ProCro, SoBro, FiDi, BoCoCa: A Lawmaker Says, ‘Enough’

All are names, gone and widely forgotten, of the areas currently known as SoHo, Stuyvesant Town and the Upper West Side. Their rechristening was driven by marketing and the age-old arriviste penchant for reinvention: like colonists, neighborhood newcomers staked their claim by renaming wherever they happened to land.

But now a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries, is writing legislation that would punish real estate agents for inventing neighborhood names and for falsely stretching their boundaries. It would also require that name changes get city approval.

Under Mr. Jeffries’s vision, NoLIta may never have been allowed to break away from Little Italy. Alphabet City might not have been subsumed by the East Village. SoBro could have been dead on arrival (some might argue it already was).

Mr. Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, might have a difficult time persuading other legislators to sign on, but he says such renaming is not innocuous because it artificially inflates housing prices. “Neighborhoods have a history, culture and character that should not be tossed overboard whenever a Realtor decides it would be easier to market under another name,” he said.

Mr. Jeffries’s outrage was set off by reports that real estate agents were using the name ProCro to peddle properties on the border of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, an area within his district. He also said the name “sounded silly.”

But in the history of the city’s changing neighborhood names, it has never been easy to predict when a new name would stick.

The abbreviation floodgates appear to have been opened by SoHo, a name that gained traction in the mid-1960s as artists began to live illegally in factory spaces south of Houston Street. It also had the allure of having a twin, nomenclaturally speaking, in London’s Soho, a centuries-old area whose name appears to have roots in a hunting call.

Next came TriBeCa, tentatively trotted out in the early 1970s. “It’s called TriBeCa, though nobody’s wild about the name,” The New York Times said in 1976. By then, abbreviation fever had struck: The article also noted that some residents preferred to call the area LoCal or SoSo, for South of SoHo.

And then it was off to the races, with neighborhoods like NoHo, NoLIta and finally Dumbo (actually an acronym, for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) coming about and — with the exception of NoLIta — being enshrined on city maps. Joel Minster, senior vice president of Kappa Map Group, which publishes Hagstrom maps, said the inclusion process involved consulting local residents and the city.

Developers and marketers fanned the flames, creating what has become a likely graveyard of names, using whatever ramp, tunnel, viaduct and manhole cover that happened to be nearby: NoBat, NoCal, BoHo, CanDo, ViVa (West Harlem between two viaducts), and, in Brooklyn, BoCoCa (where Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens converge) and GoCaGa (Gowanus meets Carroll Gardens).

The blogosphere giddily took the rebranding to new heights. In 2005, the blog Curbed held a contest for neighborhood names; the winner was Rambo: Right After the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, between Tillary and York Streets, in Brooklyn.

But other names stuck, somewhat. Lockhart Steele, the founder of Curbed, said he and his friends bandy about the names of FiDi, for the Financial District, and SoBro, a repackaging of the South Bronx. “Those neighborhood names are catching on, albeit perhaps slowly and awkwardly, because they actually fulfill a need,” he said.

Jonathan Butler, who created the Brooklyn blog Brownstoner, said the area that set Mr. Jeffries off, “ProCro,” may deserve its own name because it shares elements of both Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. “Crown Heights is huge,” he said, “and in this case, the subneighborhood designation is quite helpful.”

For all the fuss, a cursory search of Craigslist ads revealed no trace of listings for “ProCro.”

Many lauded Mr. Jeffries’s bid to punish real estate agents for suggesting that properties are in more tantalizing areas, but the halting of name creation gave some pause.

“Neighborhood names and the coining thereof is a quintessentially New York activity that should be encouraged, not discouraged,” Mr. Steele said. “Telling people not to is like telling New Yorkers they can’t have hot dogs in the street.”