If you start to dry heave when you see "NOPA" instead of Western Addition, you may want to stop reading now. Made up neighborhoods, and their euphemistic brethren micro-hoods, aren't just for real estate listings anymore: you'll find them in the rental market as well. Here are a few we've seen recently, and where they purport to be.
We'll start with one that we came across just last night: "The Gastro." Presumably due to its proximity to gourmet heavy-hitters like Bi-Rite Market, Tartine Bakery, and Defina, this stretch of 16th and Guerrero got an un-Mission-ified name. What's so wrong with labelling an apartment in the Mission or Mission Dolores? Did we miss the memo that even the Mission isn't hip enough for the upwardly-mobile set?
Speaking of the Mission, we also found an area near 20th and Shotwell renamed the "Shotwell Corridor." As much as names like Valencia Corridor or Divis Corridor make us cringe, at least they are linked to major commercial streets with lots of stuff going on! Other than Shotwell's (which is technically on 20th) this is a pretty quiet, residential street. A street we very much like, in fact!
And closer to home (for us, anyway) we stumbled upon a apartment around Oak and Webster. The neighborhood is somewhere between the Lower Haight and Hayes Valley, but you can imagine our surprise when one intrepid landlord renamed it "Zen Valley." Yes, around the block where a dead body was burned in a car earlier this year. Zen indeed. Though, to be fair, Samovar Tea Lounge seems to be into the name, so maybe it will become a thing. We hope not.
We're sure there are other examples of creative license out there. While the city is an ever-changing place, one thing will stay the same: curmudgeons who will want the neighborhood maps to stay the same as 1906 and those who insist on calling each block by a different name. What do you think, dear readers? Does a microhood by any other name smell as sweet? Which nabes are you into renaming these days?
· Renters Week 2011 [Curbed]
· SoMissPo Lands on Google Maps [Curbed SF]
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