Over the last few years, Nicky Shapiro, a New York City walking tour guide, has noticed what he calls a “disease” spreading through Lower Manhattan, particularly among newcomers in the city.
They were dropping the crucial “the” before certain neighborhood names. The East Village was suddenly just East Village, for example. Same for the West Village.
It became noticeable enough that Shapiro posted a video on TikTok this summer urging people to hold onto their articles.
“The 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, ‘Let’s go to West Village,’” Shapiro said in an interview. “And he kind of snapped back: ‘The! The! The!’”
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.
Online, neighborhood guides advertise “the perfect day in West Village.” A recent email subject line from Spotify alerted Jay-Z fans to available tickets at Yankee Stadium: “Jay-Z in Bronx,” it read. (Spotify didn’t respond to requests for clarification on whether that was a typo or an intentional omission.)
Neighborhood nomenclature is such an integral part of New York’s lore that it becomes something like a personality trait for its residents. Neighborhoods are proudly named in everything from the musical “Rent” and the TV series “Gossip Girl” to Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block” and Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.” It is hardly a surprise, then, that any perceptible shift in the city’s mores — even the omission of a three-letter article — would divide its inhabitants, pitting the new versus the classic, the young versus the old.
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. “Most of the time it’s just like, ‘Meet me at West Village,’ because we already know where we’re going,” she said. “We don’t have to say unnecessary things.”
“And ‘the’ is unnecessary?” replied her twin sister, Jade. “I think there’s a lot of abbreviations too — maybe people have just gotten lazy,” she added.
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.
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’s article among younger customers in her store for the last few years. “I correct it in my mind,” said Obsatz, who has lived in the neighborhood her whole life.
For others, including “the” is a matter of grammatical importance. In theory, an article usually precedes a particular, singular noun or an adjective that is describing that noun. “It sounds stupid to me to say ‘I’m going to East Village,’” said Rana Good, 41, a travel journalist who has lived in the city for two decades. “Maybe it’s because I generally care more about words than the average person,” Good said, “but I feel people aren’t as conscientious of how they word things and write things anymore.”
Good had also posted a video about this debate on TikTok, 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.
Previous generations seemed to count fewer neighborhoods, said Jake Dell, 39, the fifth-generation owner of Katz’s 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’s always called the Lower East Side.
About 10 years ago, he started hearing people abbreviate the name to the L.E.S. At first, “I didn’t know what the hell people were talking about,” he said.
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’t yet encountered the new vernacular. “‘Going to L.E.S.,’” he mused. “Oh, that sounds wrong to me.”
The shift may just be part of a long history in the city’s 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’s borough historian and an Abraham Lincoln scholar. (Some of them, like BoCoCa, are less successful than others.)
At any given moment, the city’s neighborhood names “represent an inconsistent, crazy quilt,” 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).
“I mean, what is TriBeCa?” he added. “What is Dumbo? They’re invented names.” For years, real estate agents tried to rebrand the once-grimy and colorful Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood into the more quaint-sounding Clinton, Holzer said, to middling success. Another example is in North Brooklyn, where there is debate over the boundaries of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick and the newish term East Williamsburg.
“My younger daughter lives in Gowanus, but she lives close enough to Park Slope that they’re calling it Parkwanus,” Holzer added. “It sounds like a creature in a lagoon.”
Katie McClure, the manager of the Locavore Variety Store, which stocks an assortment of locally made items, is familiar with nomenclature in flux.
The shop, on Sixth Avenue near West 10th Street, is in a location that one could call the Village, Greenwich Village, the West Village — or just downtown. “Like, what neighborhood do we actually fall into?” she said.
But when it comes to the preferred name, the expert in New York-made wares conceded to the old guard. “Well, I’m not a native New Yorker — I’ve been here for almost 10 years,” she said, “but I think I would say ‘the West Village.’”
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