When It Comes To Ditmas Park, What’s In A Name?

An argument about the against the ever expanding list of names for our area (and others in the borough) inside ever shrinking “neighborhood” borders by neighbor Harry Siegel ran today in The New York Daily News. In it he says:

A decade from now, when filmmakers want to establish our current New York moment, they will gesture to viewers with a coffee house with reclaimed wood, Edison lights and tattooed help, plunking it down in a place with a name from a hyper-specific realtor’s geography: Ditmas Park and Prospect Lefferts (formerly Flatbush), Greenwood Heights and South Slope (formerly the no-man’s above Greenwood Cemetery), Prospect Heights (which emerged from Crown Heights like Eve from Adam’s rib) and Dumbo (formerly warehouses and light industry)…

Too often, these new names — many of them older ones revived long after falling out of use — come from realtors looking to brand an area that otherwise isn’t distinguishable from the one next to it, dividing the map into finer and finer parts with precious little to tell them apart (see: Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, or — ugh — BoCoCa).

Any Craigslist apartment search will reveal the slew of names for our area. There’s “Flatbush,” for one, which Harry points out used to be the overarching name for a large swath of Brooklyn including where we are (larger still, if you go back even further in history). While the name continues to set off alarms in some potential renters’ brains (and, we’re guessing, doesn’t seem to be used much for exactly that reason), some are able to mitigate the F word with a “Victorian” modifier, which also goes back a long way — a cushion that sounds like, “it’s gritty outside, but safe here.”

Then there are folks who stick with just plain Flatbush (no cushions necessary), ones who are satisfied calling our entire coverage area Ditmas Park (which yes, this site and its predecessor have certainly helped in cementing), ones who, for landmarking purposes or not, prefer distinctions like Fiske Terrace or Ditmas Park West, and, on a hyperbolic note, the NoProPaSo fiasco.

And at this point in the name’s history, it’s interesting to note how far from Ditmas Park, proper or otherwise, realtors will use the name — “Ditmas Park” seems to carry an opposite connotation from “Flatbush” for many. It now comes with a weight of gentrification, including restaurants with organic food and shops for the reclaimed wood- and Edison bulb-lovers moving to Brooklyn at an ever quickening rate, and is billed as a (maybe) affordable alternative to Park Slope for young families.

It’s what Harry, who grew up in this neighborhood, calls “luxury city homogeneity” and “curated-to-death monoculture,” and it entails both a “Ditmas Park” lifestyle brand and just about everything the word “Flatbush” doesn’t conjure up for many home hunters. Is our name being thrown out as far as Sheepshead Bay — not a newly invented property portmanteau — because of the Vogue coverage or what?

Harry also suggests a lack of actual ethnic or cultural diversity in modern New York neighborhoods is forcing people to define their areas differently, which is compelling and a more endearing idea than realtors, with dollar signs in their eyes, typing “Ditmas Park” into an apartment listing on E 53rd Street.

But looking past the tattooed help, do you believe our area, whatever you call it, has lost its diverse range of people — or that they’ll be pushed out soon? What’s your reason for calling your neighborhood what you do — and if you don’t define your enclave by its ethnic or cultural populations, then what sets it apart from the ‘hoods next to it? What do titles like “Flatbush” and “Ditmas Park” bring to mind for you, and is there harm in creating new names to put on the map?