One of the interesting bits then is the differences between the common meaning of a city and the statutory boundaries.
What people mean when they say "New York City" and what it actually is are more or less the same thing (though most people are surprised at how big and diverse the 5 boroughs actually are). People don't really count the NYC Metro area in the equation. Nobody who visit Trenton or New Haven comes back home and says "I went to New York".
When people say lots of other cities, they really mean the metro area. "Washington D.C." refers colloquially to the 7th largest urban area in the country. People can make regular repeated visits to Arlington, or Fairfax or wherever and still go back home and say "I just went to D.C.".
I suspect SF is the same. People can visit anywhere in the Bay Area and go back home and credibly say "I visited San Francisco" even if they never actually stepped foot in the city proper.
edit I notice everybody who disagrees with this premise lives or is from the Bay Area where these things matter. On the other side of the country, all of California north of Monterrey is basically "San Francisco", most people think Oakland is part of L.A. and nobody could pick out SV on a map if their life depended on it.
>I suspect SF is the same. People can visit anywhere in the Bay Area and go back home and credibly say "I visited San Francisco" even if they never actually stepped foot in the city proper.
No, no they couldn't. Residents of SF are quite prickly about what is and isn't the city. You'd say you visited the bay area or possibly silicon valley not SF.
I've visited that part of the country before. I tell people I visited SF. I have no clue if I was actually inside the city proper. The problem with the "these people are prickly" notion is that THEY'RE NOT WITH ME BACK HOME TO CORRECT ME and thus I don't really have to give a shit if I stepped inside the city boundaries or not.
[nothing personal]
by that logic (no one is around to correct you and also you don't give a shit) you can start making plenty of things up. Oh what a stories you should have about your travels and adventures!
Yes of course, I completely agree. You're 100% right that I can make up any lie I care to and it's even easier if there's nobody to call me out on it. And I don't take it personally, it's not offensive.
My point, though, is that the notion that the residents of SF have any ability to sway the visitors to SF as to what they tell people back home is bogus.
>>I suspect SF is the same. People can visit anywhere in the Bay Area and go back home and credibly say "I visited San Francisco" even if they never actually stepped foot in the city proper.
>No, no they couldn't. Residents of SF are quite prickly about what is and isn't the city. You'd say you visited the bay area or possibly silicon valley not SF.
This second statement one I take issue with, made by coolsunglasses. What mechanism does coolsunglasses have to force me to know the difference between "bay area" and "san francisco" and "silicon valley"? How does he propose to regulate my speech such that I don't offend his (or others) sense of which areas are which?
I get that people who live in SF proper might get upset if someone said that. That is their right. But for the vast majority of the population (think "flyover states" and probably a good bit of the east coast) visiting anywhere in the bay area is just as good as the "real" san francisco. At least from a communicating-the-idea-of-what-happened perspective. And the folks in SF or the bay area not liking it doesn't do anything to make it impossible to say. Inaccurate? Perhaps. But uninformative? Not at all.
Actually I do recall meeting some people in one "tourist's destination" place who answered "we're from San Francisco" to "where are you guys from?" and then later specified they from bay area not far from SF (I myself live in SF). It's a matter of convenience I guess, when you are in the place with plenty of people from different regions it will quickly give an idea what part of US you're from without going into detailed explanations when not necessary.
When people ask me where I'm from I say "DC". I actually grew up in Alexandria, VA. But I'm not lying to those people[1], I'm trying to give them a general idea of where I'm from that they are most likely to know. If they follow up with "what part of DC" then I know they are more familiar with the area and I say something like "well actually, i grew up outside DC in northern virginia".
Now that I live in Oakland I say I live in Oakland, but if I lived in, say, fremont, I'd probably just say the SF Bay Area. People probably know Berkeley, Oakland, SF, Palo Alto, and San Jose as specific places around the bay, so you can safely say those, but if you are from Walnut Creek...no one (generally) outside of the area can actually place that, so defaulting to "SF Bay Area" or even "SF" is simpler and puts the person you are talking to in the right geographical area.
>But for the vast majority of the population (think "flyover states" and probably a good bit of the east coast) visiting anywhere in the bay area is just as good as the "real" san francisco.
Not really, no. If I said I visited SF, my grandfather from Florida would ask me what neighborhoods I visited and restaurants in SF I went to.
I kind of doubt anyone visits Oakland or San Jose (both of which are huge destinations in "the Bay Area" but have their own international airports) and says they "went to SF." I sure hope not. It's pretty clear cut if you went to SF or not, since there's water on 3 sides of the city and not much to visit on the 4th side.
I'm not familiar with housing costs in SF, so I'm not sure how considering surrounding areas would change the data, but I know in DC that the surrounding areas are by-and-large as expensive (and in many cases more expensive) than DC-proper.
The point being that whether you consider DC-proper, or DC/Arlington/Bethesda/Silver Spring/McLean doesn't really change things too drastically. Expensive cities tend to be expensive everywhere. I know that in Atlanta, for example, you can live in the city center in a nice place roughly for what it costs to rent an apartment of comparable quality pretty much anywhere in Northern VA. There is a floor (a very high floor) beneath which you will not find quality housing and really not much of a ceiling.
In SF, some of the immediately adjacent areas (connected by subway) are drastically cheaper, like South SF, Oakland and Alameda. Like 50% of the cost if you look at the median sales prices. There are definitely some expensive suburbs, but they're either to the north in Marin or much further south down the peninsula down by Stanford.
It's worth noting that after New York and Brooklyn merged (I think around 1900), SF considered merging with Oakland.
> Nobody who visit Trenton or New Haven comes back home and says "I went to New York".
You're stretching things. Trenton is 2 hours from Manhattan by car. If you stay in Northern New Jersey, you definitely "went to New York". I can get to Manhattan within 15 minutes from Hoboken or Jersey City. When you're that close, you're definitely part of the city.
No one I know in NYC considers Jersey City to be "part of the city" any more than people consider Oakland to be part of SF. Hell, I know people living in Brooklyn who only consider Manhattan "the city".
Sure - it's like having a stopover at SFO and saying you've "been to San Francisco"... or at CDG and saying you "visited Paris." They're both 15 minutes from the city, too.
> I can get to Manhattan within 15 minutes from Hoboken or Jersey City.
As a figure of speech most people won't consider either of those NYC. Somebody visiting Jersey City went to "New Jersey" colloquially.
Actually, I take it back, people who don't know NYC well "know" that Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx are "places in NYC" even if they aren't quite sure what they are, I'm not sure Queens registers for most people, and Staten Island, even though it's geographically one of the largest parts of the city, may as well not even exist. People picture Manhattan in their heads though and that's about all they ever visit. Some people might confuse the name Yonkers as part of NYC because it's kind of a funny name like Brooklyn or Bronx and they've probably heard it on NYC area TV shows and movies. But nobody outside of the NYC area will visit White Plains, Paterson or Newark and claim "I went to New York City".
Meanwhile, people who visit Palo Alto definitely say "I visited San Francisco". But I do agree with other comments that people don't usually conflate San Jose or Oakland with San Francisco.
It's the colloquial semantics of place names that I'm referring to. It's a little bit like how "Asian" means either East Asian, or East Asian + South Asian depending on your dialect of English, but nobody who ever visited Aermenia or Cyprus ever claimed they "visited Asia". Or people who visit Egypt visited "the middle East" when really they visited Africa.
Part of it is name recognition. If I'm not from the Bay Area, "Belmont" or "Millbrae" doesn't mean anything to me or to the people I'm talking to, even if they're clearly distinct places well outside of SF. The identity of SF has subsumed those other areas, at least in the geographic knowledge base that people from outside the area walk around with.
Most people know Jersey City is obviously not NYC. But most people from outside of the D.C. area couldn't pick out Annandale nor does it have any meaning to them. So people just say "I went to D.C."
This has some embarrassing and sometimes hilarious side-effects for out of towners. Like for example, somebody visiting San Francisco proper, knows that they have a buddy that lives near there (because in a past conversation his buddy said "I live in SF" because it was easier than saying "I live in Emerald Hills" and doesn't understand why it's not immediately convenient for them or their buddy to just hop on a street car and meet up for a quick Coffee.
Or I know a company from the West Coast that set up shop in "D.C." expecting it to be convenient to their Government customers, only to find out that none of their customers would come to their office since it was a 2 hour drive in traffic from the actual customer locations out in the larger Metropolitan area.
What people mean when they say "New York City" and what it actually is are more or less the same thing (though most people are surprised at how big and diverse the 5 boroughs actually are). People don't really count the NYC Metro area in the equation. Nobody who visit Trenton or New Haven comes back home and says "I went to New York".
When people say lots of other cities, they really mean the metro area. "Washington D.C." refers colloquially to the 7th largest urban area in the country. People can make regular repeated visits to Arlington, or Fairfax or wherever and still go back home and say "I just went to D.C.".
I suspect SF is the same. People can visit anywhere in the Bay Area and go back home and credibly say "I visited San Francisco" even if they never actually stepped foot in the city proper.
edit I notice everybody who disagrees with this premise lives or is from the Bay Area where these things matter. On the other side of the country, all of California north of Monterrey is basically "San Francisco", most people think Oakland is part of L.A. and nobody could pick out SV on a map if their life depended on it.