The Neighborhood Name Game

Red Hook

Dutch colonists controlled New York for just 40 years — from 1624, when they set foot on Governors Island, to 1664, when they handed their keys to the British, but they still managed to go on a naming spree. And many names stuck, even if they were mangled along the way.

“Bos Wyck” for “area in the woods,” one of five Dutch towns in Brooklyn, for instance, became Bushwick, while “Vlacke Bos,” for “wooded plain,” morphed into Flatbush. (One of the town names not to endure was “Nieuw Utrecht,” or “New Utrecht,” home to present-day Bensonhurst.)

Sailing around without running into things was important, of course, so attention was also paid to coasts. The sharp point of russet-colored land that projected into the bay at the end of Van Dyke Street became “Roode Hoek” for “red corner.”But taste for colors can be fickle. Farther south along the bay was Yellow Hook, which seemed to suit its residents fine until a yellow fever outbreak in the mid-19th century made people leery of visiting, said Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official historian. In 1853, it became Bay Ridge.

Sheepshead Bay

Like Cape Cod, this waterfront enclave was inspired by fish, though not the black, blue or striped bass species common today. Instead, it went with the sheepshead, a gray-striped version that hasn’t been a major presence in New York waters for decades.

“Every once in a while you will hear about guys catching one in the early morning on Jamaica Bay,” said Mike Ardolino, 37, the captain of “Hunter,” a local charter-fishing boat. “But it’s really now more of a Southern fish.”

The fishing industry in the neighborhood is also down from its peak, to about six boats from 72 in the 1960s, when Mr. Ardolino’s grandfather and father were also in the fishing business.

Carroll Gardens

Carroll Gardens, along with Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Park Slope were once all just considered South Brooklyn. That’s because the southern border of the original Dutch town of Brooklyn was at about 60th Street, so “south” made sense.

Carroll Gardens is named for Charles Carroll, a plantation owner from Maryland. Brooklynites became big fans of Maryland after the Revolutionary War, when the state’s soldiers helped play a key role in a bloody clash near the present-day Gowanus Canal in the Battle of Brooklyn.

Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, may have also been appealing to the Italian immigrants who later packed the area. In fact, the first Italian-focused church between Brooklyn and Montauk — now called Sacred Hearts and St. Stephen — was established there.

That parish, and others like it, gave Brooklyn neighborhoods coherence, said the Rev. Msgr. Guy Massie of Sacred Hearts. “You would ask somebody where they came from, and they would always refer to their parish,” he said. “It was the focus of Catholic life.”

Vinegar Hill

It might be unusual, and possibly illegal, to market a neighborhood today to a specific ethnic group, though that appears to be what the developer John Jackson did after buying land along the East River in the late 1700s.

Along with adding three-level brick dwellings around the corner from his shipyard, Jackson anointed the neighborhood Vinegar Hill, a potential rallying cry for Irish immigrants familiar with a final, fateful battle that took place at that hill during Ireland’s 1798 rebellion against British rule. Sure enough, the area was soon nicknamed “Irishtown,” though Germans, Norwegians and Poles also flocked to its stone-lined streets.

As power plants and public housing developments carved up the neighborhood in the 20th century, Vinegar Hill faded as a name, though the 2008 opening of the Vinegar Hill House, a well-reviewed restaurant at 72 Hudson Avenue, seems to have brought new visitors, and attention, to the tucked-away area.

QUEENS

Rego Park

When developers named a neighborhood, it’s perhaps no surprise that they might lean toward self-promotion.

Consider the Real Good Construction Company in the 1920s, when it began to put up houses and apartment buildings in the farm-lined area known as Forest Hills West. The builder played off the company name in ads: “Come out and see a ‘good house’ before you buy elsewhere.”

Then, in a preview of the portmanteau-making that would become all the rage with SoHo, TriBeCa and NoLIta, Real Good combined some syllables and branded the neighborhood with Rego, even if head-scratching followed. Ask some residents today, even real estate brokers, about the origin story, and blank looks can follow.

Murray Hill

They must have known it would sow confusion. But the influential Murray family — whose Inclenberg estate established Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood — still lent their name to this Flushing-adjacent neighborhood.

The two places have their differences. While Manhattan was urbanizing, Queens, a patchwork of commercial nurseries, was more pastoral. But through a chain of marriages, Murray descendants wound up owning Bloodgood, one of the major nurseries in Queens, which by the 1920s had been bulldozed for housing and shopping centers, said Stephen Casscles, who’s writing a book about the area’s horticultural past.

“People sometimes think we’re located in the other Murray Hill,” said Daniela Addamo, the curator of the Queens Historical Society, which is located at the Kingsland Homestead, a Dutch-colonial-style house where Murrays lived from 1832 to 1911. Twice, development has forced the relocation of the house, which now sits on former nursery land.

“People in Queens love still using neighborhood names,” Ms. Addamo added, “Especially when they address envelopes.”

Jamaica

With Jamaica, it can help to get the obvious out of the way first. Yes, the neighborhood has strong ties to the nation of Jamaica, which is responsible for more immigrants there than just about any other country, according to the state comptroller’s office. In fact, Jamaicans make up about 10 percent of the population.

But the island nation has nothing to do with the name. Instead, it’s derived from the word “Yamecah,” an Algonquin word for beaver, which was once an abundant animal in the area. In fact, until 1906, when it was filled in, a beaver pond stood next to looping Beaver Road, where chicken slaughterhouses are today. The Yamecah are also a subset of the indigenous Canarsee people.

When the Dutch came, they branded the area “Rustdorp,” for “peaceful village.” But unlike in some precincts, where English settlers basically adopted the existing descriptors, they reverted to the native terms, “probably because Rust Dorp was too hard to say,” said Kelsey Brow, the executive director of the King Manor, a historic house museum whose most famous occupant, Rufus King, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, arrived in 1805, when Jamaica was still its old rural self.

Ozone Park

In the 1880s, a century before “ozone layer” became a buzz-phrase of the environmental movement, it more commonly referred to “fresh air,” which the Manhattan-based developers of this area near Jamaica Bay, Benjamin Hitchcock and Charles Denton, promised in droves.

The ads could seem like they were plugging a spa. “Ozone Park challenges comparison with any suburb in America,” read one in the “New York Herald” in 1883, “as to its pure atmosphere” and “healthfulness.”

But the older use of ozone is often lost on people outside the neighborhood, said resident Joseph Caruana, reflecting on conversations he’s had with people from elsewhere.

But Mr. Caruana, 60, who is the president of Our Neighbors Civic Association of Ozone Park, said that Hitchcock and Denton’s marketing ploy has stood the test of time. “I hang out in Brooklyn a lot,” he said, “and the air definitely feels fresher here.”

STATEN ISLAND

Arrochar

In a city awash with Dutch, British, Native and even Italian appellations, Scottish handles like this one, from a neighborhood next to the Verrazzano bridge, jump out.

William Wallace MacFarland, a high-profile lawyer in the 19th century, bestowed the name (pronounced “ARROW-kar”) in 1880 on the red-brick hilltop estate he purchased off Major Avenue. He likely had Arrochar, Scotland, on his mind. A mountain village near Loch Lomond, it’s in a region that was once the domain of the MacFarlane clan, though MacFarland himself was born on a farm near Binghamton, N. Y.

“His briefs were a marvel of clear and vigorous expression,” according to a New York Times article. MacFarland’s biggest case was a suit against the robber baron Jay Gould after the collapse of the Erie Railroad.

MacFarland died in 1905, and in 1919, a nun purchased the Arrochar property, where Saint Joseph Hill Academy, a Catholic school, operates today.

Graniteville

This dense enclave by the Staten Island Expressway was once a place of heavy industry — namely a place where people hacked stones out of the ground.

Once known as Fayetteville, the neighborhood redubbed itself Granite Village, then Graniteville, with the discovery of what was assumed to be granite, said Carlotta DeFillo, a librarian at Historic Richmond Town, a Staten Island museum complex. But the blocky stone turned out to be trap rock, as in what is found on New Jersey’s Palisades cliffs.

The material still had uses; railroad beds are often lined with it. And Graniteville’s quarries lasted till the 1890s, said Phillip Papas, who has written several Staten Island books.

But the legacy is not easily recalled. Graniteville Quarry Park is a 4.5-acre tangle with few signs or paths, though some stony knobs can be found sticking out of the dirt.

Bulls Head

Clever restaurants often revive long-lost neighborhood names. But in a twist, Bulls Head might owe its existence to a bar, the Bull’s Head Tavern, which was hardly an ordinary watering hole.

Built in 1741 at Victory Boulevard and Richmond Avenue, the tavern was taken over by the Redcoats during the Revolutionary War. But more infamous were their hosts, the Hatfield family, which “murdered, robbed and plundered everybody that happened to be in their way,” then chalked up the victim count on their barroom walls, writes Ira K. Morris, in a 19th-century island history. “Every device imaginable was resorted to entice unsuspecting people into the house.”

But the Bull’s Head eventually turned into a stopover for stage coaches headed to Philadelphia, becoming a place, Morris says, “where passengers got sumptuous meals.”

THE BRONX

Mott Haven

Jordan I. Mott, an inventor of stoves that burned coal (instead of wood), and maker of kettles, pipes and fountains, created a sort of company town on the farm-lined banks of the Harlem River after locating his ironworks there in 1828.

On land purchased from the Morris family, which had owned a couple thousand acres since Colonial times, Mott also developed housing for workers near his industrial base, which has a remnant at 2403 Third Avenue.

The neighborhood has grown over time, swallowing up the communities of Wilton and North New York, said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx’s official historian. And Mott Haven has clung to its name, despite developers’ recent attempts to rechristen the area the Piano District, which set off gentrification alarms, and the 1980s offering of SoBro, which seems to have had better success in Nashville and Indianapolis.

“Sometimes who wins and who loses,” Mr. Ultan said, “is just willy-nilly.”

Woodstock

Ask somebody where they live in the Bronx, and they’re more likely to say “Webster Avenue” than “Morrissania.” That may be understandable: Intense development in the early 20th century blurred the edges of villages.

Woodstock, for example, still shows up on maps, but few people in real life seem to use the name. That was probably not the case 150 years ago, when the arrival of train lines helped create a German and Hungarian community around Jackson Avenue and East 163rd Street, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Forest Houses, an 18-acre public housing development, stands there today.

The village took its name from a work of fiction, “Woodstock,” Sir Walter Scott’s 1826 novel about an English castle that was destroyed in battle and was a source of fascination — Henry I kept lions and leopards there.

A trace of the past does exist at the Woodstock Library, a limestone-fronted three-story library on East 160th Street that was built by Andrew Carnegie in 1914. The building, which was designed by McKim, Mead and White, received landmark status in 2009.