Names matter. Just ask any parent agonizing over what to call a newborn. Or any kid burdened with a name they hate. Just think of the song made popular by Johnny Cash, about a boy who explains that “life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue,” and confronts the father who named him (“My name is Sue. How do you do! Now you gonna die!”). Whether you traverse your life as a Jane or an Ali or a Joaquin or an Eve—or you decide, as a grown-up, that you’d rather endure or enjoy it as someone else—we all learn that names mark us. Totems of identity, systems of allusion, names can signal where we’re from, who our people are, who we attach ourselves to, which Bible character or dead relative or living movie star our namers loved best. Murmured by an intimate or yelled by a foe, a name can be an endearment or a curse. Declaimed by protesters in the street, a name becomes an assertion of dignity, of rights, and of the refusal to overlook or forget. Names are shorthand, they’re synecdoche. They are acknowledgments or shapers of history, containers for memory or for hope. And if names matter so much when attached to people, they matter even more when attached to places, as labels that last longer, in our minds and on our maps, than any single human life.

“Name, though it seem but a superficial and outward matter, yet it carrieth much impression and enchantment.” That’s how Francis Bacon described the matrix of associations we affix, consciously or not, to the public words by which we navigate our days. Place-names can bind people together, or keep them apart. They can encode history and signal mores. They can proclaim what a culture venerates at one moment in time, and serve as vessels for how it evolves and shifts later on. Gettysburg, Attica, Stonewall, Rome. Wall Street, Main Street, Alabama, Prague. Malibu, Beirut, Boca Raton—place-names can summon worlds and evoke epochs in just a few syllables. They can recall long-ago events or become, as settings for more recent ones, metonyms for historical change. Place-names can become styles of dress (Bermuda shorts, Capri pants) and of dance (once we did the Charleston, now we do the Rockaway). They can hail rebellions or honor heroes or spring, like Sleepy Hollow and Zion, from books. Whether a name’s born of whimsy or faith, whether it was first written down by a cavalier in his log or a bureaucrat in a city hall, its “impression and enchantment” derives, too, from the truth that its meaning can’t be fully divorced from its roots.

In place-names lie stories. Stories, in the first instance, about their coiners—tales, say, about the long-ago Dutchmen who wandered an island of wetlands and hills that the people who lived there may or may not have called Mannahatta, but whose northern acreage those Dutchmen named for a marshy town in Holland called Haarlem. Then there are also stories about the complex or contradictory processes by which certain labels come to be recognized as “official.” Stories about how people, singly or in groups, attach certain attributes to place-names that grow iconic (iconic of, for example, as with twentieth-century Harlem, Black culture and pride). And stories, too, about all the ways that such words thus do much more than merely label location. About how these words—in their rhythm and sound and how they look rendered into Roman letters or affixed on street signs and maps—shape our sense of place.

Toponymy—the study of place-names—isn’t a well-known field. Say the term “toponymist” even to a professional geographer, and you’ll conjure a hobbyist or word hoarder—a figure seen as a compiler of useful trivia. Some of us find our minds fed and our road-trips improved by this kind of trivia, by learning, for example, that American place-makers fell in love with two sophisticated-sounding suffixes meaning “town,” one borrowed from German (-burg) and one from French (-ville), with which they ran wild in naming Hattiesburg and Pittsburgh and Vicksburg and Fredericksburg and Charlottesville and Hicksville and Danville (a village in Vermont near where I grew up, which one might incorrectly guess is named after a guy named Dan). We are intrigued to learn that during another bout of Francophilia, in the late 1800s, city planners who had wearied of the mundane word “street” began calling the broader ones by a term—“avenue”—which in France meant a tree-lined drive to a grand estate. Who, while walking down Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, does not find the trip made richer by pondering how its blocks, long before they became home to Italian immigrants and then to the restaurants that still make its name synonymous with the best cannoli, were home until the 1850s to an actual mulberry tree? As legend, if not history, has it, the Gangs of New York–era folk hero Mose Humphrey pulled the tree up by its roots and used it to bludgeon rival toughs from the Plug Uglies.

Toponymy, at its simplest, is all about such bits of knowledge and lore. But as George R. Stewart, the doyen of American place-name lovers, observed, “the meaning of a name is bigger than the words composing it.” And Marcel Proust agreed: In Swann’s Way, he described how place-names “magnetized my desires” in his youth, “not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance.” The names that obsessed him weren’t matched by the actual places; Parma was “compact, smooth,” redolent of “Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets,” unlike the fusty and sprawling burgh in Northern Italy that he later visited. Proust was making a point similar to one that geographer Yi-Fu Tuan made in his book Topophilia: It’s only in and through place—the places we love and leave and pass through and want to go to—that we figure out who we are. If language is consciousness and humans are a “place-loving species,” then place-names—toponyms—may mold a larger piece of our minds than we think.

Place-names have the power not merely to locate experience, but to shape it: not merely to label the locales to which they refer but also “in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of [them]” as the writer Henry Porter put it. Portals through which to access the past, place-names are also a means to reexamine, especially in times of ire and tumult, what’s possible. And nowhere is this more true than in a great city—a place, Tuan wrote, that “can be seen as a construction of words as much as stone.” Cities are monuments to civilization, and its opposite. They’re condensers of experience and creators of encounter. They’re nothing if not generators of tales.

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New York, the city I know best, is in love with stories about itself. It’s also not much occupied, in comparison with older towns across the sea, with its past. “Trees, a square, crooked old streets with Dutch or Flemish names. Few if any of us know the stories behind those names.” So wrote Hilton Als, of his home and its habitués: “History takes too much time. We are Manhattanites and preoccupied by our lives in Manhattan.” Lucy Sante, another exemplary essayist of the city, agrees. “New York has no truck with the past,” she wrote in Low Life, her great book about downtown before she got there. “It expels its dead.” Sante meant this literally: To live in Manhattan is to see your remains carted off, once your life’s exhausted, to a place whose cemeteries aren’t already full. This is the city’s centripetal force: its power to attract to itself the hungry who hope to make their own stories here and its sometimes-as-fierce will to cast them off.

The city has represented “an escape from the hometown and the homestead,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote—“an escape from the given.” But to emerge from the subway onto Bleecker Street, as I do each morning on my way to work at NYU, is to step onto a byway that passes places whose names—Lafayette, Astor, Great Jones, Bond—beckon as signposts to illustrious or at least notorious New York figures of yore. (You’re perhaps familiar with the names Astor and Lafayette, but Jones was an eighteenth-century politician whose namesake street got its “Great” to distinguish it from a shorter Jones Street nearby; much later, an alley adjacent to Great Jones Street that was frequented by junkies birthed the term “Jonesing.”) It is also to trace the route of what was once the edge of a homestead of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, a banker whose farm in the 1700s lay a couple of miles north of New York City’s edge. Of similar but even older provenance is the wider thoroughfare onto which I turn off Bowery to reach my office: the Bowery (from the Dutch Bowerij, “farm road”), led in the mid-1600s to the acreage of Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherlands’ last Dutch governor, who counted among his peers Anthony Bleecker’s great-granddad Jan, the first mayor of the Beaver District, upstate, that the Dutch named Beverwijck and we call Albany.

Few of the tattooed or besuited denizens of Bowery and Bleecker now, staring at their cellphones or heading home to obscenely priced flats or an NYU dorm, may know or care about these long-dead white men. But few who are invested in making their own New York stories on these blocks aren’t mindful of denizens of more recent vintage. These names and images—from Basquiat to Blondie to Bob Dylan on the cover of Freewheelin’, ambling along Bleecker with his girl—cling to these streets’ names now, like chewing gum on pavement. And our sense that ghosts haunt these sidewalks, even if we can’t know or perceive them at each turn, is vital to the larger meanings gained, over the last 350 years, by the city’s name itself.

When in the summer of 1664 Richard Nichols seized the Dutch port of New Amsterdam for the English, they weren’t in the habit of naming their colonies “New” anything. It was thus with a perhaps wry nod to its Dutch founders that Nichols renamed the town for his patron in Britain. The place invoked by the Duke of York’s title no doubt strikes many American ears, and English ones, too, as “just a name.” But “York,” like “Oxford” (where oxen forded a stream) or “Blackburn” (the brook there was dark-colored), is also a descriptive place-word. “York” derives from a Celtic word for “place of the yew tree,” Eburāka, which passed through the mouths of successive invaders whose tongues reshaped it from Eboracum (Romans) to Eoforwic (Saxons) to Yorvik (Vikings) to York (English) Which is why and how when Frank Sinatra sang New York’s name twice or Orphan Annie hailed “NYC!” or the rapper Nas parsed, in warier tones, his “New York state of mind,” they were all hymning the allure and mental weather, whether they knew it or not, of the Duke’s New Place of the Yew Tree.

To seek after place-names’ roots in a young city of the New World, which counts its age not in millennia but in centuries, is usually easier than doing so in or near the ancient towns of Eurasia or Africa or the Levant—sites where the toponymist’s art can involve a good deal of guesswork and daunting quests of philological detection into bygone people and tongues. This fact has long been vital to American scholars of place-names, and is the reason that George R. Stewart exulted, in Names on the Land, his bible of American toponymy, that the stories behind American names—from Cape Fear to Providence to Troublesome Creek—“were closely bound with the land itself and the adventures of the people.” In 1945, he wrote that “In older countries the story of naming was lost in the ancient darkness. But in the land between the two oceans much of the record could still be read—who gave the names and when, and even why one name was chosen rather than another.” Stewart penned Names on the Land during a war that saw not a few Germantowns and Hamburgs removed from Americans’ maps and the name of their favorite form of processed meat changed—lest they be put in mind of the Führer when barbecuing on the Fourth of July—from frankfurters to hot dogs. Stewart’s love for American names contains more than a hint of American jingoism (and an outmoded lack of discomfort with settler colonialism). But he was of course correct that maps of American cities are different beasts from those of Timbuktu or Berlin.

There are other reasons, which New York shares with other big cities, that pondering place-names here differs from pondering them in just any place. One of these is the outsized way that addresses here can connote prestige: There’s a reason that Donald Trump, years before proclaiming that the Gulf of Mexico should be named for America, petitioned the city to make the official address of what’s now the Trump International Tower, by Columbus Circle, One Central Park West.

Another is the way that other names here, ones less evocative of global prestige than local pride, can travel. I wasn’t alone, among members of my generation who grew up far from Queens, in nodding along to A Tribe Called Quest’s ode to their home blocks’ arboreal tag (“Linden Boulevard represent, repre-sent-sent”). A metropolis is an object of desire and megaphone of culture: It produces more than its fair share of the cultural texts—TV shows and novels, pop songs and films—that we term “popular.” Cities broadcast the names that comprise them outward.

Broadway is more than a road that traces an Indian trail whose width impressed the English; it’s an adjective and a noun and an idiom of musical theater. When Manhattan’s name is preceded by an indefinite article, it’s also a bourbon-based cocktail first concocted at a tavern by the East River in Queens, whose barkeep’s creation eased his patrons’ waits for the ferry to its namesake. As Brooklyn has evolved, over recent decades, from a haven for immigrants to a gentrified home for the self-consciously hip, its moniker (which in Dutch meant “broken land”) has become a mainstay in the Social Security Administration’s list of Americans’ fifty most popular names for baby girls. Of course such outward resonance isn’t shared by every name or numbered street in its boroughs. Some streets’ names are monumental only to their residents. But one distinctive feature of place-names in the city is the speed and force with which a label like “Lower East Side”—which once signified a German enclave and then a Jewish one before its newer denizens, from Puerto Rico, began calling it by a new tag, Loisaida, that’s now fastened to light poles on Avenue C—can see its connotations and even pronunciations change, across time, as its namesake blocks become home to new New Yorkers.

Much of our best recent writing about how “wisdom sits in places,” as the Western Apache say, centers on landscapes we think of as “natural”—on the necessarily local or at least regional words, evolved by particular people in particular places, to describe the ecology where they live. The American writers Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, in a marvelous volume of American “landscape words” called Home Ground, collected terms ranging from malpais (as Arizonans call desert that’s “cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood”) to cowbelly (the fine silt beneath where an Appalachian stream runs calmest, that’s “soft as a Holstein’s belly”). The British writer Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, written in a similar vein, focused on the old tongues and dialects of the British Isles: His book includes poetic and suggestive terms for geographic and climatic features ranging from small bucket-sized islands in a bog (which folks in Exmoor call “zugs”) to “the fine silver ice that coats all foliage when a freeze follows a thaw” (known in Devon as “ammil”). Macfarlane showed how, in an era of both linguistic homogenization and growing alienation from nature, such words can reenchant our “language for landscape,” and, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “fasten words again to visible things.”

These books have much to teach about the power of language to vivify context and bind us to place. But to explore place-names in a city rather than a landscape that’s natural or wild is to focus less on linguistic conservation than the notably urban form of linguistic evolution whereby a place-name that evoked one set of images or ideas a decade or a century ago may now evoke, and help create, a different place today. When some decades ago the storied New Yorker writer and fabulist Joseph Mitchell wanted a bracing whiff of the “Old New York” he loved, he headed to the piers that still lined Manhattan’s chin like whiskers. “Seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom,” he wrote, “I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market.” He liked to breakfast there on shad-roe omelets at Sloppy Louie’s, a place whose Genoese proprietor’s fear of venturing to the upper stories of his old brick building, its rooms filled with naught but cobwebs and ghosts, furnished a classic meditation on Old New York’s scent in its present. Now that the city’s main fish market has moved up to Hunts Point in the Bronx, the old buildings where Fulton Street hits the East River are a tourist trap. With their landmarked façades sheltering purveyors not of herring or fluke but Dunkin’ Donuts and GUESS jeans, they contain no floors their owners haven’t leased. Walking there at dawn may not banish your deathly thoughts, unless sipping Dunkin’ coffee on deserted cobbles named for Robert Fulton, inventor of steamships, floats your boat. But Mitchell’s sense of the city’s places and their people, as solace and as balm, is one shared by many writers of New York—from Alfred Kazin to Vivian Gornick and Paule Marshall and Ian Frazier and Teju Cole—whose excavations of its crannies have nurtured mine.

Today the city’s margins that are its lifeblood—the places where its past is most palpable, and where new immigrants shape its present—often lie beyond Manhattan. Sloppy Louie’s proprietor was Genoese; new arrivals to the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn’s southern half now hail from Oaxaca and Haiti and Mali and Nepal. And on bright weekend mornings and gloomy Tuesday afternoons I’ve long made it my avocation, with the subway system that remains both the city’s gift to explorers and what makes its culture go, to pore over maps of its boroughs and, like the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in his youth, to point to place-names that intrigue me—from Brooklyn’s Dead Horse Bay, to Linoleumville and Victory Boulevard in Staten Island, to Featherbed Lane in the Bronx—with the idea: I will go there.

Digging into such toponyms’ tales is its own reward. But that reward is made richer still for the lover of the city’s juxtapositions and layers and rhymes who pays a visit to the places on the map in person. Take, for instance, Steinway Street in northwest Queens. Named for the German piano maker who in the 1870s opened a factory here that is still turning out the world’s finest baby grands, Steinway is also now the name of the main drag in New York’s Little Egypt. I have no idea what Mitchell’s shad-roe omelet tasted like. But the thick Cairo-style coffee and pistachio halvah at El Khayam Cafe dished up by its charming proprietor, Gamal, to gringos and to regulars joshing in tuneful Arabic alike, is a breakfast—and a vision of New York now—that doom can’t touch.

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As a writer who is also a geographer, words and places duke it out daily for my mind’s affections; it’s hard to overstate the inbuilt joy to be won from such ventures where my two obsessions intersect, or from absorbing literature on the names that make up New York. During the frenetic span of history during which this once-colonial port grew to become the biggest city in its hemisphere (Gotham surpassed Mexico City in the 1830s), and then hurdled over London a century after that to become the most populous on earth, the city’s place-names multiplied as fast as its populace—and saw some of its residents become their devoted students. The first of these was John J. Post; he published his three-volume Old Streets, Roads, Lanes, Piers and Wharves of New York in 1882. His intellectual heir Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, whose hefty moniker perhaps fed his will not be outdone, filled no fewer than six volumes with his encyclopedic The Iconography of Manhattan Island, released between 1915 and 1928. Over the decades since, these yeoman researchers have been joined by heirs whose labors’ fruits are findable on the Internet and in tomes published by its boroughs’ historical societies and others. It is to them that we owe the educated guesses that the Bronx’s Featherbed Lane was named for bordellos on it once frequented by workers building the Croton Aqueduct, and that the names of the “fruit streets” of Brooklyn Heights—Cranberry, Pineapple, Orange—are owed either to a prosperous pair of local fruit merchants who named them as a marketing ploy or to a mischievous neighbor called Lady Middagh, who thought the area had too many streets named for wealthy families like hers and, in an act of DIY urbanism avant la lettre, tacked up fruit-themed signs instead (she left Middagh Street alone).

But to ponder place-names today requires considering questions not merely of origins but of power. It means asking who has the power to name and why—to question why the powers that be, or were, saw fit to make those fruit streets a part of Brooklyn’s map. It also crucially means, in this era of pulling down statues and reckoning with America’s past, engaging questions around when and why we should change street names that honor, say, historical figures whose business wasn’t selling oranges but people. New York was a slave port just like Charleston and New Orleans, though it has long pretended otherwise, and no fewer than seventy streets in Brooklyn alone, by one count, are still named for slave owners. Calls to remove names of people who weren’t merely of their time but backed its evils with arms—Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton still has byways named for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson—have been joined by a surge of new and honorary street names hailing historic antiracists from Toussaint L’Ouverture to Shirley Chisholm and Malcolm X.

A similar conversation is ongoing with regard to streets and monuments—as with the recently removed statue of Theodore Roosevelt that depicts the roughrider lording it over African and Amerindian attendants outside the Museum of Natural History—that glorify the colonial enterprise that began in the Americas in 1492. That enterprise also birthed the trading post that became New York, before overspreading a continent whose decimated first people saw their languages singing consonants become key to American place-names in a manner whose basal dynamic is distilled in an episode that occurred not in these parts, but out west.

It involves the first white men to enter the sublime valley in California’s Sierra Nevada that became the United States’ foremost “natural cathedral” and first national park. When in 1851 the Army captain Lafayette Bunnell scrambled into the Yosemite Valley and his men claimed its waterfalls for their gold-miner friends, they encountered a band of the area’s native people, whose surrender their guns quickly won. Bunnell explained to those Northern Miwoks’ defeated leader, Tenaya, that his people would now be brought from where they’d gathered acorns under misty peaks for millennia to a reservation in California’s sunbaked Central Valley. By the stone-rimmed edge of a high lake that the Miwok called Pyweack, or “shining rocks,” Bunnell told Tenaya to cheer up: He’d chosen, he said, to name its clear waters Lake Tenaya, “because it was upon the shores of the lake that we had found his people, who would never return to it to live.” Bunnell ignored Tenaya’s protest that the lake already had a name, but did register, in his memoir of their encounter, the Indian’s downcast face. “His countenance indicated that he thought the naming of the lake no equivalent for his loss of territory.”

What’s notable about this episode, as Rebecca Solnit wrote in her haunting account of it, was how it collapsed two stages of historical change—a culture’s annihilation and its romanticization—into a single meeting: an exchange that made plain to Tenaya not merely that he now had no place in his ancestral home’s present, but that his name was going to be used there to adorn someone else’s future. It’s also striking for how it captures several of the things—from describing nature that is present to monumentalizing people who aren’t—that names can do. Today’s picnickers quaffing Cokes by Lake Tenaya may not be put in mind, by its name, of the Miwok chief or of dispossession. But surfacing such pasts—and showing the power of names to do so—suffuses Solnit’s Savage Dreams, a book that anyone interested in California and landscape and politics must read. It’s also suffused my work with Solnit, in the years since we became collaborators and decided to do a project about the city where I live, and where the stories of both my forebears and Rebecca’s, like those of many Americans, run through Ellis Island.

That book, Nonstop Metropolis, was an atlas of New York based on the idea that any city contains at least as many ways to be mapped as it does people. Its subjects ranged from the eight hundred languages now spoken in Queens to the fires that ravaged the Bronx in the 1970s, and aimed to suggest how maps of such themes can help us see the city in new ways. To research and create them was to grow immersed in the names that are the basic building blocks of any map, and to become fascinated by how people use those names drawn from many tongues, or craft new ones in their own, to “make place” in the city. It was also to grow convinced of the truth, whether your daily commute involves hopping the C train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn or taking a ferry to Red Hook, that your sense of wonder can be deepened only by learning that the Schermerhorns of Brooklyn were a family of ship-chandlers whose namesake street gained its moniker from their employees’ custom of using its length as a “ropewalk” for braiding lengths of cord; or that the choppy stretch of water you cross from Wall Street to reach Red Hook’s Atlantic Basin, the Buttermilk Channel, may have won its name from long-ago Brooklyn dairy farmers, who imagined the milk they floated to market might be churned to butter by its waves.

Names of New York grew from that conviction, and from a happy autumn when I had the fortune to ride that ferry to Red Hook a few times a week. And it was in an old iron works there, on a street named Pioneer, between two others named Coffey and Van Brunt, in a brick building that now houses not machines but art, that it got under way. Whatever streets you’re near or places you hold dear, it's a project whose hope was to help you see their names—and what they do—anew. ♦

From NAMES OF NEW YORK: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.