ProCro, SoBro, FiDi, BoCoCa: A Lawmaker Says, ‘Enough’

[brooklynite]

from The New York Times:

Everyone knows that some of the best people-watching in New York City can be had in Hell’s Hundred Acres. Those on the hunt for a middle-class complex would be well advised to check out the Gas House District. Hankering for bagels and a schmear? Get thee to Bloomingdale, stat.

All are names, gone and widely forgotten, of the areas currently known as SoHo, Stuyvesant Town and the Upper West Side. Their rechristening was driven by marketing and the age-old arriviste penchant for reinvention: like colonists, neighborhood newcomers staked their claim by renaming wherever they happened to land.

But now a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries, is writing legislation that would punish real estate agents for inventing neighborhood names and for falsely stretching their boundaries. It would also require that name changes get city approval.

Under Mr. Jeffries’s vision, NoLIta may never have been allowed to break away from Little Italy. Alphabet City might not have been subsumed by the East Village. SoBro could have been dead on arrival (some might argue it already was).

Apparently all the important issues in NY State have already been addressed....