I don’t know if it’s the same way if you’re a native of Bozeman, Montana or a native of St. Louis, Missouri, but if you’re a native of New York, New York, precious few things are likely to irk you more than misinformation about the local lay of the land. This certainly holds true for me. Couple that with an inclination to be deeply, insufferably pedantic, and you get posts like this one.
Yesterday, NY1 – a local media institution that, given its core mission, really ought to know better, reported a story about a partial wall-collapse in downtown Manhattan. Their headline for this story, both online and during the evening broadcast, was …
Partial Wall Collapse in SoHo Impacts Traffic, Local Businesses
That’s all well and good, but scratch the surface, and the reporting revealed that the wall-collapse in question occurred on a corner of the intersection of Mulberry and Grand Streets.
If you’re employed at NY1, a cable news channel founded by Time Warner Cable in 1992, exclusively dedicated to 24-hour coverage of any and all doings in the five boroughs of New York City, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW that the intersection of Mulberry and Grand – while, yes, technically south of Houston Street – is NOT IN FUCKING SOHO.
Mulberry Street is basically the spinal cord of Little Italy, and that cross-section of streets is practically its very heart. It’s not even in the recently designated “Nolita” (North of Little Italy), it’s right smack in the center of Little Italy, a neighborhood that has been called such since the late 19th century.
Now, conceivably, some of the movers and shakers at NY1 might consider “Little Italy” to be an increasingly anachronistic term, given both the steady advance of gentrification and the gradual encroachment of Chinatown to its south, but that does not at all alter the fact that the particular byway in question is inescapably festooned with the visual and culinary trappings of its long heritage. You would have to be significantly impaired to not glean that the street in question is the quintessence of Little Italy.
It's ultimately a totally trivial point, but details matter.
Shame on you, NY1.
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