Neighborhood name game is serious stuff

Seven years ago, when Paul Kimport was looking for a house, his requirements were few: It had to be cheap and near the Standard Tap, the pub that he co-owns in Northern Liberties.

Kimport settled a few blocks north, across Girard Avenue, in Fishtown, a neighborhood that got its name from its shad-fishing roots in the 18th century. Yet by the early 21st century, Fishtown had come to mean shut-down factories, a poorer working-class population, and continual news reports of petty crime and fires.

As it turned out, Fishtown's name would eventually take on a new meaning. Within the last year, its identity has become hip, trendy, artsy. Kimport's latest venue - Johnny Brenda's, at the corner of Girard and Frankford Avenues - is a destination point. Nearby rowhouses ripple with rehab, and those old factories are filling with studios.

"I guess the name has really changed meaning," said Kimport, now president of the Fishtown Area Business Association, which promoted a shad festival last summer, with music, finger food, and modern art, a scene far different from its 20th-century vibe. "And all the new people don't know any differently."

It's a question that goes back to the Capulets and Montagues: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right? Not necessarily. In a city where every several blocks offers a different identity, Philadelphia neighborhoods and its surrounding towns have had a long history of name-changing as a way to shed one reputation and claim a new and improved identity. Be it Southwark, Manayunk, Northern Liberties, or Levittown, our neighborhoods and their names are constantly shifting - whether the place that evoked doom now conveys desirable, or a new name makes the same tired place all of a sudden seem sexy.

Old-timers well remember the name Southwark. West of the Delaware and south of South Street, the neighborhood was where first the Swedes, and then William Penn's followers, settled in the 17th century. Yet it was looking pretty rundown in the 1960s. Seeing an opportunity to snag a new customer base, real estate entrepreneur Bernard Meltzer wanted to give it an upgrade - the housing stock was sturdy, if old, but cute enough for the recent college grads of the baby boom. So Meltzer started advertising the area as Queen Village in honor of its original Swedish settlers and their Queen Christina, and sold those rehabbed homes to those baby boomers. Eventually, Queen Village took on an identity that was both hip and unpretentious. Goodbye to Southwark.

Manayunk, a mill town that boasted a vibrant retail district, came to eventually symbolize the working class. But it got a new lease on its name in the 1980s when residents of Bala Cynwyd and other inner Main Line towns started turning to Manayunk for restaurants and shopping. They could avoid the ever-increasing traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway to Philadelphia, while at the same time feel they were pumping life into the city. So the riverside neighborhood, infused with new demand from wealthy clientele, went from shabby to sheen. Manayunk, the definition of blue-collar rowhouses, now defined Main Street's strip of retail heaven.

"When people said 'Manayunk' 20 to 30 years ago, that meant the place up the hill from the river," said Orly Zeewy, who owns a brand consulting business in Bala Cynwyd. "Now 'Manayunk' really only means the restaurant area on Main Street for most people. It's the same name, but really a different place both in style and geography."

Yet for any name change to be successful, it has to be organic, said Richard Harris, a professor of public policy at Rutgers-Camden.

"The cachet of a name change or a different meaning for a name has to be more than packaging," said Harris, a political scientist and director of the Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs at Rutgers. "People have to have the feeling about their town, their neighborhood. That is what pushes its meaning."

In some cases, a name can have two meanings at once. Although many people assume Society Hill reflects its sophisticated residents, the area was originally named for the trade societies that stood there from revolutionary times. Still the name has seamlessly transitioned from one culture to another.

"How strange that it was just right for both times with different meanings - from trade societies to high society," Zeewy said. "But words are only what you want them to be, so that is natural."

After all, it's possible to designate a new name to an old place and have it fall flat.

When New York developer Tony Goldman acquired a handful of buildings about a decade ago in the area just east of Broad Street and south of Market, he wanted to call it "Blocks Below Broad," said Meryl Levitz, head of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation. That didn't come to be (Philadelphians don't like being called "the sixth borough" or anything else New Yorkian, Levitz said), but these days, people are referring to the area as Midtown Village, which seems to be catching on.

What also is catching on, she said, is the nicknaming of neighborhoods in the lingual-trendy ways of J-Lo and iPod. There is NoLibs, for Northern Liberties, and even G-Ho, for the area southwest of Center City near the old Graduate Hospital. Old City, the historic district area that now resounds with an upscale-theater-and-art feeling, was originally renamed in the 1970s as Olde City, but, Levitz said, "We don't go to shoppes, with that e on the end, so I guess olde didn't make it either."

A little more than 50 years ago, many new families were moving into two rapidly changing South Jersey towns: In colonial-era Willingboro, developer William Levitt was trying to create his third development, following successes in New York and Pennsylvania. A dozen miles south, in Delaware Township, several builders created developments near Routes 70 and 38 off the Ben Franklin Bridge.

By 1960, Willingboro was called Levittown, and Delaware Township transformed into Cherry Hill, two names that now evoke tract-home suburbia - not only around here, but nationwide.

"There was a demographic change in Cherry Hill which drove changing the name," Harris said. "People were new and apparently wanted something new that showed who they were."

Although Levittown's name didn't last, it now suggests a different image. Since going back to being called Willingboro in 1963 after Levitt's rules for his all-white community were successfully fought in a 1960 lawsuit, the name is now synonymous with the black middle class, its most famous former resident being Olympian Carl Lewis.

For professor Harris, growing up in Long Island, Levittown evoked an image of ticky-tacky houses. "Willingboro sounds so much more like its own community," he said. "That is how it should work."

Levitz said that as wonderful as Philadelphia's traditional roots are, it's still a good thing when a community can revitalize with a name change.

"You wouldn't want to change, say, South Philly. It's too vital," she said.

But when new life arrived west of the University of Pennsylvania, bringing new stores and restaurants, it deserved a new identity. That part of West Philly became University City.

"It makes it all seem better," Levitz said, "even though it is the same blocks your grandfather may have lived on."