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Maybe that's what New York should say from now on: "We're New York. Not Northeastern, or Mid Atlantic, just New York."
If we dissolved all of the regions, and went back to the more state-centric paradigm of the colonial era, all of these threads would finally come to an end. You would no longer have people fighting for the right to be associated with New York or New England, which is really what these threads are about.
Being from Chicago, we have none of this phenomenon. Even though our city does have strong Southern ties because of the Great Migration (Chicago is one of the few cities where Black people and White people have different accents, not just vernacular). Blacks in Chicago do tend to sound more Southern (albeit diluted with a bit of the famous Chicago accent).
We love Southern food, we eat like Southerners at times, yet we have no problem claiming we are Midwestern through and through. Of course, we are hours away from any transition zone, so this has a lot to do with it.
I think Al Brown (Valchek) sounds like he’s from the Philadelphia area. IMHO, he’s got a very Delaware Valley accent. From what I’ve heard, Baltimore-area and Philadelphia-area accents are very similar with the exception that Baltimore’s accent has a slight southern thing happening, and Philadelphia’s accent doesn’t.
John Doman, who plays Rawls, is an actual native Philadelphia.
Like Italians? The Northeast has the highest concentration of Italians by far, states like RI, NJ, CT, NY. No other place in the country has these numbers, nor did they have the mass Italian immigration that the NYC area had from around 1880-1920.
I associate Asians more with CA, and Hispanics more with the SW and TX, also, because those areas have a lot as a whole. I don't think it's just an Eastern thing.
While you may be right, the Irish and Poles don't count as specifically purely East Coast ethnic backgrounds. But I will agree that Mediterraneans in general love the East Coast and stay there. Unlike the Midwest which has more Scandinavians and Germans, the South that has Scotch-Irish and English, the Pacific NW (and the Pacific) that has many Asians and the SW that has many Mexicans.
Which is why guys that look like me aren't common in Chicago (but I'd fit in NY, Mass, RI, CT easily).
While you may be right, the Irish and Poles don't count as specifically purely East Coast ethnic backgrounds. But I will agree that Mediterraneans in general love the East Coast and stay there. Unlike the Midwest which has more Scandinavians and Germans, the South that has Scotch-Irish and English, the Pacific NW (and the Pacific) that has many Asians and the SW that has many Mexicans.
Poles tend to be concentrated more in the Midwest (Pittsburgh and Buffalo have sizable Polish populations, however). I didn't know what Paczki Day was until I met people from Michigan.
The Irish have much stronger concentrations in the Northeast. The Philadelphia MSA, for example, has more Irish than the Chicago MSA despite being much smaller. The Philadelphia MSA also has 161,000 more Italians than Chicagoland.
But you're right that the Midwest has many more Germans than the East Coast. Pennsylvania is by far the most German of the Northeastern states. For the most part, high concentrations of Germans seems to be more of a Midwestern thing.
Poles tend to be concentrated more in the Midwest (Pittsburgh and Buffalo have sizable Polish populations, however). I didn't know what Paczki Day was until I met people from Michigan.
The Irish have much stronger concentrations in the Northeast. The Philadelphia MSA, for example, has more Irish than the Chicago MSA despite being much smaller. The Philadelphia MSA also has 161,000 more Italians than Chicagoland.
But you're right that the Midwest has many more Germans than the East Coast. Pennsylvania is by far the most German of the Northeastern states. For the most part, high concentrations of Germans seems to be more of a Midwestern thing.
We used to be way more Irish but a ton of flight from groups like Italians and the Irish made our city much less Italian and Irish that it once was.
Our South Side was once a HUGE Irish bastion. Now, maybe 1 square mile of the South Side is Irish, and the South Side is the largest side of the city!!!
We used to be way more Irish but a ton of flight from groups like Italians and the Irish made our city much less Italian and Irish that it once was.
Our South Side was once a HUGE Irish bastion. Now, maybe 1 square mile of the South Side is Irish, and the South Side is the largest side of the city!!!
I was talking about the metro areas, not so much the city limits. King of Kensington provided an article a while back about how the larger Italian populations in the Northeast essentially "Italianized" the suburbs. I'll see if I can find it.
Here it is.
Quote:
But let’s get back to Brooklyn, or more to the point, New Jersey, being that my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between visits to Long Island and New Jersey. Which brings me to Soprano Country—Bloomfield, Clifton, and North Caldwell. I saw it all. But what really stuck with me is how ubiquitous Italian American life is in the area (not just New Jersey or Long Island, mind you; I took a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street and Avenue U, too, and saw plenty of pasticcerie and salumerie, not to mention other subtle, or not so subtle, signs of Italian American existence).
What struck me is the way a small town, like, say, Nutley, New Jersey, seems to have become (or always was?) a kind of Little Italy all its own. That when Italian Americans did their part in the great white flight to the suburbs in the decades following the Second World War, those in the New York area appeared to have taken a good part of the commerce and culture of their urban neighborhoods with them. (I realize I’m making some broad generalizations here.)
This phenomenon did not happen in California, even though the state had a number of Italian American urban neighborhoods that disappeared or drastically changed when Italian Americans moved out of the cities. Why does Italian American identity remain intact more recognizably in Eastern suburbs?
Poles tend to be concentrated more in the Midwest (Pittsburgh and Buffalo have sizable Polish populations, however). I didn't know what Paczki Day was until I met people from Michigan.
The Irish have much stronger concentrations in the Northeast. The Philadelphia MSA, for example, has more Irish than the Chicago MSA despite being much smaller. The Philadelphia MSA also has 161,000 more Italians than Chicagoland.
But you're right that the Midwest has many more Germans than the East Coast. Pennsylvania is by far the most German of the Northeastern states. For the most part, high concentrations of Germans seems to be more of a Midwestern thing.
Apparently some southern cities have high German and Irish populations as well. Baltimore has a higher percentage than Philly and a higher Irish percentage than the NYC area. Italians and especially Irish seemed to favor the northeastern suburbs of Baltimore. Jews and Russians favor northwest Baltimore and its northwestern suburbs.
Last edited by KodeBlue; 09-10-2014 at 06:27 PM..
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