Read the name of this street and I will tell you who you are: how tourists are calculated in New York

There is one popular street in New York called Houston street. By the way you pronounce this name, you can immediately determine whether you are a local or a newcomer. The newspaper shares interesting facts The New York Times.

Houston Street is a street in Lower Manhattan in New York City. All locals know that the name of this street is not read at all like the name of the city of the same name in Texas. That is, not Houston, but Houston.

By the way you pronounce it, you can understand who you are - a real resident of the Big Apple or a visitor. So if you suspect that your interlocutor has come from another city or country, ask him to read the name of the Houston street.

While anyone with a good enough command of English will read it as Houston, the local knows exactly what is correct - Houston.

However, few people think about why this name is pronounced this way in New York. The name of a city in Texas, with the same spelling, reads differently from a street name in New York.

As Gerard Koppela wrote in City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, the city of Houston was named after Sam Houston (American politician and statesman, the first and third president of the Republic of Texas, who gave his name to the city of Houston - Ed.). And a street in New York was named after William Howstone, a famous Georgia native who came from an old Scottish family.

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True, the surname of Houstoun is spelled Houstoun, not Houston, as is ingrained in the name of the street. He was born in 1755 in Savannah, Georgia. He studied at London's Inner Temple for a time, but returned to Georgia in 1783. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and one of the first trustees of the University of Georgia. However, the streets were named in his honor not at all for his achievements, but simply because he successfully married.

They got engaged in 1788. His wife, Mary Bayard Howstone, was a member of the well-known Bayard family, consisting mainly of lawyers and politicians from Wilmington, Delaware. Members of this family were the leaders of the Democratic Party and traced their roots to Peter Stuyvesant (the last governor-general of the Dutch possessions in North America).

In New York, the family owned several large farms. True, in the year that Mary got married, her father, Nicholas Bayard III, faced financial problems. He was forced to sell his 40-hectare farm in modern-day Soho.

But why do we write this word "Houston"? Koppel believes that Texas-based Sam Houston gained such popularity that people began to confuse the two spellings.

As ForumDaily New York wrote earlier:

• There is a street in the Big Apple where you can forget that you are in New York. We wrote in detail about her here.
• The most expensive street in the world is located in New York. It houses a handful of luxurious buildings built in the past decade. Read about what street it is in this publication.
• There are as many as four streets in New York called Broadway - in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. But only one has a worldwide reputation. Which one - read here.