When you were in fifth grade, you might have had to look up why they call New York City "The Big Apple."
After about six minutes on the internet, you maybe figured it out and learned that the answer is actually pretty lame, so lame that we're not even going to mention it here.
However, rather than talk about why NYC is called 'The Big Apple,' it seemed like a good move to talk about how other NYC neighborhoods got their names.
So, there are a ton of neighborhoods in NYC. That's a given. Obviously we can't fit them all into this one article, so here we just focused on neighborhoods that we thought had particularly trippy names.
Read on to find out just how some of these interesting names came to be.
1. Astoria - Queens
This area was originally called Hallet’s Cove, named after the landowner William Hallet. But, they wanted more rich people to invest in the area, so they named it after John Jacob Astor who was the richest guy in America at the time with a net worth over $40 million.
But, this guy Astor totally screwed them and only invested like $500 into the neighborhood. Also, he never even went to the neighborhood. He just kind of looked at it from his summer home in Manhattan.
2. Canarsie - Brooklyn
The word Canarsie is an English adaptation of a word in the Lenape language meaning “fort” or “fenced land.”
Europeans often referred to places by the name of the people living there, and apparently, the Europeans often referred to the Lenape as Canarsee Indians for some inexplicable reason, and, in turn, referred to this area as Canarsee which later became Canarsie.
3. Hell’s Kitchen - Manhattan
The origin of this neighborhood's name is super foggy. No one really knows where it comes from.
Some people say it comes from Davy Crockett when he described the Irish people living in the five points as, “these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab Hell’s kitchen.”
Then this later came to describe this section of Midtown because at the time it was also mostly inhabited by Irish immigrants.
However, no one can actually pin down the origin and there are a ton of different opinions about which tenement building was actually considered the first Hell’s Kitchen.
4. Ozone Park - Queens
The name was chosen for the neighborhood by developers who wanted to lure in potential buyers with thoughts of Atlantic Ocean breezes and a park-like community. The word “ozone” was meant as a reference to fresh air rather than the alternate form of oxygen.
,5. Bushwick - Brooklyn
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The Dutch West India Company bought this area from the Lenape in 1638 and this guy, Peter Stuyvesant, named it Boswijck which means “heavy woods”, or “little town in the woods" in 17th century Dutch. This obviously got changed into the word Bushwick.
It was the last of the original six Dutch towns of Brooklyn that were established in the area known as New Netherland.
6. Tenderloin - Manhattan
In 1876, this New York Police Captain named Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams gave this area its nickname after he was transferred to the notorious red-light district.
He said it was because he was making so much more bribe money that he would be able to eat tenderloin instead of chuck steak. The name “Tenderloin” became a generic word for red-light districts all across the U.S. including cities like San Francisco.
7. Mott Haven - the Bronx
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This neighborhood was named after a guy named Jordan Mott who built this huge iron works in 1828 which continued running until 1906. He originally bought the land from the Morris family. Mott Haven was originally a part of Port Morris.
When Jordan Mott asked the Morris family if he could rename it Mott Haven (the name everyone had started calling it), they basically told him that they didn’t care what he did and that he might as well rename the Harlem river the Jordan.
This name might have been a super sneaky 19th century rich person insult, but who really knows? Nobody understands old, rich people.
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