Same here. I live in North Center, but I really consider the boundaries to be Montrose, Addison, Western and Ashland. Roscoe Village is technically part of North Center, but I would never say “I went to Costello’s in North Center.” I would say “I went to Costello’s in Roscoe Village.”
Sacramento has a few very well defined neighborhoods. I live in Natomas. It has specific boundaries. It is very large (large enough really to be it’s own city/suburb) and probably not what most people think of as a neighborhood, but that’s what it’s called. To be further specific, I live in South Natomas, which is on the south side of the freeway from North Natomas.
Some neighborhoods here are only a few city blocks. Some are huge like mine.
I’m in the suburbs. When I sit on my roof, all the houses I can see are in my “neighborhood”.
Again, I said vaguely racist, but my point was that new and often white people move in and rename it. Mostly what I hate about the new neighborhood names is that they’re trying to be New York with names that sound like SoHo. White DC has always had an inferiority complex to NYC.
I’d like to inject a note of caution on Chicago: neighborhoods have neither fixed names nor boundaries. Neighborhoods expand (Bucktown) and contract (Uptown), are invented (DePaul, Bronzeville, Little Village, Buena Park, Boys Town) or forgotten (Meekerville, Towertown, Schorsch Village, New Town). There’s also the problem of sub-neighborhoods, such as Printers Row within the South Loop, or Pill Hill within South Shore. And people who live in Lake Meadows or Lathrop Homes think of that housing project as their neighborhood. Fifty years ago, I’ve heard that Irish South Siders often replied with what parish they were part of rather than a subdivision or neighborhood name. African-Americans often give a nearby intersection when answering “where do you live?” I hear so much attention to this subject from millennials—mostly recent arrivals in the big city—that I’ve come to regard neighborhood names as a Thing White People Like.
In the 1920s, University of Chicago sociologists divided Chicago into 75 (now 77) “community areas,” but it’s best to think of these as statistical divisions rather than neighborhoods. Along the lakefront, these track pretty closely our perception of neighborhoods, but many of the inland designations (Lower West Side, New City, North Center) are catchalls of convenience that lumped together several separate ethnic and community groups.
Even when the general area of a neighborhood can be identified, it’s hard to determine exact boundaries that everyone agrees on. But if you have to have a neighborhood map, this one doesn’t seem too bad.
It’s not even an Irish thing, nor that long ago. I was born in 1975, and growing up in a fairly Polish neighborhood, it was common to identify where one is from by mentioning the parish. I still hear people talking about neighborhoods down here in terms of parishes, but it tends to be from people slightly older than me.
For me, my neighborhood is the part of the city that I know very well. I’ll be driving across town and all of a sudden, I kind of pop out onto a street that says ‘home’ to me.