In today’s Real Estate section, The New York Times notices that 20,000 live (roughly) between Church, Walker, Pearl, and Fulton, and writes a nice enough article about the joys therein. But then it goes and ruin everything by calling that area “Civic Center.”

Civic Center? Not to jump on a linguistic bandwagon or anything, but who dat?

I’m not going to argue that there aren’t civic buildings within those boundaries, but when you look at the Times’s map (left), there’s no cohesion: That’s not a neighborhood, it’s an arbitrary boundary. The west border of the Times’s “Civic Center” has more in common with traditional Tribeca than the northeastern quadrant, which is Chinatown, pure and simple. And the southeast is closer in spirit to the Seaport or even Financial District.

Am I way off base? Does anyone living west of Broadway say “I live in the Civic Center”? (Hell, no—they say “Tribeca” because that’s better for real-estate values.) Does anyone south of Park Row say “Civic Center”? That’s a tougher call…. My partner once tried to get people to call the general City Hall area CiHa, but no one went for it. Including me. But I’d take that over Civic Cen—yawn….. I can’t even type it without getting sleepy.

To my mind, whether people like or not, Tribeca now extends from Canal down to the World Trade Center site, from Broadway to the Hudson River. Where that leaves the area north of Worth and east of Broadway, I’m not sure—and if they want to say they live in the Civic Center, that’s super. Just leave me out of it.