Over the last few years, Nicky Shapiro, a New York City walking tour guide, has noticed what he calls a \u201cdisease\u201d spreading through Lower Manhattan, particularly among newcomers in the city.<\/p>\n
They were dropping the crucial \u201cthe\u201d before certain neighborhood names. The East Village was suddenly just East Village, for example. Same for the West Village.<\/p>\n
It became noticeable enough that Shapiro posted a video on TikTok<\/a> this summer urging people to hold onto their articles.<\/p>\n \u201cThe inciting incident for that video was that, a few months ago, I was with a friend who is a cantankerous, born-and-raised New Yorker, and we were speaking to a young woman who said, \u2018Let\u2019s go to West Village,\u2019\u201d Shapiro said in an interview. \u201cAnd he kind of snapped back: \u2018The! The! The!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The video seemed to have tapped into a hot debate, drawing hundreds of commenters, most of them agreeing with Shapiro and commiserating with one another about all of the other neighborhoods whose definite articles had fallen victim. Some are now going to Bronx, instead of the Bronx; or meeting on U.E.S., for the Upper East Side, which is, as one user put it, more or less a crime.<\/p>\n Online, neighborhood guides advertise \u201cthe perfect day in West Village.\u201d A recent email subject line from Spotify alerted Jay-Z fans to available tickets at Yankee Stadium: \u201cJay-Z in Bronx,\u201d it read. (Spotify didn\u2019t respond to requests for clarification on whether that was a typo or an intentional omission.)<\/p>\n Neighborhood nomenclature is such an integral part of New York\u2019s lore that it becomes something like a personality trait for its residents. Neighborhoods are proudly named in everything from the musical \u201cRent\u201d and the TV series \u201cGossip Girl\u201d to Jennifer Lopez\u2019s \u201cJenny From the Block\u201d and Jay-Z\u2019s \u201cEmpire State of Mind.\u201d It is hardly a surprise, then, that any perceptible shift in the city\u2019s mores \u2014 even the omission of a three-letter article \u2014 would divide its inhabitants, pitting the new versus the classic, the young versus the old.<\/p>\n For some, using fewer words is about efficient communication. Charlotte, a 16-year-old New Yorker strolling through the Financial District, noticed that her friends had recently been dropping the article. \u201cMost of the time it\u2019s just like, \u2018Meet me at West Village,\u2019 because we already know where we\u2019re going,\u201d she said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to say unnecessary things.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd \u2018the\u2019 is unnecessary?\u201d replied her twin sister, Jade. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of abbreviations too \u2014 maybe people have just gotten lazy,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n The omission could also be less a statement and more of a mistake borne out of confusion, Shapiro added. Two New York Times journalists, on a recent walk through the East and West Villages, did not happen upon signage, bus stops or maps that carried neighborhood names with the articles included, which is part of a longstanding, space-saving convention of dropping articles from signs all across the city.<\/p>\n Even uptown neighborhoods, often perceived as more conservative and less susceptible to the whims of young trend cycles, are seemingly not immune. Joelle Obsatz, a co-owner of Butterfield Market, a specialty grocer with two locations on the Upper East Side, has been noticing an omission of the neighborhood\u2019s article among younger customers in her store for the last few years. \u201cI correct it in my mind,\u201d said Obsatz, who has lived in the neighborhood her whole life.<\/p>\n For others, including \u201cthe\u201d is a matter of grammatical importance. In theory, an article usually precedes a particular, singular noun or an adjective that is describing that noun. \u201cIt sounds stupid to me to say \u2018I\u2019m going to East Village,\u2019\u201d said Rana Good, 41, a travel journalist who has lived in the city for two decades. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s because I generally care more about words than the average person,\u201d Good said, \u201cbut I feel people aren\u2019t as conscientious of how they word things and write things anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n Good had also posted a video about this debate on TikTok<\/a>, drawing hundreds of comments with users swearing their allegiance to one side or the other. Was it the West and East Village? she asked. But that question opened up another point of contention, as some commenters suggested it was simply the Village, which usually refers to Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n Previous generations seemed to count fewer neighborhoods, said Jake Dell, 39, the fifth-generation owner of Katz\u2019s Delicatessen, which has been in business on East Houston Street since 1888. He has a deep history with the area adjacent to the East Village that he\u2019s always called the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n About 10 years ago, he started hearing people abbreviate the name to the L.E.S. At first, \u201cI didn\u2019t know what the hell people were talking about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Down the street at Russ and Daughters, the 112-year-old smoked-fish emporium, Josh Russ Tupper, 51, a fourth-generation owner, said he hadn\u2019t yet encountered the new vernacular. \u201c\u2018Going to L.E.S.,\u2019\u201d he mused. \u201cOh, that sounds wrong to me.\u201d<\/p>\n The shift may just be part of a long history in the city\u2019s neighborhoods of rebranding and adapting to waves of people moving in. Often, the changes have come from real estate agents looking to market a neighborhood, said Harold Holzer, Manhattan\u2019s borough historian and an Abraham Lincoln scholar. (Some of them, like BoCoCa<\/a>, are less successful than others.)<\/p>\n At any given moment, the city\u2019s neighborhood names \u201crepresent an inconsistent, crazy quilt,\u201d he said. The Bronx, for example, carries an article because it is named after the Bronx River, itself named after a European settler named Jonas Bronck, he explained. But Harlem, which is also hugged by a titular river, is divorced from any articles (and is named after a city in the Netherlands).<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, what is TriBeCa?\u201d he added. \u201cWhat is Dumbo? They\u2019re invented names.\u201d For years, real estate agents tried to rebrand the once-grimy and colorful Hell\u2019s Kitchen neighborhood into the more quaint-sounding Clinton, Holzer said, to middling success. Another example is in North Brooklyn, where there is debate over<\/a> the boundaries of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick and the newish term East Williamsburg.<\/p>\n \u201cMy younger daughter lives in Gowanus, but she lives close enough to Park Slope that they\u2019re calling it Parkwanus,\u201d Holzer added. \u201cIt sounds like a creature in a lagoon.\u201d<\/p>\n Katie McClure, the manager of the Locavore Variety Store, which stocks an assortment of locally made items, is familiar with nomenclature in flux.<\/p>\n The shop, on Sixth Avenue near West 10th Street, is in a location that one could call the Village, Greenwich Village, the West Village \u2014 or just downtown. \u201cLike, what neighborhood do we actually fall into?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But when it comes to the preferred name, the expert in New York-made wares conceded to the old guard. \u201cWell, I\u2019m not a native New Yorker \u2014 I\u2019ve been here for almost 10 years,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I think I would say \u2018the West Village.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n