"midtown"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote:

> I was looking over various dictionary entries for "midtown,"
> and I have to confess I'm not sure what it really means. I'm
> too New York-centric to get the Manhattan arrangement out of
> my mind--can we have a discussion of what "midtown" means
> in other cites, or in smaller things (if it is used there)?

I searched Nexis in the file covering 1975-1998, using a search of the
type "midtown Chicago or mid town Chicago" for various cities, in order to
see to what extent "midtown" is used for cities other than Manhattan. Here
are my results:

Atlanta         705

Toronto         587

Detroit          56

Los Angeles      42

Philadelphia     29

Baltimore        23

Chicago          22

Houston          22

Boston           21

Miami            19

San Francisco    12

Dallas            7

Seattle           7

Minneapolis       4

Pittsburgh        1


It appears that "midtown" is a well-developed concept in Atlanta and
Toronto, but is used only rarely in reference to the other cities I
searched.

Fred "Jesse" Shapiro



-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu