Denmark Street in Soho, London was known for music publishing.
“…Those old die hards in Denmark Street start laughing at the keyboard players hollow, haunted eyes…” Bitter Fingers -Elton John
Gropecunt Lane was used to refer to…err… well I don’t think I need to explain.
Seattle - Jet City
Amusingly, within New York City, Whitehall Street refers to the immense bureaucratic leviathan of the New York City Department of Education, because their main headquarters are there. The mayor’s office has a whole staff just for “dealing with Whitehall Street.”
Occasionally you will see the American space industry referred to simply as Houston, at least in context of longer discussions.
Also see Main Street to refer to small(er) town America, even though most big citites have streets called Main.
Here in Texas one often hears the city name Austin as shorthand for progressive culture.
Colby cheese - Named after Colby Wisconsin.
K Street in Washington DC, the industry of government lobbying.
Oh, it’s definitely used that way, to mean the country music recording and promotion industry. More specifically, it means mainstream country music recording and promotion. Many country artists were ostracized from “Nashville” during their creative peaks, because they didn’t fit in with (or go along with) the standards and methods of the industry of the time.
For example,
In an odd reversal, Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, was named after a TV game show with absolutely no connects to said town.
The Pentagon, for the U.S. Department of Defense, or, more broadly, the top brass of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Also, Foggy Bottom is Washington, D.C. shorthand for the U.S. State Department. I’ve never been able to determine if it is a real toponym, or a nickname. Any D.C. dopers want to chime in?
That is pretty odd
Yeah, but you never hear something like, “Seattle is in an uproar over the cancellation of Project X”, where project X is an Aerospace project, like you might “Hollywood is in an uproar over the cancellation of Project X”, where project X is an entertainment project.
Seattle isn’t even home to Boeing headquarters anymore, although we still have a huge Boeing presence.
The street name no longer exists, but Grub Street has since become a pejorative term for impoverished hack writers and writings of low literary value.
Foggy Bottom is a real place. Besides State, it’s the neighborhood of the Kennedy Center and the Watergate. And a bunch of highways and access roads and such–actually, it’s not much of a “neighborhood.”
The British equivalent is Shaftesbury Avenue.
So Seattle is not called Jet City, and every major order or cancellation is not reported in the local news?
Yes, anything Boeing-related is reported in the daily news, because Boeing is still a major employer here, and yes, Seattle sometimes (although much less than in the past) calls itself “Jet City”.
But that doesn’t mean Seattle is a synecdoche for the aerospace industry in the same way that Detroit is a synecdoche for the automotive industry, or Hollywood for the entertainment industry, or Madison Avenue for the advertising industry.
So when there’s big news in the Aerospace industry, the reports in Seattle talk about Seattle, but the reporters in the rest of the country don’t talk about the reaction in Seattle, and expect people to understand that by Seattle they really mean “the Aeospace industry”.
If someone says “something big is happening in Hollywood”, you know they mean in entertainment. If someone says “something big is happening in Seattle” you’re more likely to think of coffee or grunge music than airplanes.
I think that the New York equivalent is Tin Pan Alley (or possibly the Brill Building).
Milwaukee was THE brewing capitol of the USA for generations, and even today the baseball team’s name still references that past glory…
Here you go: