It's all a matter of opinion. (http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/10-manhattan-neighbourhoods)

Real estate interests have a habit of rechristening neighborhoods into inelegant abbreviations that drive copy editors crazy: NoHo, NoLIta, ProCro. Or else they try to rebrand them as something dreadfully, hatefully bland like Clinton. If you're Hakeem Jeffries, you might propose legislation like the Neighborhood Integrity Act to stop this nefarious activity. But if you work for googlemaps, you just moderate the debate as best you can.

Amateur online cartographers, via user-generated wisdom banks like Wikipedia and Googlemaps, are increasingly defining neighborhood boundaries, The New York Times reports, particularly as formal atlases are abandoned for online ones. The process is fraught with cheeky attempts from real estate brokers, status-seekers and would-be Robert Moseses determined to wield whatever power they can via nomenclature.  One even tried to rename a section of the Brooklyn waterfront Rambo, for Right Around Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Without any codifications from the city, the decision to strike down the Rambos falls on Matthew Hyland, a 31-year-old Brooklyn chef who makes the final decision on any changes to googlemaps' neighborhood oulines.  Last month, he told The Times that he received more than 2,000 proposed revisions to NYC neighborhoods from users of Google Map Maker. He is not paid for this work, although he does get a t-shirt.

The areas around Hudson Square, Turtle Bay, Tribeca and Chinatown are particularly controversial, Mr. Hyland says. It seems that real estate interests, unable to wipe Chinatown off the map and redevelop it into a village of luxury pied-a-terres, would at least like to wipe its name off the map and are continually pushing to claim its streets for the posher surrounding neighborhoods.

But some question the entire enterprise of defining neighborhoods.

“Anyone who says there is a defined neighborhood is off his rocker,” Lisa Keller, the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City told The Times.

Of course, stopping people from defining neighborhoods is even more impossible than stopping people from redefining them.

kvelsey@observer.com

A change of name?

It worked for Francis Gumm, Norma Jean Baker and Gladys Mary Smith, so why not a condo project with less than stellar sales?

The Journal reports that the condo formerly known as 1280 Fifth Avenue is now going by a new moniker: One Museum Mile.

Apparently, the East Harlem building's bid to woo the type who lusts after a pretentious-sounding address wasn't going so well. (We'd guess address droppers would be super attentive to any street number above 96th Street—the building is located between East 109th and East 110th Streets).

Of course, the building is putting a positive spin on its new identity. (And the building will house the Museum of African Art, so the new name is not all bluster. Plus, as of last summer, after the City Council extended the district from 104th Street to 110th, the building is technically in the Museum Mile.

"Depending on your perspective," Developer Bruce Brickman told The Journal, "we are the first building and museum that we see coming down from the top of the park. We feel we begin the Museum Mile."

Before changing its name, the condo also experimented with tried and true methods for stimulating sells—dropping prices, renting units. The re-branching effort is expected to launch later this month.

The whole affair made us wonder if some other structures around the city might be better-served, or at least better-described, by new names. The Barclays Center could be One Eminent Domain, for example, the Toren in Brooklyn, with its library profiled in The Times, might become One For the Books. As for the stalled Domino Development in Williamsburg, how about One Hipster Too Many?

And, if the renaming doesn't work out, there's always that old standby: rechristening the neighborhood. We''re looking at you ProCro.

kvelsey@observer.com

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Living the good life.

After years of NIMBY grumbling and financial trouble, Brooklyn's latest development at 144 North 8th Street has finally, really, truly hit the market, according to Curbed. Although we don't think it will ever shake its resentful nickname, the Finger Building has defied naysayers and is currently listing several units for sale, with prices just over $2 million.

People have been wary of the Finger Building from the start, concerned that the high-rise will attract all the wrong types of nouveau Brooklynites. The building's carefully crafted website seems to confirm the neighborhood's worst fears. We can't tell if the illustrator is pro- or anti-Finger Building, but they sure did a good job of cramming every single Williamsburg stereotype into the artwork. In our very own version of Where's Waldo? (what a perfect BroBo name!), see if you can't find the following things on the Finger Build site:

1. Skinny Jeans
2. Expensive strollers
3. Nerd Glasses
4. A.P.C.
5. Ethnic diversity
6. Artisnal food in glass jars
7. Saarinen womb chairs
8. "Roof Meadow" (So NOT a roof garden)
9. LEGO moms
10. Pasta water baths.

eknutsen@observer.com

Brooklyn Republic Vodka

We know you've been stockpiling Brooklyn whiskey and Williamsburg cigarettes and maybe even collecting those Spike Lee inspired Absolut Brooklyn bottles. Fortunately you can officially add vodka to the laundry list of Brooklyn vices, according to The Brooklyn Paper.

A father and daughter team has created "Brooklyn Republic Vodka," naturally distilled in a Navy Yard warehouse. And don't expect to find any Icelandic purified H20 in this recipe: the concoction is made with straight Brooklyn water—lead, rat poison, arsenic and all. Don't worry, though, it's been distilled a full six times, so only the whiff of Brooklyn terrior remains.

The new tipple is the brainchild of Kary Laskin and her father Gary Shokin, a Lithuanian cab driver who now owns an auto shop. Mr. Shokin crafted the recipe for the liquor himself, hopefully not working on cars as he did so. Now he has given up his business entirely, dedicating all his energy to the blossoming vodka business.

So far, the brand is carried at several local liquor stores and served—where else—at Edison-bulbed, reclaimed-wood-clad Brooklyn bars.

eknutsen@observer.com

(Chiascuro Foundation)

Did you know that New York City had 87,273 abortions in 2009? That's like 1 percent of the city's population. Thanks to the anti-abortion group the Chiascuro Foundation (motto "fight for the protection of all human life from conception to natural death"), we now even know which are the naughtiest neighborhoods through a helpful interactive map.

Chiascuro, which points out 41 percent of all New York City pregnancies are terminated, got the city to break out its abortion numbers by zip code, and the resulting map is both enlightening and puzzling. Zip code 10012, smack in the middle of Greenwich Village has a 60.3 percent abortion rate, which makes sense considering its proximity to N.Y.U. Less clear is why 10018 tops this list—it's the Garment District and that neighborhood we love, Hellsea, so it's not exactly a bustling hood.

Other interesting facts? Greenpoint has more abortions than Williamsburg, the Upper East Side is more prudish than the Upper West, and many of the city's minority communities—Bushwick/Bed-Stuy/Brownsville in Brooklyn; Jamaica, Queens; the South Bronx; Coney Island—have high abortion rates.

The Chiascuro Foundation has developed a plan to stave the city's abortion rate: don't have sex!

"The City and it’s extremist allies will tell you that only so-called “comprehensive” sex education works, and that “abstinence-only” curricula have been “proven” not to work," the Chiascuro Foundation's website says. " They recommend a program focused solely around abstinence.

But fear not. The group's anti-sex plan is super informative about contraceptives too.  "Abstinence-centered programs contain plenty of information about contraceptive methods: how frequently they fail to protect young people from pregnancy and STDs, and how condoms provide no protection against HPV and only reduce the risk of contracting herpes by about 30%." Thanks for the advice guys!

The Observer talked to Planned Parenthood of New York to hear their take on the stats—numbers, it should be said, the group does not dispute. "Making abortion less available isn't going to do anyone any favors in terms of health," Erica Sackin said. "New York City has one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancy int eh country. That's something we should be focusing on."

Bridging the gap.

While The Observer believes Portland has taken over Brooklyn, inveterate blogger Jeremiah Moss sees a creeping Brooklynization going on in Manhattan that is ruining both boroughs.

There are lots of examples over the past year--like the Brooklyneer restaurant on West Houston and how the Guggenheim Lab, when they set up shop in the East Village, opted to have the food served by Roberta's of Bushwick. And this year's Lower East Side Ideas Fest showcased a plethora of Brooklyn-based vendors--as Bowery Boogie commented here, it looked like "a Brooklyn takeover."

It's a kind of reverse gentrification, but more twisted, a sort of Mobius Strip of gentrification in which the New Brooklyn, which exists because it was priced out of Manhattan 10 years ago, and which sort of (but not really) resembles the old Manhattan, is coming back to Manhattan, extruded through the New Brooklyn ringer, like artisanal sausage, a kind of monster-mash of flavors, so that it feels nothing quite like Manhattan ever did and only like parts of Brooklyn have come to be in recent years. Which is to say--it feels like somewhere not New York at all.

[...]

The Observer recently got to the dark heart of it, writing: "It’s as if the tumor of hipster culture that formed when the cool kids moved to Williamsburg had metastasized into a cluster of cysts pressing down on parts of the borough’s brain... Brooklyn is producing and consuming more of its own culture than ever before."

There's something powerful going on here. This is Greek-sized stuff, the mythic story of maternal cannibalism, only in reverse. Manhattan's cast-off children are getting big enough to eat the mother that rejected them. No wonder so much of this phenomenon comes obsessed with food and oral pleasure.

So Portland eats Brooklyn eats Manhattan. Maybe this explains the hurricanes and earthquakes. The world is literally coming apart at the seams.

And yet it's not as bad as it might seem: Brooklynites still aren't moving to Manhattan, according to PropertyShark. "There are about 5 times more people from Manhattan buying Brooklyn condos than the other way around," according to the research site. Two percent of new Manhattanites are from Brooklyn. That's less than the number of buyers from Long Island (4 percent), California (3 percent) and even Jersery (6 percent). Almost exactly two-thirds are from Manhattan already, which is either surprisingly high or incredibly low, depending on perspective.

You know what? They can have their Manhattlyn.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

We've even found a mascott. (Markets of New York)

On Monday, in need of a name for the burgeoning neighborhood spanning 29th Street to 40th Street* west of Eighth Avenue, we put out a call to our dear readers for suggestions. Many of you pointed out that the area had a moniker already, namely Chelsea or Hell's Kitchen, with a typical boundary of 34th Street. One commenter, CB4, gave a particularly strong defense of the latter:

Matt Chaban is also wrong. Hell’s Kitchen goes to 34th these days. Below 42nd it’s often called Hell’s Kitchen South. Clinton has been the real name of HK for over 100 years (after Dewitt Clinton). The real estate industry often claims the area was named Clinton as a result of the Capeman slayings in 1959 in an effort to make the area more palatable. But that’s not true.

The historical “center” of HK is seen by many to be on 39th St., mostly by anecdotal evidence, and the HK neighborhood over the years has seen boundaries as far south as 23rd St. and cutting off on 52nd St. But those were boundaries are mostly from the 1800′s.

Sure, alright, fair enough. But that's also not the point. The East Village, Morningside Heights, FiDi, ProCro—all had names before these, and while they have varying degrees of utility—legit neighborhood, butt of joke, etc.—that did not stop them from being renamed. So it goes with this area. It needs a name because people are not sure what to call it. If there were utter consensus that this was Hell's Kitchen, typically thought of as a gay-friendly, brownstone-lined area with good eateries, then this article would not exist.

So, to the names. Among those we received were many that played on extant ones. HuYa came from the folks at Stribling; a reader suggested HiLi for the High Line; and SoKi for South Kitchen, as well as one of our favorites, Hell's Pantry. (Reminds us of Hell's Foyer.) There were the slightly more obscure, too—one from a commentor who gave us East West New York and HeliCompton, which we didn't quite get. Ditto BalleTown. Then there was our favorite, Jersey Barrier City.

Still, unconvinced that would stick and hitting upon the current vogue for mash-ups and (hopefully) soothing the Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen's partisans, we settled, through an office straw poll, on Hellsea. It encompasses the grit and glamor of both and hopefully keeps everyone happy. Now how to get it picked up on Craigslist?

(*A mistake that probably caused some confusion was the boundaries of the neighborhood. We originally wrote West 29th to West 30th streets, when what we meant to say was West 40th Street.)

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

1685? That's so vintage! (The Neny Fragments)

At least that's what the Daily News declares today in an article headlined "City Island mixes bohemian cool, NYC quirkiness and seafaring charm." It reminds us of the time The Times called Staten Island the new Brooklyn. (Then again, the Gray Lady calls something the new Brooklyn at least once a month.)

There is a very sweet story in here, though, of antiques, salty seadogs and newly married gay couples.

Last Friday, the Island’s first-ever gay Jewish wedding took place between Ken Binder and Steve Roth at their Bay St. 1911-built home. As they exchanged vows, the sun set over the water, dogs barked, guitars played and the Empire State Building stood as a sliver in the  distance while a female rabbi chanted love hymns. More than 250 people showed up, which comes to roughly 5% of the island’s 4,500 population.

[...]

“For someone who has been gay since he was a little kid, picked on, lost jobs, had trouble coming out and has been through health issues, the fact that I was able to look the man I love in the eye and legally get married and celebrate it in front of friends and family in this lifetime is incredible to me,” says Binder, (the couple legally married in New Canaan, CT, last Wednesday opting to rush the ceremony instead of waiting for the N.Y. state law to take effect this Sunday. “I have never encountered anything but support since I moved to this island. It’s a village, and it’s in New York.”

[...]

Greenwich Village and other neighborhoods wish they had oral and physical history as accessible as this. Ken Binder cherishes the old and the new on City Island. When he first moved here to live with Roth seven years ago, he researched the old structures. As a designer, he’s been inside many of them, including a colorful loft on City Island Ave. and a waterfront 1901 Victorian he redesigned, where Katharine Hepburn filmed “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Gene Hackman filmed a scene from “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Wes Anderson? Maybe City Island is cooler than we thought.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

What's in a name? (Streetsblog)

We tend to make fun of people for this sort of thing, but it's true—there's a major New York City neighborhood very much in need of a name. This is not some failed attempt at gentrifying outer Brooklyn or the points south in the Bronx (it's called Riverdale!). This is an honest-to-god neighborhood, or at least it's about to be one when it has all those towers dropped on its head.We're talking about the far West Side, as the area has been known, but that's more of a direction than a location. Even if it will be decades before Hudson Yards is fully formed, tons of development is already sprouting in the area—29th Street to 40th Street west of Eighth Avenue—so we need to figure out what to call it. Consider the unfortunate case of another otherwise lovely Journal story about the rise of shitty-chic hotels in New York:

A handful of these types of hotels have landed on the West Coast, but the trend is just hitting New York City. In addition to the Aloft Brooklyn, an Aloft opened in Harlem last year, a Yotel opened this year at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue and a Tryp by Wyndham is slated to open this fall in Hell's Kitchen.

[...]

The first American Tryp Hotel, a Spanish hotel chain recently acquired by Wyndham, is slated to open this fall on 35th Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues. The 173-room hotel was converted from a former industrial building, which was cheaper than building from scratch. The hotel has European design elements, including a lobby featuring barrel-vaulted ceilings, a breakfast bar and bunk beds in some of the rooms. Rates start at $259 a night.

Sounds great! Only problem is, 35th Street is most certainly not Hell's Kitchen. Nor is it the Garment District, a neighborhood itself in decline. The question is, what is it? And no, Steve, MiMA will not do.

Hudson Square has been taken by the smog-filled lofts surrounding the tunnel of the same name. Hudson Heights has a nice ring, and we've got lots of those in the city. In an homage to its chief benefactor, we could call this Related Land or even Ross World. Better yet, as a capstone to the mayor who made all this outsized development possible, how about Bloombergia? Borrowing from recent convention, we could go in for Hellsea. The Observer is partial to BeLTT: Between the Lincoln Tunnel and the Tracks. Certainly, our readers are more clever than us. Leave your ideas in the comments and your crack editors will choose a winner on Friday.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Bushwick teems with life. (straatis/Flickr)

It's kind of surprising that it hasn't happened already, that it took until July 17, 2011, for The Times to write one of its "Living In" columns about Bushwick.

After all, the paper, in its unending fixation with the mysterious borough of Brooklyn, has written about Bushwick no fewer than 164 times in the last 12 months, according to Nexis. (Theirown archives say it's 10,000+ times, but that seems a little high.) Compare that to 2006, when Bushwick was mentioned a mere 112 times. In the intervening years, those numbers were 133, 131 and 147. We smell what the Styles section would call a trend.

The trend has also been away from the typical fair of crime, arson and neighborhood mayhem and toward the much plusher confines that pass for news on Eighth Avenue these days. There is the no-longer-bourgeoning art scene, the new hipster mini-mall on Wyckoff, collectives!, how Roberta's may just have the best pizza in the city, if it weren't for the schlep (which can't be worse than going to DiFara's).

A healthy number of these stories are about real estate.

What, then, is so special about a "Living In" column? Well, it is a rite of passage of sorts, a coming of age, in the eyes of the Gray Lady, of a neighborhood. There was Cobble Hill in 2001, and again in 2006. Oh, and we almost forgot, 1983, when it was referred to, no longer, as "a poor man's Brooklyn Heights." Why? Because the houses were selling for more than $400,000. Crown Heights had its debut in 1985, and did not reappear, with the tide on Franklin Avenue, until last year. It took longer to come around to Bed-Stuy—2003 and 2009, the same two years Greenpoint got the treatment.

Bushwick was certainly no worse off than these neighborhoods back then, so it is a mystery what took so long. Certainly the housing stock is beneath those mentioned above, though the violence and test scores are at times and in places comparable. Perhaps the right demographic had simply not shown up yet.

One of those residents, an entrepreneur named Katja Bartholmess, said it was precisely this new activity that attracted her and her husband, Daniel Susla, to the apartment they bought on Knickerbocker Avenue this year.

“I like areas that are transitional, where things are happening, where I can see potential,” said Ms. Bartholmess, who runs a branding strategy company, Copygold.com, and sells baby clothing at Babysnappy.com. As a native of East Berlin who saw her city grow after the wall fell, she added, “I view transition and change as a very positive force.”

Their journey to Bushwick, like many others recently, began in Williamsburg, where Mr. Susla, a music executive, was living when Ms. Bartholmess immigrated from Germany. They moved into an apartment on the neighborhood’s south side and stayed for four years.

“We had a big patio there, so we had concerts, and masquerade parties, and an underground restaurant for a few months,” Ms. Bartholmess recalled. Still, after a few years, a staleness set in as the neighborhood gentrified. “It’s now a perfect place for someone else, not me,” she said.

You see, Bushwick is not stale.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC