A piece from Secret London has a Londoner taking on a fun challenge: pronouncing New York City's most notoriously tricky street names out loud. It's a light-hearted bit of content, but it taps into a very real traveller problem — NYC's street names are a minefield of Dutch colonial spellings, Polish tongue-twisters and words that are pronounced nothing like they look.
The classic example is Houston Street. In Texas it's 'HYOO-ston', but in Manhattan it's 'HOW-ston' — say it the Texas way and you'll instantly out yourself as a tourist. Then there's Van Wyck Expressway in Queens ('van-WYCK'), the gateway route to JFK that plenty of visitors mangle on their way into the city. Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn is another trap, a leftover from the old Dutch landowning families, as is Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District.
Manhattan's Houston Street divide is the one locals love to quiz visitors on, but theboroughs offer harder tests: Kosciuszko Bridge, named for the Polish hero Tadeusz Kościuszko, and the Queens neighbourhood of Maspeth and Middle Village are gentler by comparison. The fun of the piece is watching someone who navigates London's own oddities — think Marylebone, Feathersone-side and Southwark ('SUTH-uck') — get humbled by New York's version of the same phenomenon.
Why should a traveller care? Because place names are how you get around. Asking a subway clerk for 'HYOO-ston Street' might earn you a polite correction and a small dent in your confidence. Getting a few of these right, on the other hand, is a cheap way to sound like you know the city — and locals genuinely warm to visitors who make the effort. It's also a reminder that both London and New York wear their history in their street signs: Dutch settlers, English aristocrats and immigrant communities all left names behind that English spelling rules never quite tamed.
If you're planning a New York trip, treat the street names as a mini game. Learn three or four — Houston, Van Wyck, Schermerhorn and Kosciuszko will cover most encounters — and you'll move through the city with a bit more swagger. And if you do get one wrong, don't worry: every New Yorker has heard worse.
Story via Secret London.
