Bay Area

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:44 PM -0500 5/7/00, Donald M. Lance wrote:
>In his files, Peter Tamony has a number of instances of ads and references
>in newspaper
>articles to "The City" being a reference to San Francisco in much of
>California.  When a
>developer built a mall in Orange County south of Los Angeles and called it
>The City, there
>was a slight furor over the choice of the name.
>When people near St. Joseph MO say they're going to The City, it's clear
>they're going to
>KC.  I don't think it's used much in the St. Louis area.  And just as San
>Franciscans
>don't say Frisco, St. Louisans don't say St. Louie.
>DMLance
>
The immortal (though now dead) columnist Herb Caen of the S. F. Chronicle
used to boast that letters addressed to "The City"--with no further
specification --from places like Long Island or Westchester or Jersey (I
forget the details) somehow got delivered, rightly or wrongly, to San
Francisco rather than NYC (or anywhere else).

But it has been a standard (and often criticized) practice of those living
in the "outer" boroughs of New York City to refer to "going in to the City"
when they visit Manhattan.  Specifically midtown, downtown, or lower,
though--I suspect a trip from Yankee Stadium to my old neighborhood of
Washington Heights or the nearby Polo Grounds would not have been described
as a trip into the City.  We probably talked about this practice at some
point in the last years of the previous century.

larry