Inquiring minds want to know
Not entirely sure why I started harping on this, but it's been bugging me the last day or so and no one has been able to provide a reasonable answer.
When sending a letter (probably a foreign concept to most people these days, but I imagine some of you are familiar with the act of sticking a document in an envelope and mailing it) to someone in New York City, here's how the City and State line breaks down:
Manhattan - New York, NY
Brooklyn - Brooklyn, NY
The Bronx - Bronx, NY
Staten Island - Staten Island, NY (I assume; I doubt I've ever sent anything to this dump)
However, when writing out the address to a resident of Queens, you don't write "Queens, NY;" you instead jot down the neighborhood (Astoria, Hollis, Kew Gardens, etc.) So far the only decent explanation I've received is that Queens is considered part of Long Island (though how Queens gets away with maintaining a borough distinction as well as being considered an extension of Long Island is perplexing in and of itself); as such the "towns" are proudly displayed on the envelope. A quick Wikipedia search tells us that the United States Postal Service divides Queens into four "towns" (Long Island City, Jamaica, Flushing and Far Rockaway), but I know that's not the case because I've sent mail to Scotty before and his address line was "Jamaica Estates, Queens."
Additionally, Wikipedia claims that Brooklyn is located in the westernmost part of Long Island, despite the fact that no one I know considers Brooklyn to be a part of Long Island. But if it technically is, how come Brooklyn's address lines don't include the names of the neighborhoods, i.e. "Park Slope, New York" and "Williamsburg, New York"?
I feel fairly ridiculous posing these questions, because if you've made it this far without rolling your eyes and clicking over to Clink or Leslie, (a) you're wondering why the hell anyone would care about this (I have a bizarre obessesion with NYC neighborhood names and happen to think it would be cool as hell to send mail to "Alphabet City, New York" or "Dumbo, New York." I need a hobby, I know), and (b) as a lifelong denizen of New York City, I'm shocked I don't know the answer to this query.
posted by CT at 7:05 AM
8 Comments:
snore...
Thanks Les, I know I can always rely on you to keep me honest.
Being from Jamaica, Queens, and having grown up with the "town within a borough within a city" phenomenon, lemme add my proverbial two cents...
I think the whole thing comes from the fact that all of Queens is, like Wikipedia said, divided up into a few, really huge uber-neighborhoods which contain all of the smaller neighborhoods you mentioned [Astoria is in Flushing, Hollis, Jamaica Estates and Kew Gardens are all in Jamaica, etc]. Since those uber-hoods are so big, they pretty much define your location, more than your actual borough. [When people ask where I'm from, I almost always say "Jamaica, Queens", while most people from any other borough just name their borough. Unless they're from Brooklyn. In which case they of course follow up with "...represent"]
Once people got used to using their uber-hood name as a reference, it eventually became OK to get more specific and just use the name of your smaller neighborhood.
By the way, the uber-hood name and the smaller neighborhood name are interchangeable. If you sent something to Scott and addressed it to "Jamaica, NY" instead of Jamaica Estates, it would still get to him. [My mom also lives in Jamaica Estates, and I use both names, depending on how I feel when I address the envelope]
Hope everyone enjoyed their Queens 101 lesson of the day. Please join us for our next discussion titled "Have you ever taken the subway from one place in Queens to another place in Queens? Seriously? You sure you weren't going somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn? You're a goddamn liar. I wish you weren't such a liar."
-- Rick [Living in Echo Park, Los Angeles, not Jamaica, Queens]
According to my voter registration card (and some institutional-type mail) I live in Flushing, but I really live in Middle Village, which is nowhere near what most people think of as Flushing. Queens and Brooklyn both used to be a series of towns before joining the city of New York- I think the reason Brooklyn, NY caught on as the mailing address is that there was indeed a City of Brooklyn at one time (Bklyn Heights and Downtown, I think) whereas there was never any City of Queens to speak of. Hence the Flushing, Jamaica, etc. I dunno. Pretentious people in certain sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx write their mailing addresses as Brooklyn Heights or Riverdale, so I'm sure you could write a letter addressed to Alphabet City or whatever and it would still get there as long as you had the right zip code.
If you look at Queens' history, it was a county with several cities and towns. (LIC, Flushing, Jamaica, etc.). In 1898, Queens was subsumed into NYC, but a lot of those areas still retained their own sense of identity. (Brooklyn became a borough of NYC that same year, but at the time it was just one big city).
Both Brooklyn and Queens are literally part of Long Island, although we don't normally think of them as such...
Bk and Qns are kinda like Russia. Most of the country is east of the Urals, hence Asian, but we think of Russia as being in Europe because Moscow is so much more glamorous than, say, Sakhalin, which I guess is like East New York.
I once lived in Astoria, but the US Postal Service insisted it was LIC and I had other people telling me it was Dutch Kills.
And your reason for the gratuitous 'dump' knock on Staten Island is...? After all the dump closed several years ago.
Not hip enough, I suppose.
www.forgotten-ny.com
Queens was a county in NY before it was part of the city full of farmland and small towns, and like all other counties, the Post Office established offices based on those towns. When the county was added to NYC, the Post Office left the offices as they were, or at least continues the tradition. A Post Office location is NOT a definition of a neighborhood.
Brooklyn was its own city and was never a county with smaller towns... therefore the post office named them all Brooklyn, like they do in Manhattan (with obvious different names for each physical office and zip code).
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