On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Joel Gwynn wrote: > When you get right down to it, this Boston "neighborhood" thing is > just confusing. I work in Dorchester but management likes to put > "Boston" on the stationary, which is confusing because there's an > identical address in Boston proper, just with a different zip code. > Are there any other cities that have similar naming schizophrenia?
Sure, I imagine it happens all over the place. As has been noted in other comments in this thread, big towns assimilate smaller towns all the time, so current neighborhood names are often the names of formerly independent political entities. But then, it's not even always assimilation. People all over the world know that Harvard Square is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it isn't, as far as I know, a formal geographic boundary in any useful sense -- it's just a district in that part of Cambridge. But then maybe I'm revealing some ignorance here, as I've lived in the Boston area since I was a kid and yet I still don't actually know what "square" is really meant by the trm "Harvard Square" -- I've always assumed that it's centered on the T station, but that's not actually on Harvard's campus, hence the ambiguity. At $past_job, some of my coworkers were working on a real estate site. For this, they had to be able to handle all kinds of random input from people that, whether or not it was on any formal map, did in fact denote a perfectly well understood geographic area. Harvard Square. Union Square. Mark Sandman Square. Financial District. Theatre District. Leather District. Back Bay. Fort Point. South End. World's End. Greenbush. Queen Anne's Corner. Four Corners. Assinippi. Minot. Humarock. Silver Lake. Cedarville. Just to name a few. All of these are definite places in or around Boston or southeastern Massachusetts, but none of them is an actual town or city. But if you put any of them on an envelope, the mail will very probably get to its intended destination, and if you put any of them into a search string on a real estate site, it has to return results for that area. My impression is that dealing with all these varying names for the same places was the main impetus for setting up the ZIP code system in the first place. As long as you have the right ZIP code on an envelope, you can call your neighborhood Fatty Arbuckle for all the post office cares. Heh. Come to think of it, I might start calling my street that... :-) -- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
