Where exactly are you from?

Did you know that there are 16 Boston cities? Cities with a namesake

Some would say that naming a city is as important as naming a child, or even more, considering that cities tend to have a longer lifespan. Like with a child, the name is a declaration of intentions, of what is expected or wished for them.

But sometimes children are named after someone else, like a loved one, a relative, or a favorite celebrity. Does this happen to cities as well? In this article, we will explore some cities around the world that have a namesake.

In Spanish, Londres is the name given to the city of London, England, and also to a town in the Argentinian province of Catamarca. This town, the second oldest in the country, owes its name to the marriage of Mary Tudor with Philip of Spain in 1553. The founders of the city, at that time part of the Spanish empire, decided to honor the royal marriage by naming it Londres de la Nueva Inglaterra (London of the New England), though nowadays the name has been shortened to just Londres.

Located over the Mississippi River, the city of Memphis has been the setting of important historical and political events. But, where did it get its name from? In 1818, the U.S. gained the territory of Western Tennessee after signing the Treaty of Tuscaloosa. The founders of the city, among them future president John Adams, recognized the importance of the river and decided to name the place after another famous city on a river, the Egyptian Memphis.

Back in the day, many people believed that China and the U.S. were on opposite sides of the world. One of these people, Mrs. Ann Eliza Cromwell, was tasked with naming the new town her husband had helped to found near the Illinois River. Convinced they were on the antipodes of Peking (what we now call Beijing), she chose the name Pekin.

The origin of this name is interesting because we don’t really know the reason behind it. During the 1820s, a man called Edward Hughes bought land in the state of Maryland and divided it for sale. He received Congressional approval for a postal route in a document where the flourishing town was named as The Pleasant Plains of Damascus. While he named it after the Syrian city of Damascus, we don’t know if he had any connections to it or if it was just a biblical reference.

In the early 19th century, Scottish landowner William Fullarton wanted to give coal workers on his estate somewhere to live, and he founded a village for this purpose. The son of an East India Company officer, Fullarton was born in India, in the city of Patna, Bihar, and decided to name the new mining town after his birthplace.

Many people hear ‘Cartagena’ and think about the Colombian city, named after its Spanish namesake. But Spanish Cartagena is also named after a city. This Mediterranean town was founded by Carthaginian general Hasdrubal with the name of Carthago (after the North African city of the same name). Conquered by the Roman Empire, it was renamed Carthago Nova, or ‘New Carthage’, and, after the Visigoth and Arab rule, its name evolved to Cartagena.

One would think that a city named Kansas in a state named Kansas would be the first of its name. But the Kansas of Kansas is named after Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in the 1830s, the Missourian Kansas quickly grew thanks to commerce and industry. Over the state line, the people of Kansas state decided to also have a Kansas City, to benefit from the economic growth associated with the name. Now you know: if you have a feeling that you are not in Kansas anymore, you might just be in Missouri.

Capital of the state of Jalisco, Guadalajara is one of the most important cities in Mexico. Its name is of Arab origin, and it means ‘valley of the stones’. Established by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, it was named by Cristobal de Oñate after his birthplace, Guadalajara City in Spain, a place once under Arab rule.

There are at least 16 places in the U.S. named Boston, but only one of them is named after a foreign city. The capital of the state of Massachusetts was established in the 17th Century by Puritan settlers, who took the name from an English port in Lincolnshire. The new Boston was the scene of several key episodes in the American Revolutionary War, and all other Bostons in the U.S. are named after it.

Ithaca is a college town, home to Cornell University. It was founded after the Revolutionary War, on territory gained from the Iroquois, who had helped the British Army during the conflict. The American government granted plots of land as payment to soldiers in the Continental Army, one of them being Moses De Whitt. First settled in the Town of Ulysses, he later relocated to what is now Ithaca and named it after the Greek island that was Ulysses’ home.

What’s in a name?

The origin of 10 of New York City’s (many) nicknames

Image: Yucel Moran

New York City has so many monikers that one of them could very well be The City of Nicknames. Throughout its history, the most populous city in the United States has received different names, some of which refer to its political and cultural significance, while others were coined in an ironic or satirical way. Because there is a life beyond The Big Apple, in this article, we will uncover the history behind 10 New York nicknames you probably didn't know about. Are you ready?

Image: Pixabay

This is probably the most widespread nickname for New York. Although it became popular in the 1970s as an advertising campaign to attract tourists, it actually emerged as early as the 1920s. It was coined by a sportswriter named John Joseph Fitz Gerald, who at the time worked for the New York Morning Telegraph.

The expression The Big Apple in relation to New York City was used for the first time in an article on horse racing. As it was later revealed, Fitz Gerald picked it up from the way New Orleans stable hands referred to the city. "Big Apple" was what the jockeys called turf money prizes, and the biggest prize they could aspire to was, of course, in NYC.

Image: Hen Kaznelson

The nickname The Empire City refers to New York State's moniker. But in turn, it is said to derive from a statement by one of our Founding Fathers. Supposedly, George Washington once said about the city: "Surely this is the seat of the empire!".

The first written reference appeared in 1836 in an Illinois newspaper, which stated: New York City is "the Rome of America, the Empire City of the New World."

Image: Marc Kargel

In 1898, New York City was consolidated into five counties or boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and later the Bronx. So, it is not surprising that at some point in history, the nickname The Five Boroughs began to be used to refer to the city, especially when alluding to the entire metropolitan area and not just Manhattan, the city center.

Image: Jon Tyson

Today, no one would doubt that New York is a city that never sleeps: it has a lively cultural life, you'll always find a place open for a bite to eat, and you can even take the subway 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But what you may not know is that this has always been the essence of the city.

At least since the 1880s, people referred to New York City as The City That Never Sleeps for its evening mail delivery, electric lighting, and its mythical nightlife. Yet, it was Frank Sinatra who canonized the moniker in the lyrics of the song "New York, New York".

Image: Liliana Drew

What do ancient Rome and the most populous city in the United States have in common? At some point in their history, the two cities were dubbed The Capital of the World. In a 1948 essay, author E. B. White, best known for his children's books, borrowed the expression Caput Mundi from the Roman poet Lucan to refer to New York City.

Here is New York is an ode to one of the most iconic places in the world and, according to The New Yorker, is one of the best pieces ever written about the ever-changing city.

Image: NASA

In the same grandiloquent vein as The Capital of the World, The Center of the Universe is a nickname coined by Robert F. Wagner Jr., mayor of New York City between 1954 and 1965.

Perhaps the moniker is a bit of an exaggeration, but we must admit that NYC is a cosmopolitan and influential city where culture flourishes, finance thrives, and where some of the most important events in history have taken place.

Image: Alex Vegas

Yes, as you can imagine, this nickname is inspired by the many songs about the city with the title "New York, New York", one of which was popularized by Frank Sinatra.

The City So Nice They Named It Twice was first used in the late 1950s by musician Jon Hendricks. However, it was late-night talk show host David Letterman who made a version of this nickname famous in 1984.

Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

New York City is like a modern-day Tower of Babel. It is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, where all kinds of ethnicities and languages coexist —an estimated 700! Therefore, it is no coincidence that the city has been blessed with the nickname The Melting Pot, reflecting its great cultural diversity.

The term was used by several authors throughout history, including Henry James, but was ultimately popularized in 1908 by the play The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill, which tells the story of a Jewish immigrant who escapes a Russian pogrom to rebuild his life in New York.

Image: Naitian（Tony） Wang

You may think New York City got the nickname Gotham from the DC comic Batman. But in reality, it was the other way around. The first person to link Gotham to the city was the American short story writer Washington Irving in 1807. In turn, the author was inspired by a medieval English proverb about a village called Gotham, meaning "Goat's Town".

This tale tells the story of the town’s residents, who, to avoid the king's reprisals, pretended to be fools. Of course, Irving used this negative connotation of the term to satirize NYC. When Gotham began to be associated with the Dark Knight in the 1940s, the nickname came to invoke not New York's foolish aspects but its darker side.

Image: Jon Tyson

In stark contrast to Batman's dark Gotham, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, authors of Superman, created their Metropolis in reference to the city's cheerier face, that is, New York in the daytime. The main location of the comic book was first called Metropolis in 1939. The rest is history!