What’s in a name? A lot of lost history.
New York City is home to some of the most uniquely named streets, neighborhoods and more — the pronunciations of which have become marbled and mangled over time.7
Tourists and residents alike, even locals whose families have been around since the dawn of the country, are guilty of butchering the Dutch tongue that lent its history to the metro area to a point where no one is truly sure what the correct pronunciations are anymore for certain landmarks.
The culprit: the very melting pot for which New York is famously known.
“What happens is over time, we have people come in and they bring a bit of a language they have here, so a lot of things that were Dutch have become Americanized, which means they lost some of the Dutch color,” explained Mitchell Moss, a linguistics expert at New York University.
“There are words that are too hard for people to understand, like the concept of the boroughs. No one uses the word borough, they use Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island … People tend to not adapt to New York speech, they try to fit it into how we speak words, how they pronounce words.”
Here are some of the most mispronounced names in New York City:
Houston Street
This misstep is perhaps the most well-known, and yet the “most abused,” according to Moss.
The iconic street is frequently pronounced like the Texas city, but, like any native New Yorker will tell you, the name should be pronounced as “how-sten.”
The major thoroughfare was named after William Houstoun, one of the Founding Fathers of the US, whose father-in-law’s land was once encompassed in the lower Manhattan area.
The spelling of the Houstoun became corrupted sometime after 1811, kicking off the confusion that persists today.
Fort Schuyler
Directly below the Throggs Neck Bridge and on SUNY Maritime’s campus in the Bronx lies the 18th-century fortification whose name is diecievingly pronounced as “Fort Skylar.”
“Everybody who comes from anywhere in the world calls it ‘schooler’ because it’s ‘SCHU,’” Moss explained.
The mistake could simply be blamed on a declining interest in the city’s history, Moss theorized — the 1856 fort was named after General Philip Schuyler, who commanded the Continental Army in 1777 before representing New York in the 1st United States Congress.
Van Wyck Expressway
The roughly 30,000 daily commuters who use the 14-mile-long expressway running through the Bronx and Queens almost ubiquitously call the roadway “Van Wick” — and they are wrong.
“Van Wyck is an old Dutch name. ‘Van Wike’ is the right term, but ‘Van Wyck’ is the way it’s abused here,” said Moss.
The expressway was named after Robert Van Wyck, who was the first mayor of New York City after the five boroughs were consolidated in 1898.
The story goes, according to The New Yorker, that the pronunciation was lost when the expressway was built between 1947 and 1963 by Robert Moses, who when apparently corrected on his mispronunciation as ‘Wick,’ barked: “I’m Robert Moses. I can call it whatever I damn please!”
Kosciuszko Bridge
The Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Queens, is possibly the most mispronounced namesake in the five boroughs — but there’s a catch.
Many New Yorkers refer to the cable-stayed bridge as “Koz-ee-as-ko” or “Koz-ee-uhs-ko,” but the most correct pronunciation would be “Ko-shoo-sko,” according to the Brooklyn library’s historical team.
The bridge was named after Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought alongside the Americans in the Revolutionary War, but the “Polish flair” is too difficult for many Americans, Moss theorizes.
“Now, this is what makes New York different. We don’t have a pronunciation czar. It’s kind of like a free-for-all,” said Moss.
“This is a case where New Yorkers are very tolerant. As long as you can pronounce it, it’s acceptable.”
Bonus: Spuyten Duyvil
The Bronx neighborhood just across the creek from Inwood isn’t so much bastardized as it is completely ignored.
Spuyten Duyvil and its namesake railroad bridge — pronounced like “Spy-tin Die-vul” — literally translates in Dutch to “Spouting Devil” and is a reference to the strong currents found in the creek, with “Spui” in Dutch meaning a body of water.
But the neighborhood is commonly usurped by its neighboring community, Riverdale, with mostly only locals bothering to learn the original name, according to Moss.
“That’s kind of an inside name for people in New York, who know when they’re leaving Manhattan to get to the Bronx,” said Moss.
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