City nicknames lists (1881, 1883, 1884, 1889, 1894)

[Peter A. McGraw]

Do you have "Stumptown" for Portland, OR?  I haven't seen documentation for
its origin, but it apparently arose in the early days when the city was
rising where forest had been only a short time before.  Most Portlanders
are familiar with it today (it's still used without elaboration or
explanation), and clearly it isn't your chamber-of-commerce-style moniker.

The c-of-c nickname is The Rose City or The City of Roses, FWIW.

More recently there's Rip City, which was apparently a spontaneous coinage
of the commentator at a particularly exciting moment in a Portland
Trailblazers game.  During the last period when the Blazers were
championship contenders and "Blazermania" ran high, Rose City Furniture
hung a temporary sign over the "Rose" in its sign facing I-84, making it
read "Rip City Furniture."  The Blazers' lawyers, getting right into the
spirit of the thing, filed suit for copyright infringement!  (They soon
dropped it when, to their astonishment, it began to shape up as a PR
disaster.)

With the Blazers getting more publicity these days for the repeated arrests
of their players than for their playing, I haven't heard "Rip City" in
quite a while.

Peter Mc.

--On Friday, July 18, 2003 1:32 PM -0400 Frank Abate
<abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:

> Special thanks to Geoff Nunberg for pointing out "The City That Waits For
> The City That Waits To Die To Die", the nickname of Colma, CA, where San
> Franciscans are often buried.
>
> For general knowledge of those on the list, I am interested in in-use and
> documented nicknames for American places.  The historical ones that Barry
> P has posted are very useful, as they often reflect things that a city was
> once famous for, but is no longer.  But current nicknames are important,
> too, esp. ones in widespread use.
>
> The ones promulgated by local chambers of commerce, many of which were
> clearly written by PR people purely for promotional value (and are often
> somewhat to very flattering), are NOT of great interest, at least not to
> me. I am looking for "real" nicknames that have (or had) popular
> currency.  One way you can tell the "real" ones is that they often occur
> in names of businesses and such.  Older ones, such New Haven as "The Elm
> City" (most of the elms are gone now, of course), often are still in
> commercial use -- in this case, there is an Elm City brewery (and ale) in
> New Haven.  For Middletown, CT, it is "Forest City" (also used of
> Cleveland, OH), which is not in popular use, but is the name of a dry
> cleaning business in Middletown.
>
> So one can verify the nicknames often by checking the Yellow Pages.
>
> Frank Abate
> (at work on a dictionary of American Placenames)



*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************