Why are “Tribeca” and “Madison at Upper West Side” in Melbourne?
Posted: July 21, 2011 Filed under: Miscellaneous, Planning | Tags: BoCoCa, developer, Julie Szego, Madison at Upper West Side, neighbourhood, place name, real estate, Robin Boyd, Suliman Osman, Tribeca 13 Comments
The real Upper West Side, Manhattan - apparently you can now get all of this in Melbourne, Australia (much cheaper too!)
A few months ago, writer Julie Szego bemoaned the Americanisation of place names in Melbourne. She identified two examples – the “Madison at Upper West Side” development on the old Spencer St power station site and “Tribeca” on the former Victoria Brewery site in East Melbourne.
She invoked the spirit of Robin Boyd to explain just how easy it to sell the gloss and sparkle of New York to aspirational Melburnians:
Robin Boyd in The Australian Ugliness, the highly influential polemic about cultural cringe in the 1950s and early ’60s, observed that the most ”fearful” aspect of Australia’s low-rent mimicry of the American aesthetic ”is that beneath its stillness and vacuous lack of enterprise is a terrible smugness, an acceptance of the frankly second-hand and the second-class, a wallowing in the kennel of cultural underdog”
While Melbourne’s developers and apartment buyers pretend they’re living Sex in the City downunder, real New Yorkers are continuously inventing new, home-grown names to market projects. Here are six New York neighbourhoods you probably haven’t heard of:
SoLita: Downtown Manhattan, south of NoLita between Tribeca and Little Italy
FiDi: (Financial District, geddit?) Southern tip of Manhattan between the South Street Seaport and Battery Park City
BoCoCa: Brooklyn waterfront area comprising Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens, also known as Columbia Street Waterfront District
LIC: Southwestern waterfront tip of Queens, including Hunter’s Point (also known as Long Island City)
Two Bridges: Southeast of Chinatown beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges
Southside: South part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near Williamsburg Bridge exit
Other examples – some of which resurrect old names or functions – include the Meatpacking District, Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), East Williamsburg and Vinegar Hill. According to this writer, areas “like NoMad (north of Madison Square Park) and others like SoHa (south of Harlem) haven’t exactly caught on yet”. One commenter says that some, like Dumbo, were coined by the populace, not developers.
This has all gotten too much for certain New Yorkers. Suliman Osman reports that a Brooklyn (State) Assemblyman, annoyed that real estate agents are calling the area between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights “ProCro”, is calling for a Neighbourhood Integrity Act. One of his complaints is that rebranding lower income areas as hip could ultimately displace traditional residents.
However Osman, who is an academic at George Washington University and author of Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity, points out that inventing names has a long history and can be a positive force:
The Neighborhood Integrity Act is an understandable response to a cynical form of place naming. But in the end, even the oldest neighborhood names are invented. That does not make them unimportant. Greenwich Village was once as new a title as BoCoCa, but it allowed, in time, residents to organize politically and to retain a sense of history and place. So, perhaps, will BoCoCa one day.
The complaint I hear from people in Melbourne isn’t the fact of giving large new developments their own names, but rather importing the labels from elsewhere. We’ve always had the Paris End of Collins St and Julie Szego says she’s heard the western part of the city referred to as the Prague End (she reckons it should actually be called the Bucharest End!). She praises the Eureka Tower, named after the miners’ rebellion and wonders why the developers of Tribeca, the large residential development on the former Victoria Brewery site at the corner of Powlett and Albert streets in East Melbourne, couldn’t have followed the same path:
The recipe for VB was developed there in the early 1900s and the brewery’s Victorian facade has been tastefully preserved. The place, in essence, reeks of Melbourne. Surely this would have been a marketing opportunity to relish? But what did a bunch of clever folks decide to name it? ”Tribeca”, of course, after the monied neighbourhood in old New York.
I hope in the future we have home-grown names in key areas of central Melbourne, but I hope we’re spared the likes of ElCoBo, PaPr, SoSoBa and NooDo (the first one is the Elizabeth St precinct between Collins and Bourke – maybe someone can figure out the rest, or make up some new ones!)
The Melbourne Urbanist 
Those New York names are all for neighbourhoods though, not developments, so they’re a bit more organic for the most part. We don’t need to do this as we have a new suburb every couple of minutes with its own name. Remember that all of Manhattan is postally ‘New York’, so they create names for smaller units. I think Queens, though, follows the Australian suburban appellation system, so I wonder whether they too have informal neighbourhood names.
But I agree. Recycling names like Tribeca, Brighton and Heidelberg shouldn’t happen. It’s even mildly offensive that the metropolis is named after an English toff, not to mention the name of this state.
Yes, I was conscious of that but I reckon “Madison at Upper West Side” is trying to create both an address and a neighbourhood. Also, I expect the developer-driven names in NY probably start with a single large development and attempt to locate it within a rebranded neighbourhood.
How is it even mildly offensive that Melbourne is named after an English prime minister and the state after the Queen? Do you remember your history? The UK wasn’t a foreign country back then. Why shouldn’t such people have been honored, if at the time they were felt to be important? And in many cases the copied names were done to give this strange land a more familiar feel for its new inhabitants, and this was hardly a new practice or unique to the British.
You may wish legitimately to describe the *settlement* of Australia by the British as morally dubious, wrong or repugnant. But that’s an extremely different thing from the naming of places.
Now, as for contemporary name-copying from America, I think it fits in quite well with Australia’s long term self-esteem problems, especially amongst whatever passes from time-to-time as the elite.
Yes, let us then maybe take the next step and consider deleting the word “Royal” from existing buildings and places.
There was some controversy recently in regards to change the name of well-known Manhattan neighborhoods. Some argue that it deprives a neighborhood of the historical value once it’s name is changed. It’s ironic to see so many New York City references in real estate globally, not just in Melbourne.
The two developments Julie Szego was concerned about are named after New York, not ‘American’, neighbourhoods, obviously for the high-density rich-culture connotations of that city. The names are obviously part of the marketing, and presumably flag to possible buyers to expect unusually high density, overlooking, and other aspects that should really be a drawback. They are only two of very many however, in a tradition of adding a touch of style, glamour, sophistication, wealth or the exotic, to new developments stretching from new Docklands towers such as Palladio or Nolan (and the odd one out ‘Watergate’), and St Kilda Rd’s Lucient and Balencia (sounds like Balenciaga, famous fashion designer), all the way back to interwar St Kilda apartments – in the 90s I used to love wandering around St Kilda past the Venetia, the Belvedere, Windermere, San Diego, Nareen, Woy Woy, (rare Aust references), the triple blocks of Pacifica, Altantica and Oceania, the Biltmore (a US hotel chain), Le Chateau (French style), or most exotic of all ‘Mandalay’. In fact theres a whole street of nice deco hosues called ‘Los Angeles Crt’.
I remember when SoAlNoJo was fun and interesting. It’s lost most it’s magic now, all seems to have moved north to HiDunHut.
I’m guessing NooDo isn’t: “Noooooo!!! Docklands…. ” Can’t for the life of me figure out any of yours… could you give us some hints?
NoDo is “North of Docklands”
SoSoBa is “South of Southbank” (quite like the sound of that one – sounds Spanish)
PaPr, pronounced ‘paper’, is “Parliament Precinct”
The best I can come up with is:
SoAINoJo – something like “South of Alexander….North of Johnson”??
But no idea what HiDunHut is – something to do with High St maybe?
Spot on with SiAiNoJo.
HiDunHut is the stretch of High Street between Hutton St and Dundas St in Thornbury. Seems to be developing a thriving night-life and decent bunch of cafes quite rapidly in recent years.
I like the SoSoBa one a lot actually! Might just have to start slipping it into conversation as if its normal.
Prague end? I’ve only ever heard the west side of the city called the Beirut End! Especially in the days of Spencer street station, the old power station and the brutalist Age building…
G’day Alan
Some further thoughts on this at The Interpreter:
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2011/07/25/Do-we-still-have-a-cultural-cringe.aspx
Our concept of suburbs is so different to the americans that this argument is a bit defunct.
They have cities like oakland and san francisco and manhattan that have smaller neighbourhoods with ill-defined boundaries and fun names.
For them, a suburb is a far away exurb.
I don’t care that the development is called madison at west side, because, having visited new york, i think trying to transplant its dynamism to what my friends have always called “The Cambodia End” is probabyl pretty desirable!
I work just opposite spencer street station near the docklands (i.e. in SpenDo) and it needs all the va va voom it can get.
In Los Angeles they got rid of “South Central Los Angeles”; the area made famous by race riots and gangster rap during the 80s and 90s.
When it happened (2003):
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/09/local/me-socentral9
Aftermath (2008):
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/07/local/me-nameless7
PS: Australian’s cant win. Cultural cringe is leveled when British or Americans names are brought up and too-PC when Aboriginal names occur.