Soladarity across state lines!

[muckefuck]

I tricked monshu into buying me a new Cardinals scarf for Christmas by telling him I'd lost my old one when really I only left it behind at my mothers. I've been wearing my new prize basically non-stop ever since. Today I was in a cafe and a young woman behind the counter said, "I like your scarf." I asked if she was a Cards fan, and when she said yes, I asked, "Where are you from?" "St. Louis." "I grew up mostly in Mid-County. How about you?" "Oh, I'm from around Collinsville."

Quick geography lesson: Collinsville is in a completely different state from St. Louis. To get there, you have to cross the river and drive for about 20 minutes. (How do I know this? Because I see the name on a sign when we're taking the highway past Cahokia Mounds.) She was being so sweet, I just had to bite my tongue to keep from barking, "You're no St. Louisan!"

To clarify, this is different phenomenon from the anti-suburban snobbishness I've come to know (and gleefully participate in--"You're from Highland Park? I'm live in Uptown, you poser!") in Chicago. Almost nobody who's "really from St. Louis" is really from St. Louis if by that we mean St. Louis City. For one thing, it's tiny. The boundaries were set over 130 years ago and haven't budged since. For another, until relatively recently, urban living had no real cachet there; unless you were in one a small handful of upscale neighbourhoods, having a St. Louis City address merely meant you were too poor to move someplace better.

I suppose maybe there are city snobs who would like to call us Countyites "posers", but they're totally outvoted: Only one in twelve people in the St. Louis Metro Area live within the city limits--and that's the highest the ratio's been in decades. (In Chicago, the number is closer to one in three.) I never had anyone question my credentials when I lived there, even though I was right on the border between City and County[*] for many years. It seemed to me a settled question: All of us on the Missouri side were St. Louisans; the Illinoisans weren't. The funny thing is--as I keep discovering when I speak to fellow exiles--they don't seem to have gotten the memo.

We didn't even have a special name for our neighbours to differentiate them from other out-of-staters: If you had to cross the Mississippi to drive home, you were an "Illinoisan", whether "home" was--like Collinsville--twelve miles from the border or--like Chicago--three hundred. "Metro East" was the designation you heard on the media, but there were no such thing as *"Metro East(ern)ers".

Is this the same in other border cities? Does someone who's lived their entire life in Hoboken call themselves a "New Yorker"? More importantly, are residents of Yonkers allowed to do so without getting the same degree of guff from Manhattanites? Would a Pfälzer ever dare call himself a "Mannheimer" (bzw. "Mannemer")? And what would a Ilvesheimer say to him if he did?


[*]Now the County in question is also named "St. Louis", so perhaps one could say that our claim to being "St. Louisans" is based on that, but I don't think so: We didn't seem to have any problem calling those who lived in suburban St. Charles County--across another river, but this one within the state boundaries--"St. Louisans" either.

Comments

[grunter.livejournal.com]

Having stayed so frequently over the last few months in the Fairview Heights/Collinsville area to attend court in the legal hellhole of Edwardsville, IL, I have to concur. Collinsville ain't no St. Louis.

I'm sure a much more physical smiting of this sad, deluded counter-lady was in order.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It would've been like kicking a kitten.

[porysski.livejournal.com]

Being a public transit user, I tend to define "St Louis" as "the areas easily reached by Metro". Thus, parts of Illinois count; most of St Charles doesn't.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

Is this the same in other border cities? Does someone who's lived their entire life in Hoboken call themselves a "New Yorker"? More importantly, are residents of Yonkers allowed to do so without getting the same degree of guff from Manhattanites?

Neither would dare call themselves a New Yorker, though someone from Yonkers might get away with the designation were they to claim they were talking about the state. Hell, I live in New York City, but because I live in an unfashionable outer borough, Queens, I'm referred to disparingly as "bridge and tunnel."

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I think there is a decent Chicago analogy: Indianans. Residents of Hammond and Gary live closer to the city of Chicago than Arlington Heighters or Shaumburgians. Because they live in another state (and a scorned, rust-belt part of that state), I don't think many folks would consider them Chicagoans. When one of my co-workers, who always said he was from Chicago, was recently outed as a Hammondian, I had to bite my tongue. I would not have had the same reaction if I found out he was from River Forest.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

New York is, I think, unusually deluded in its self-image - more so than any other town I've visited. The city clearly spreads as a single urban fabric right out to Edison, NJ and the Hamptons, but Manhattanites are, generally, in deep denial about this fact. That said, a lot of Upper West Siders feel that the Upper East Side is a foreign country, and vice versa. Nobody likes to talk about Roosevelt Island. If you polled people in downtown and midtown about where the 'core' of New York ends, most would exclude Harlem: Inwood (at the northern tip of Manhattan) would be right out. The more affluent bits of Brooklyn just might be included these days.

"I'm from London" covers all the land inside the M25: a very wide area indeed, with a nicely defined boundary. Claiming to be a Londoner when you're actually from Reading or Braintree might raise eyebrows, but I'm having a hard time imagining anyone getting heated about it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Not at all like the question of who is and isn't a "Cockney", is it?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I guess you'd have to ask a Cockney that question: I've never met one. I understand there is a whole mythology about this, but I'm honestly not aware of it as a living tradition. On the other hand, I've had conversations with New Yorkers where they'd start out quite interested, ask me how long I've been in the States, where I work, what I think of their city, right up to the point where they'd wonder which neighbourhood I lived in. When my hand strayed in the direction of the Hudson, they'd just turn away and pretend I wasn't there.


No, really.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

OK, I've read over our exchange again, and you have a fair point, the way I've worded it (talking about the 'core' was a mistake). What I mean is, for a great many of the Manhattanites I've met, the other places actually aren't New York City - especially the bits that happen to be located across the state line.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Manhattanites are notoriously snobbish on this point. I can top danbearnyc's "bridge-and-tunnel" lament with a story borrowed from someone who spoke up when we discussed this sort of thing in febrile's journal a while back: Her Manhattanite mother was speaking to someone she'd known casually for a while and when the woman revealed that she lived in Queens, the mother replied without a hint of snark, "Oh, I thought you were from New York!"

I can't think of another American city that takes it to that level. Chicago was still annexing territory as recently as the 50s, but I don't know of any cleavages between inhabitants of, say, areas within the 1890s boundaries and those added later. Morgan Park (1914), for instance, has always been presented to me as a classic old Chicago neighbourhood.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Though I've known people who've lived in Hyde Park who still describe it as a suburb of Chicago. (Granted, I suspect that was lack of attention, rather than being a stickler for pre-1889 borders.)

Personally, I'm a lumper rather than a splitter when it comes to geographic identity-- if someone thinks he's an Xer, then as far as I'm concerned he is one. (Possibly with some sort of sanity check, e.g., if someone who'd lived in Las Vegas all his life claimed to be an Angeleno or something. But I don't think I've ever encountered a real-world need for one.)