OvermodOvermod wrote the following post 2 hours ago: As a native New Yorker, it's not the East River, it's the Hudson.
My mother was a native of Manhattan. She and her relatives always called it the North River.
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It's doing it again.
It IS the North River. Amusingly enough, I did not know the correct meaning until someone here corrected me... I thought it was North in the sense 'north to Albany and the Erie Canal connection' -- it is north because the Delaware is the South River.
But the whole time I was growing up, first at 114th and Amsterdam, then in Tenafly and Englewood, NJ, very few people called it anything but the Hudson. You can have fun with those apparently simple questions like 'what is the diameter of an 8-inch shell' and 'who is buried in Grant's Tomb' with this: Manhattan is an island running roughly north-south. The river along the east side of the island is the East River. What's the river along the west side of the island?
The PRR tunnels were famously the 'North River Tunnels'... until, apparently, Conrail and Amtrak complicated things by distinguishing the two east-west bores under the river as the 'north' and 'south' river tunnels, at which point it would be enormously convenient to refer to them as the north and south Hudson River tunnels... when the ridiculous Gateway kludge is built adjacent to them, the same convention might apply.
There is a sort of amusing parallel. The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson/North was double-decked in the early 1960s. There are almost no connections that allow emergency responders to get from one deck to the other -- so the Port Authority needs a way to distinguish the upper deck and its approaches from the lower deck's. Therefore on official Port Authority drawings and in their emergency response procedures, the lower deck is officially termed the "Martha Washington Bridge". (It does not help that the bridge on the other side of Manhattan is also the Washington Bridge...)
I suspect there are going to be efforts to have dead white man Henry Hudson's name removed from the river and... well, just renamed North if they can't decide on a more appropriate name. I will be amused to see how they get to renaming the two decks of the GWB; a surprisingly long list of potential contenders can't be brought up on a family-friendly forum.
OM:
Of course my mother was growing up in Manhattan (west 40s?) long, long ago. Names for places can change because it just happens. Example around here a town you visited is called West Chicago, but it was once named Turner Junction. Ditto Glen Ellyn was Stacey s Tavern. Nothing to do with "PC" not that there is anything wrong with that. During a tragic period of history, almost every town in Germany had an Adolf Hitler Platz. Thankfully they all reverted to there earlier names.
My mother's a New York City girl, if I remember correctly her old neighborhood was 107th Street and Central Park West. She never called the Hudson River the North River and neither did anyone else I know.
Interestingly though, on 18th Century maps of New York City and it's environs it IS shown as the North River. As an aside the Hackensack River is sometimes shown as the "First River" and the Passaic as the "Second River."
In the various books I have about ocean liners they mostly refer to it as the North River but then most of the companies that operated the ships were European.
Further off topic- as a native New Yorker (Long Island, anyway) I never once ate a pushcart hot dog, neither Sabrett's or Hebrew National. I did once eat nothing but pushcart pretzels when in the City for the day. I didn't feel so good when I got home.
Yep. Things change. I'm waiting for Tom Hanks to throw out the first pitch at the very first home opener for the brand new (?) Cleveland Guardians at 7:10.
Same me, different spelling!
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