SoHa is a NoGo: why Harlem won’t be rebranding any time soon

Harlem. Good old Harlem. The name alone conjures images of the New York neighbourhood’s famous African-Americans who made it a centre of black intellectual and cultural life over the past 200 years. Langston Hughes and James Baldwin turned stories from its streets into prose and verse, Malcolm X and WEB Du Bois changed the world’s perception of black people with ideas honed there, and everyone from Nina Simone to James Brown cut their teeth on the stage of the Apollo theatre.

Yeah, Harlem. What a place. Well, forget Harlem and get used to SoHa. That’s what one company wants us to do anyway, proposing that the area between 110th Street and 125th Street be known by this awkward two-syllable moniker. Who are the linguistic dynamos behind this rebranding effort? An estate agent that, along with property developers and marketers, is always on the lookout for neighbourhoods that can be turned into brands and then monetised. Flipping Hell’s Kitchen into Clinton? Them. The attempt to rebrand a part of South Bronx waterfront known as Port Morris as the Piano District, only to be thwarted by hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz (or so he claims)? Same. In London, there was a similarly ill-fated attempt to turn Fitzrovia into Noho. And let’s not even discuss London’s Midtown.

There is a kind of aspirational lunacy that seems to drive these would-be renamers. One of the most cringeworthy cases was a 2014 blogpost by property writer Jennifer Rosdail, which imagined the Mission district of San Francisco turning into a “newly defined meta hood” known simply as the Quad. The problem was that the Mission is one of the Bay Area’s most established Latino neighbourhoods and already has plenty of residents that consider it their own, er, meta hood. (One that has experienced a mysterious number of building fires some claim are linked to landlords trying to cash in on the property boom.)

Harlem’s congressman Adriano Espaillat has vowed to stop the SoHa move. In an email, he wrote: “I along with leaders and constituents of this community stand united to vigorously oppose the renaming [of] Harlem in yet another sanctioned gentrification.”

When it comes to SoHa, Espaillat and Harlem residents probably shouldn’t lose any sleep. As with rebranding efforts in parts of London, somewhere with such a strong sense of identity usually rebuffs the moniker madness. The only people who might use that are estate agents and their prey. How do you avoid falling into the trap? Use your common sense and remember that anything with two syllables is probably a NoGo.