This piece in the New York Times describes how gentrifying neighbourhoods separate and rename themselves, using Brooklyn’s Williamsburg (map here) as a case study:
It is no longer enough to say you’re from Williamsburg. Status-conscious locals name-drop “North” or “South” as a way of telegraphing their membership in a certain tribe.
The new labels have bubbled up on blogs like Curbed, where the comment section includes intra-borough digs like, “South Wburg is grim” and “S burg is getting better all the time.” They pop up on real estate ads, where “North Williamsburg” has become a byword for higher-end apartments on the nicer side of the tracks. “The beating heart of North Williamsburg,” read a recent listing for a $4,400-a-month penthouse loft on North Sixth Street with white-oak flooring, stone countertops and a private roof deck.
They even appear in Urban Dictionary, the crowd-sourced lexicon of street lingo, under its top-ranked definition for “Williamsburg”: “North Williamsburg (near the L train) is generally filled with trustafarians, overpriced bars, and vintage clothing stores, where South Williamsburg (near the JMZ train) is still home to a large Hasidic and Hispanic population.”
Neighborhood mitosis is neither unique to Williamsburg nor new, but simply the latest example of how New York neighborhoods continually shift and subdivide.
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Just a matter of time before Grandview-Woodland or the DES loses a hyphen or gains an adjective.
South Surrey, anyone?
Railtown broke away from Gastown and now there apparently a hood called Crosstown which I am told is in between Yaletown, Downtown and Gastown.