don’t know.
While the “Brooklyn” accent was never ubiquitous and I agree that it more a Brooklyn working class accent, it was enough different from the similar class Bronx accent or Queens accent to be noticeable, provided one had significant exposure to all 3. As the years roll on, all 3 regional accents are dying out, pretty much confined to a few ‘old immigrant’ neighborhoods.