Artifact Title / Real Life Places

Places

Airports

• A number of airports have IATA codes that reflect now-abandoned names. The codes stick around because the IATA is not fond of changing codes after they've been printed on aviation charts.
  • Before the establishment of the IATA, airports in the US had two-letter designations derived from the National Weather Service. Some airports still use this two-letter code with an additional "X" tacked on to the end which doesn't actually stand for anything. These include the otherwise nonsensical-seeming "LAX" for Los Angeles International Airport, "PDX" for Portland International Airport, and "PHX" for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (although this last one actually does have an "X" where it logically should be).
  • Similarly, airports in Canada originally took their codes from existing codes of nearby train stations or radio beacons. When an airport had its own weather station, its code began with Y, apparently for "yes." These codes were eventually transferred to the IATA system (conveniently, very few US airports had codes starting with Y, so overlap was avoided), and it became the custom that subsequent Canadian airport codes also began with Y even though it was now meaningless. To this day nearly all Canadian IATA airport codes start with Y. (This is why that instrumental by Rush is called "YYZ": YYZ is the IATA code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, Rush was from Toronto, and the instrumental is supposed to evoke the homecoming vibes the band got on seeing their luggage at long last marked with their hometown code.)
  • A bunch of airports in the former Eastern Bloc service cities that were renamed after the fall of communism:
    • Armenia has "LWN" for Gyumri Shirak International Airport, referencing Gyumri's former name of Leninakan.
    • Azerbaijan has "KVD" for Ganja International Airport, referencing Ganja's former name of Kirovabad.
    • Kazakhstan has "SCO" for Aktau International Airport, referencing Aktau's former name of Shevchenko. Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport in the capital Astana used to be an example, retaining its IATA code of "TSE" (referencing the city's former name of Tselinograd) long after it was renamed in 1991, until it was changed to "NQZ" in 2020.
    • Kyrgyzstan has "FRU" for Manas International Airport in Bishkek (formerly Frunze).
    • Montenegro has "TGD" for Podgorica Airport, referencing Podgorica's former name of Titograd.
    • Russia has "LED" for Pulkovo Airport in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), "GOJ" for Strigino International Airport in Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), "SVX" for Koltsovo International Airport in Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk), "KUF" for Kurumoch International Airport in Samara (formerly Kuybyshev), and "OGZ" for Beslan Airport in Vladikavkaz (formerly Ordzhonikidze).
  • In China, Beijing Capital International Airport is still "PEK", from when the city it serves was known around the world as Peking. There's also "CAN" for Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (for the older romanization of Canton).
    • The Baiyun Airport is also a double example, as it was named after its original incarnation's vicinity to Baiyun Mountain. In 2004, the airport was relocated around 20 km north of its original location, yet the name remains unchanged.
  • India has a bunch, due to several cities having their standard English names changed in the 1990s and early 21st century to better reflect local names/spellings: "BOM" for Mumbai (formerly Bombay), "CCU" for Kolkata (Calcutta), "MAA" for Chennai (Madras).
  • "BNA" for Nashville International Airport references the airport's original name of Berry Field.
  • "DCA" for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, although this one wasn't caused by its name change.^note Due to Ronald Reagan very controversially firing the air traffic controllers, many controllers in the area avoid using the "Reagan" part of the name whenever possible.
  • "GEG" for Spokane International Airport references the airport's original name of Geiger Field.
  • "MCI" for Kansas City International Airport is from its original name of Mid-Continent International Airport. ^note A bonus joke during the '90s long-distance phone wars asked why Kansas City's airport code was MCI while the city was the headquarters for Sprint.
  • "MCO" for Orlando International Airport is from the former McCoy Air Force Base which the airport mostly took over.
  • The reverse applies for the new Munich (München) airport which was named after former politician Franz Josef Strauß who was abbreviated FJS. However, that IATA code was already taken, so the more pedestrian "MUC" that had been used by the prior airport (which shut down the same day the new airport opened) was kept.
  • "ORD" for O'Hare International Airport, probably the best known US example of this, dates to when Chicago's main airport was still known as Orchard Field.
  • "SDF" for Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport references its original name of Standiford Field.^note ("LOU" is instead assigned to Bowman Field, which had been Louisville's airport before Standiford opened, and remains in use as a general aviation facility.)
  • Saigon was officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 (it's still widely used informally), but Tan Son Nhat International Airport retains the code "SGN".
  • Stewart International Airport, which serves Newburgh, New York, was originally Stewart Field — hence it still has the code "SWF".
• While you enter and leave airplanes through movable jetways, the airport side is still called the "gate", from when it was just a gap in a fence and there were no terminal buildings.
• The large paved area next to the gate, which the plane must cross as it goes to and from the taxiway, is called the "ramp" even though it's level. This is a relic of early airports built for amphibious planes that landed on adjacent water but then taxied up the ramp onto land.
• "Ticket counters" are still referred to as such, even though few US airlines use paper tickets anymore. Nowadays, the front counters are primarily used for checking luggage.

Countries and regions

Countries

General examples

• A country that gets its name from a founding dynasty will sound like this once that dynasty falls out of power. China (Qin dynasty, out of power 206 BCE) and Korea (Goryeo dynasty, out of power 1392 CE) are examples, although they are only called that by foreign countries and not in the native tongue (China's most enduring endonym, Zhongguo, means "Central Country"; North Koreans and some elderly South Koreans call their country Joseon, meaning "Land of the Morning Calm", while modern South Koreans use Hanguk, which means "Land of Han").
  • In Russian and other Eastern European languages, the name of China is derived from the Khitan, a nomadic tribe that ruled over northern China until they were wiped out by the Mongols in the 13th century. This name (Cathay) was also used in Western Europe during the Middle Ages but was replaced with China after the Portuguese's arrival.^note (It's still in use for the name of the Cathay Pacific airline based in Hong Kong, although not in Cantonese.)
• A few vehicle codes, used to distinguish the origins of a particular vehicle on an international scale, reflect an old name for a country. Examples include Yemen (YAR, for Yemen Arab Republic, which officially merged to form the current state in 1990) and Sri Lanka (CL, reflecting its colonial name of Ceylon). In 2021, the United Kingdom changed its code from GB to UK^note The latter is more representative, as "GB" refers to Great Britain and therefore by implication excludes both Northern Ireland and the various minor orbiting islands — but the many derivative codes that apply to its Crown Dependencies and overseas territories still feature 'GB': GBZ for Gibraltar, GBJ for Jersey, etc.
• A few ISO 3166-1 codes reflect some countries' former names. Of two-letter codes, there are Belarus (BY, for Byelorussian SSR), Cambodia (KH, for Khmer Republic), Solomon Islands (SB, for British Solomon Islands), and Samoa (WS, for Western Samoa). An artifact three-letter code is that of Saint Kitts and Nevis (KNA, for Saint Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla).

Individual examples

• Brazil is named after a certain tree called pau-brasil (brazilwood), which was very abundant during the time of the country's colonization (circa 1500-1600) and whose orange-red wood made it the country's first significant export crop. Excessive harvesting meant this tree has practically been extirpated from most of its original range today.
• A lot of Asian languages know Greece as "Ionia" or their variations — see Armenian Hunanistan, Hebrew Yavan, Arabic Yūnān, and Persian Yunan (the Persian most likely being the source for the other three, or at least closely-related via the Old Persian Yauna). Ionia is a region in western Anatolia/Asia Minor that was part of the Greek homeland during antiquity. However, Ionia has been a Turkish territory for hundreds of years (most of the Greeks became Turks in the years after the Seljuk invasion through intermarriage and assimilation; those who held onto Greek language and culture emigrated/were forced to emigrate to Greece in the 1920s during the "Population Exchange") so the name seems hardly fit anymore.
• The Kingdom of Hungary was created in 1000, becoming a constituent of Austria-Hungary in 1867. After the dissolution of that state, the Kingdom of Hungary emerged as an independent state once again in 1920, but with the fact that it didn't actually have a monarch. It did have a regent, Miklós Horthy, whose job was to find a monarch who would replace him. This never happened largely due to a lack of popular candidates, and Horthy instead became the de-facto dictator of the 'Kingdom' until its end in World War II.
• India takes its name from the Indus, a river that flows these days mostly in neighboring Pakistan, which was partitioned from modern-day India in 1947.
• The country of Liechtenstein was named after its ruling family, the House of Liechtenstein, who in turn took their name from a castle that isn't in Liechtenstein at all, but near Vienna.
• The Roman Empire kept calling itself that even after Rome was no longer the capital:
  • In A.D. 286, Emperor Diocletian subdivided the empire into the western and eastern halves — each of which was later subdivided into two regions of its own, making four administrative divisions and four emperors in total. So even though Rome technically remained the capital of the empire as a whole, the actual governing was outsourced to the four tetrarchic capitals.
  • Eventually, after repeated civil war between the two halves, the West and East split for good in 395. The Western Roman Empire had its capital initially at Mediolanum (modern-day Milan) and later at Ravenna. The Eastern Roman Empire (which outlasted the western half by nearly a millennium, and is known to current historians as the Byzantine Empire) had its capital at Constantinople. However, each half called itself the Roman Empire until the bitter end — even the eastern half, which didn't even contain the city of Rome for most of its history, and changed its official language from Latin to Greek in 610. Even the Turks kept up this tradition, with the Seljuks calling their Anatolian territory the Sultanate of Rûm (Rome) because they seized it from the Byzantines, and the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror adopting the title Kayser-i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) after toppling the Byzantine Empire and moving his imperial court to Istanbul (Not Constantinople).
    • Even well after the Byzantine Empire fell, many Greek-speakers in the area continued to call themselves Romans up until at least the 20th century — namely those that lived under Turkish rule outside the borders of the independent Greece founded in 1821. There's a semi-famous anecdote (recounted by Peter Charanis) about how when Greece invaded the island of Lemnos in 1912, Greek soldiers were sent to each village and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the island children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of the soldiers asked. "At Hellenes [Greeks]," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" the soldier retorted. "No, we are Romans," the children replied. (Please note that this whole exchange would have taken place entirely in a language we today would unambiguously call Greek.)
  • People elsewhere continued to call themselves Romans or Latins for centuries after Rome or Constantinople fell. This is the etymology of the Ladin language in Switzerland (also known as Romansch), which is indeed Latin-derived. The Jewish-Spanish dialect Ladino is called that because they were called "Latins" by Greeks and Turks alike when they migrated to the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Both Romania and Rumelia (the Ottoman name of the Balkans) are named after the Roman empire.
  • And of course, there was the Holy Roman Empire, which as Voltaire quipped, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
• The Soviet Union became an artifact title over the years as the union put less and less constitutional emphasis on Soviets (local councils of workers deputies), which, as the name implies, were supposed to be the entire basis of the state — but which fell out of favor as the executive branches of government ended up wielding far more authority than the Supreme Soviet/Congress of Soviets. The "Union" part of the name also became an artifact in the final four days of its existence, when Kazakhstan became its sole remaining member after the secession of everyone else.
• Syria is both an example of this and Non-Indicative Name. The word is ultimately derived from "Assyria", a major power in the ancient Middle East, which was not centered in today's Syria but in northern Iraq. However, Assyria did conquer the region that would become Syria (at that time, it was probably called Aramea). The Greeks, conflating the conquered land with its master, started calling it "Syria", and the name continues to be used even after the Assyrians fell from power in the late 7th century BCE. On another note, the Assyrian language ceased to be spoken in 600 BCE; what is today called the "Assyrian language" is actually a dialect of Aramaic (Assyrian Neo-Aramaic), though the people who speak them are likely descended from the ancient Assyrians.
• The United States of America, under international law, is a state, and the "states" are really provinces. The name comes from when the US was still thought to be a confederation of sovereign states that acted more or less like independent nations under a more powerful and local UN, hence all the early references to "this Union" or "Union of States". This conception more or less died out after the Civil War, when "nation" started cropping up (though secession's still theoretically permissible, so long as the other "states" agree).
  • The name's meaning began to fall apart a mere twelve years into the United States' existence, when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the US Constitution. This reduced some of the powers available to state governments and greatly increased the power of the national government. Which has from then on been the "federal" government, denoting that it shares power with the states instead of merely having what the states delegate to it.
  • Really it fell apart when the Articles of Confederation themselves were ratified in 1781, just five years into the United States' existence. That document, while creating a far weaker central government than the Constitution that replaced it, did reserve certain powers — declaring war, making treaties, sending and receiving ambassadors, enforcing maritime laws in US territorial waters, and coining/printing money. No truly independent state would cede those powers to another entity. Though in the aftermath of World War II a few nominally sovereign small Pacific islands have ceded their power to coin/print money and to wage war to the United States (the latter was not much of a concession, since they never had their own militaries).
  • The title is most confusing when you consider that the United States of America, a country, is also a member of the Organization of American States, an international alliance of countries.
  • The US isn't alone in this; there are numerous other federations around the world that call their provinces states, such as Mexico ("Estados"), Germany ("Bundeslander"), and Australia. In some of them, the states indeed used to be fully independent.
    • In such instances where a nation is The Federation (aka "federal state"), the constituent entities are called "federated states", reflecting that they've ceded international recognition while retaining internal sovereignty.
  • The "of America" part is also no longer 100% accurate, geographically speaking, ever since Hawaii became a state.

Regions

General examples

• Several regions, particularly in Europe, were named after peoples who used to live in the area but are no longer recognizable as ethnicities: Aquitaine, Burgundy^note From the Germanic Burgundian tribe; the inhabitants of modern Burgundy generally speak French, a Romance language, Belgium^note The Belgae were an essentially Celtic people; today's Belgium has no Celtic-speaking population to speak of — the northern part speaks the Germanic Dutch language, while the south speaks French, a Romance language, Lombardy^note From the Germanic Lombard people; modern Lombardy is Italian-speaking, in a "Lombard" dialect that is still distinctively Romance. The name Lombard also translates as 'longbeard'; contemporary Italian fashion calls for men to either be clean-shaven or to have short beards per 21st-century Western fashion more generally, Lazio^note From Latium, named after the ancient Latin people who gave the language its name; interestingly, the name might go right back around to being indicative, since the Latins seem to have derived their name from latus, a word in their language meaning "broad" or "wide": this apparently referred to the relatively broad plains of Latium, so the term "Latin" seems to have originally meant 'plainsman', 'lowlander', or 'flatlander'. The plains still exist and characterize modern Lazio, Swabia, Saxony^note After the Saxons, who gave their name to numerous places in one way or another. They first become known to history as living somewhere between the modern day Netherlands and Denmark on the North Sea Coast — essentially equivalent to the modern State of Lower Saxony. Then some of them emigrated (together with Angles and Jutes) to the island of Great Britain, where they settled around and south of the Thames, creating areas like "Wessex", "Essex", "Middlesex", and "Sussex". These names were later taken to places the Saxons had never even heard of, like New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ontario, Australia and Jamaica, by virtue of the English habit of naming regions of their colonies after English counties. Later the area where those who hadn't emigrated still remained was forcibly integrated into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne and subsequently their name, through their rulers, would travel east of the Elbe to the area around Meißen ending up as the Electorate, later Kingdom and finally Free State of Saxony. Oh and then there is Saxony-Anhalt, and the tendency by Scots and Irish people to call every disliked Englishman "Sassenach", or the tendency of half of central and Eastern Europe to use some variety of "Saxe" thanks to their descent from the House of Wettin, usually the Saxe-Coburg branch that is also ancestral to The House of Windsor. When Simeon II, former child Tsar of Bulgaria, later ran for a political career — ultimately becoming the only former royal in recorded history to be democratically elected prime minister after losing his crown — he did so under the civil name Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; well, Симеон Борисов Сакскобургготски Simeon Borisov Sakskoburggotski...
• Many Native American place names traveled west with settlers, making them incongruous with those used by the local tribes.
  • Several places are named after Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, including a county in New York, a city^note (well, a large suburb) in Michigan, and an entire state amidst the Rockies in the West. A Lenape (Delaware) name thus was used for a part of Iroquois, then Odawa, and later Cheyenne territory.
  • Just north of Wyoming County, New York, is Genesee County^note (it's most of what's between Buffalo and Rochester), which actually does come from the local Iroquois. So, what better name for settlers to take to Michigan and give to the county around what is now Flint — again in Odawa territory, a long way from the Iroquois (and actually having a bad history with the Iroquois, the Iroquois having occupied the Odawa lands during the imperialist phase of the Iroquois Confederacy in the late 17th century).
  • Settlers originating from the Mohawk Valley region of upstate New York named the settlement they founded in North Dakota Canistota, a misspelling of their hometown's Iroquois name: Canastota.
  • Poughkeepsie, Arkansas: a Dutch transliteration of an Iroquois name, now used in a place where the Dutch never settled and the Iroquois never went.
• So why were Native Americans, the indigenous people of the Americas, called "Indians" by Europeans, even though they're not from India? It all goes back to Ancient times when Greeks called the lands beyond the Indus river "India". By the Middle Ages, Europeans had a vague knowledge that there was a lot of land and many countries beyond the Indus, so "India" was reserved to the subcontinent and the lands further beyond were collectively called "The Indies". Christopher Columbus sailed west with the intention of finding a new route to these countries — Cathay (China), Cipango (Japan), and the Spice Isles (Indonesia), and not India proper as commonly believed — and when he hit land (in what was in fact the New World) he called the people he found there "Indians" because he thought they were somewhere near to the Indies. Although the Americas were identified as a new continent less than a decade after, the name stuck.
  • This is also why the Caribbean islands are known collectively as the West Indies. Originally coined in contraposition to the East Indies, the name given to Southeast Asia, but it has continued whereas the other fell largely into disuse — the only surviving remnant of it is Indonesia, which roughly means "the Indies Archipelago".
• At different times, Maryland and Missouri concluded it was administratively better that the cities of Baltimore and St. Louis became separate county-equivalent jurisdictions. However, the former counties remain known by the names of those cities (so that, for example, Missouri has both St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis, which is not a officially a "county" but in practice is treated exactly as if it were).
  • This is an incredibly common kind of setup in Germany where most major cities handle what counties would handle in rural areas, so you have stuff like "City of Munich" surrounded by (partially) Landkreis Munich, same goes for places like Hof, Bayreuth and so on. In some cases the Landkreis even has its administration (which explicitly has no jurisdiction in the city, thank you very much) in the city because that's easier. So a city like Erlangen for example has the City Hall of Erlangen (which handles both municipal and county level matters for the city of Erlangen) and the County offices for the county Erlangen-Höchstadt (a merger of the former counties of Erlangen and Höchstadt).
• A number of Chinese provinces are named after places that have since changed their names. Examples include:
  • Anhui, after Anqing (unchanged) and Huizhou (modern-day Huangshan City).
  • Fujian, after Fuzhou (unchanged) and Jianzhou (falls within modern-day Nanping and Ningde).
  • Zig-zagged with Gansu. While its namesakes Ganzhou and Suzhou still exist today, they are now districts under their respective cities, Zhangye and Jiuquan.
  • Guangdong and Guangxi, meaning "east of Guang" and "west of Guang" respectively, after Guangxin, a two-millenia-old outpost believed to be located in the middle of the two modern day provinces.
  • Jiangsu, after Jiangling (modern-day Nanjing) and Suzhou (unchanged, different character from the entry above).
  • Zhejiang, after the original name of the Qiantang River that runs through it.

Individual examples

• The area covering most of present-day Turkey is still known as Asia Minor (or alternately Anatolia). It's been a very, very long time since the entire rest of Asia was called "Asia Major". Let's just say that the ancients who came up with the naming scheme thought that Asia was a lot smaller, and only consisted of what's now known as the Middle East. The name was cemented when Pergamum, at the western end of Turkey, became the Roman province of Asia Minor.
• The Canadian province of British Columbia was called that to distinguish it from the various other Columbias that existed at the time, including the US district and the country (natively spelled Colombia). Britain hasn't exercised direct authority over the territory at least since 1931, hasn't been able to exercise any authority over it since 1982, and while it is true that the Canadian and British Columbian head of state is HM the King, he holds that title separately independently (that is to say, it "just so happens" that the King of British Columbia is the same person as the King of the United Kingdom). In other words: British Columbia isn't British anymore.
• In the wake of apartheid, South Africa decided to reorganize its internal subdivisions a little bit. The (literally) biggest change was to split up the Cape Province, pretty much the western half of the country, which takes its name from the Cape of Good Hope. That area, centered around Cape Town, became today's Western Cape. The Eastern Cape province includes a different cape, Cape Agulhas, which is actually the southern tip of Africa, so it still applies. However, the Northern Cape's seacoast is strictly along the Atlantic all the way up to Namibia, with no significant feature that could continue to justify the name.
• The Cayman Islands is named for its crocodile population which was exterminated soon after the first settlers arrived. Christopher Columbus originally named the islands "Las Tortugas" after their abundant turtle population, which has also been decimated through overfishing.
• Delta County, Michigan is so named because when the county was first designated, it formed a triangle. Pieces of the county were subdivided among bordering counties, but the original name stuck.
• Both Glacier National Park and Glacier Bay National Park could lose most of their glaciers if climate change continues unchecked.
• The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, presently only has 0.2% people who identify as Jewish. It once had a large Jewish population, since, well, the subject was accorded specifically for the Jews, but they all either internally or externally migrated not long after its creation. But then, the name is doomed from day one anyway, considering that the oblast, due to being created during the height of antisemitism, is located far, far, far, away from major Russian cities: in the Russian Far East, near China. Once antisemitism became less of a problem, most of the Jews who lived there moved to the metropolitan cities.
• Leningrad Oblast and Sverdlovsk Oblast, federal subjects of Russia, retained their names even though their namesake cities were renamed back to Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg respectively in 1991 just prior to the Soviet Union's dissolution.
• The little German region of Lippe, formerly a principality, nowadays a district in North Rhine-Westphalia, is named after its rulers, the House of Lippe, who were in turn named after the river Lippe, where they originated. Confusingly, the river does run through Westphalia, but the eponymous territory is removed from it.
• The region containing the six US states to the east of New York is regularly called "New England", as it was known before it gained independence. For several layers of irony, there's a popular American Football team called the New England Patriots.
• The New Forest in England, created by William the Conqueror in, er, 1079.
• The state of New Mexico is a subtle one. The "Mexico" in question refers not to the modern nation but to the Aztecs, who referred to themselves as Mexica. When the Spanish discovered the Pueblo civilizations they were impressed and were reminded of Tenochtitlan, so they dubbed the region New Mexico. Amusingly the Pueblo cultures predate the Aztecs, though not necessarily the other Nahuatl-speaking peoples who preceded them in Central Mexico.^note (Also, interestingly, one of the largest and most powerful Puebloan nations, the Hopi, appear to be distantly related to the Nahuas, as they both speak Uto-Aztecan languages.) New Mexico was only governed by modern Mexico for roughly eleven years (1837-48) and many New Mexicans see themselves as culturally and ethnically distinct from Mexicans, so confusing the two is highly offensive.
• Hong Kong's New Territories were ceded to Britain by China in 1898. And since Hong Kong itself is now back under Chinese administration, the "territories" part is also sort of quaint. The PRC did find this name colonial-sounding, and that name was in fact always put between quotes in the Basic Law, implying Chinese disapproval. However, there's otherwise no better name for "the part of Kowloon Peninsula, north of Boundary Street (see below) and south of Shenzhen River"...
• The Northwest Territories were once most of what is today Canada. Over time provinces and other territories have been carved out of it. The plural might have made sense as long as the land itself was divided into districts. But since the last of those districts, Keewatin, was made into the territory of Nunavut in the late 1990s, there's nothing to suggest that it's necessary.
  • However, the creation of Nunavut caused an inversion of the trope as applied to the "Northwest" aspect. Before that, the territories included all the islands of the Canadian Arctic, the two largest of which, Baffin and Ellesmere, are on the northeast of Canada. Today the territory is comfortably actually nestled in the northwestern portion of the country.
• Orange County, California is an inversion. The name itself came from the people who were involved with creating the county wanting the new county to sound to the East Coast like a semi-tropical paradise. It eventually started growing the oranges (and other citrus) that it was more known for, before that faded out.
  • When Orange County was formed, there was already a town named "Orange" there. Previously it was known as "Richland", but when the town applied to be officially incorporated there was already a town in California named Richland. So they changed it to "Orange" mostly as a PR move. They wanted the town to become the county seat of Orange County, but most people in the region knew that Santa Ana would've gotten the title anyway.
  • It is widely believed that Orange County, New York (home of the eponymous Choppers) had taken its name from the Dutch royal family, which hasn't held any kind of authority there since the late 17th century.
    • To a lesser extent, the name was tied to the town of Orangeburg, New York, which was part of Orange County when it was created as one of New York's original counties. However, a later division of the county into two left Orangeburg in the newly created Rockland County instead — why they didn't name them the other way is a mystery. Other similar situations have occurred whenever county boundaries change, such as Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, not being in Chester County (it's in Delaware County, named for the river that also named the state and a county in New York).
  • Orange County, Florida (home to Orlando) is a downplayed example. While a few orange groves do still exist there, most of the county is urbanized now due to very rapid growth in recent years.
• The Pacific ('peaceful') Ocean itself was named that way in 1520 by explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who found its open waters a welcome relief after the treacherous strait he had just navigated (afterwards named the Straits of Magellan) between the southern tip of mainland South America and the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The part of the Pacific west of Chile has generally tranquil waters, but the equatorial and westernmost parts are infamous for hurricanes and typhoons. At least it is better than "Southern Sea", the name given to it by the conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa when he walked across Panama in 1513.
• The "Pacific" in the US's Pacific Northwest is an artifact of a time when it needed to be distinguished from the "Northwest", which is today called the Upper Midwest. This is because prior to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the western boundary of the United States' territory was the Mississippi River, and thus the part of the territory north of the Ohio River was indeed the northwest of the country. This was reflected in the naming of the Northwest Ordinance of 1796, the act of Congress that established the settlement patterns of that territory, which is now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (and part of Minnesota). These days, nobody looking at a map of the US would consider anything but the Pacific Northwest to be the Northwest.
• Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, has long been inhospitable to the pearl-bearing oysters it was once rich in.
• The Australian state of Queensland was so named because at the time it was a colony of the British Empire governed by Queen Victoria. While Australia's head of state is still the British monarch, Queen Victoria herself has been dead since 1901.
• In 1863, Southern Australia legally annexed the Northern Territory, which at the time was a de-facto New South Wales exclave. This meant that "Southern" Australia took up a massive chunk of the continent, connecting the north and south coast. This was finally addressed in 1911, when the Northern Territory was once again split off into its own territory a decade after Australia's federation.
• In general the term "West" shifted westward throughout the history of the US, as did the mean center of population. Just by looking at a map, a lot of what is commonly called "the Midwest" is actually closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific and thus not very "mid" or "west" at all. (It is, however, still the "middle" in the sense of being the center of population; both the mean and median centers of population of the United States have been in the Midwest since the 1860 census, and the median center in particular hasn't left Indiana since 1900.)
• Gulf of Tonkin (in Western languages only, not in Vietnamese) is derived from Tonkin, an older name for Hanoi (Tonkin means "Eastern Capital" and when the Vietnamese capital was moved to Hue at the beginning of 19th century, the city name reverted to Hanoi and the name stayed around even after becoming the capital again in 20th century). The French also called the northern region, around Hanoi, Tonkin after Hanoi was no longer called Tonkin.

Streets, roads, bridges, and neighborhoods

General examples

• Toponyms with "gate" in them usually don't have gates anymore, and in some cases are just named for places that once did. These are particularly common in the London, where the various gates — Bishopsgate, Ludgate, Billingsgate, Aldgate, Newgate (doubly artifacts, since "Aldgate" means 'Old Gate' and "Newgate" should be obvious, and isn't new anymore) — now give their names to areas of and around the City, and usually to major roads that run through where the gatehouse used to be.
  • This is less of an artifact for some street names named gate — as they originate from the Norse gata, meaning 'street'.
• Likewise there are a lot of Chinese place names with "-men", which also means gate and is sometimes (depending on whether the old city wall had been demolished) just as nonexistent, in them. Especially apparent in Beijing, as only two "gates" survived the construction of the Subway Line 2 (in which they simply dug up the inner wall of Beijing and plunked the subway tunnels into the excavated foundation hole) and/or the Cultural Revolution.
• There are a great many "... Ferry" odonyms all over the English-speaking world that are now in-name-only. Sometimes it carries over to the name of the town, such as Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., or neighborhood, like Grays Ferry, Philadelphia.
  • Horseferry Road, Westminster, best known for its magistrates' court, did once lead directly to the horse ferry crossing the Thames to Lambeth Palace. It now leads to Lambeth Bridge, which replaced the ferry in 1862.
  • The same applies to the many "-ford" place names; in most if not all such cases, the ford has long since been replaced by a bridge.
• Some shopping mall developers name the mall access roads after the department stores they're near. Sometimes, these access roads keep the same name even if the department store doesn't:
  • Northland Center in Southfield, Michigan (adjacent to Detroit), one of the first shopping malls in the USA, was bound on the north side by J. L. Hudson Drive (named for the Hudson's department store that served as the mall's main anchor store) and Northland Drive to the south. Hudson's was bought out by Marshall Field's in 2001, which itself was bought out by Macy's in 2006, rendering the former name obsolete. When the long-ailing mall was finally shuttered in 2015 and partially torn down, Northland Drive became an artifact as well, although the exit off the John C. Lodge Freeway (M-10) leading to the site of the former mall is still signed as "Northland". However, the former mall would be redeveloped into a primarily apartment complex in the early 2020s, and this new development retains the Northland (City) Center name, which finally makes this an aversion.
  • The Crossroads in Portage, Michigan also has a J. L. Hudson Drive that now leads to a Macy's.
  • In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, the Charlottetown Mall has an access road named Towers Private Road, for the now-defunct Towers chain, which was sold to Zellers in 1990, which in turn was sold to Target in 2013 before going out of business a year later.
  • Likewise, the access roads at the Paramus Park Mall in Paramus, NJ, were named after the mall's original anchor stores. The Abraham & Strauss store near A&S Drive has been a Macy's for decades, while the Sears near Sears Drive was shuttered in 2017.
  • The first indoor mall in San Antonio, Texas, was the Wonderland Mall, which opened in the 1950s. It was decaying by the late 1970s, so in the early 1980s the property's owners decided to do a complete overhaul of the mall, which they renamed as Crossroads Mall. One of the streets that borders the mall was also renamed, to Crossroads Boulevard. The mall began decaying yet again by the early 2000s, so toward the end of the decade the property's owners decided to do yet another overhaul of the mall and transform it into a combination medical building/office space/shopping center, anchored by a Target. They also switched the property's name back to Wonderland Mall (of the Americas). Crossroads Blvd. has not been considered for a renaming.
  • In Toledo, Ohio, Southwyck Boulevard was named for the Southwyck Mall, which the street encircled. The mall has since been replaced with Amazon warehouses.
• Similarly to the shopping mall examples, it is not uncommon for roads to be named after businesses that used to operate from them, but no longer do:
  • Lansing, Michigan has two examples. The motel that was on Ramada Drive was originally a Ramada but later operated as a Best Western before it was torn down. On the other side of town is a Knights Inn Drive that now leads to a Motel 6.
  • The motel on Hilton Boulevard in Ann Arbor, Michigan was later a Crowne Plaza but is now independent.
  • The hotel on Hilton Drive in Bossier City, Louisiana has not been a Hilton since 1992. It last operated as a Rodeway Inn but was abandoned in 2016.
  • Holiday Lane in Howell, Michigan used to have a Holiday Inn on it, which later cycled through a few different names before it was demolished.
  • Orlando, Florida and Marietta, Georgia both have streets named for Woolco, a department store division of Woolworth which closed all of its American stores in 1983.
  • Kresge Drive in Amherst, Ohio no longer has a Kmart on it. (The "K" stands for Sebastian S. Kresge, who founded the S. S. Kresge dime store chain from which Kmart was later spun off.)
  • Drivers passing through Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, on Route 17 will see a sign in either direction for a turnoff at Race Track Road. If they get off, however, they will not find a race track in either direction. There was one^note (it followed the course of the present Arbor Drive just west of Route 17 if it matters) that began as a harness racing track, and later became home to midget-car races. It was closed down after some horrific accidents in the late 1930s; the land was redeveloped for residential use.
  • Nappanee, Indiana has a Family Fare Drive that has not led to a Family Fare supermarket since the late '80s.
  • The hotel on Hampton Drive in Effingham, Illinois rebranded from Hampton Inn to Best Western.
  • Target Drive in St. Louis, Missouri used to lead to the first Target store in the St. Louis area, but after the store moved in The '90s, the road now leads to a megachurch.
  • Hills Plaza in State College, PA no longer has Hills.
  • There are two examples in metro Detroit: Korvette Apartments in Roseville and Korvette Park in Redford Charter Township were both named for their proximity to E. J. Korvette stores, which went out of business in 1980.
  • Multiple street name examples in metro Detroit as well:
    • A&W Drive in Farmington Hills once led to the American headquarters of the A&W fast food chain. However, A&W moved its headquarters elsewhere in The '90s, and the road now leads to the offices and studios of iHeartMedia's Detroit market radio stations (including WNIC 100.3 and Channel 95.5).
    • Two separate Sears Streets, one in Highland Park and one in Livonia, no longer have Sears stores.
    • The city of Detroit itself has a Borman Avenue, which used to lead to the headquarters of Farmer Jack, which was owned for decades by the Borman family until its sale to A&P in 1989. The road now leads to garages for the city's public works department.
    • Downriver, Eureka Road and Pennsylvania Road were both named for factories at the eastern ends of these roads at the Detroit River in Wyandotte, the Eureka Iron Company steel plant and the Pennsylvania Salt Company chemical plant, respectively. While the latter went defunct at the start of The '80s and was demolished by the end of that decade, and the former was torn down in the 1890s and replaced with additional downtown Wyandotte businesses and a residential neighborhood, both roads' names remain.
  • Firestone Boulevard in Southern California was named for the large Firestone Tires factory very close to it. That factory has since been replaced by a shopping center.
  • In Danville, PA, there's a Sheraton Rd. near the Interstate. But the hotel the road leads to is now a Days Inn. Similarly, in Falls Church, VA, the hotel to be found on Ramada Rd. is now a Westin.
  • In Manassas Park, VA, the fast food place on Hardees Drive is now a Roy Rogers.
  • Richmond, British Columbia has a street known as Sweden Way, formerly home to a store of Swedish chain IKEA which relocated to an adjacent lot in 2012.
  • There's a Datapoint Drive on the northwest side of San Antonio, Texas, named after an early computer company called Datapoint Corporation that had its headquarters on that street. While it's not a completely defunct company, it's not the same business it was at its peak and there no longer exists a Datapoint on that street.
  • Homewood, Illinois has a Washington Square Plaza, but the once-well-known Washington Park racetrack that stood across the street and gave the plaza its name has long since been redeveloped for commercial use after a fire destroyed the grandstand.
  • North Versailles, Pennsylvania has a Loews Drive whose Loews theater closed in 2001 — after having only opened in 1999! — and has been converted into a flea market.
  • Miramar, Florida and Murfreesboro, Tennessee both have streets named USA Today Way that no longer feature USA Today printing plants.
  • Albertson Drive in Flowood, Mississippi still leads to a grocery store, though the store is no longer an Albertsons, but rather a Kroger. Subverted in that while the city renamed the street Fresh and Friendly Drive, the address for the Kroger is still officially Albertson Drive.
• The Chestnut and Elm Streets in many towns have few, if any, of those tree species left due to the chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease.
• Some towns in the US that are home to small eponymous state universities, such as Montclair, NJ, and East Stroudsburg, PA, have streets named "Normal". That otherwise puzzling name is left over from when the colleges in question were established to train teachers, under the name "[X] State Normal School", "normal school" being the 19th-century term for a teacher-training institution (compare the name of the ludicrously prestigious écoles normales supérieures in France). This even gets applied to a whole town: Normal, Illinois is the location of Illinois State University, founded as Illinois State Normal University.
• Many cities that have undergone amalgamations contain neighbourhoods or districts whose names no longer apply.
  • In Toronto, the term "East End" does not refer to Scarborough or part thereof, but to the east end of the pre-1998 city.
  • Oklahoma City has several such neighborhoods. Capitol Hill is, in fact, miles from the State Capitol complex, and is instead the former main street of a city that was annexed long ago (it's also no longer a hill, if it ever was). Stockyards City and Putnam City are not cities but neighborhoods of OKC. Midtown and Uptown are much closer to Downtown than they are to the actual outer boundaries of the city, which has expanded greatly since those names were given. Belle Isle hasn't been an island since the lake it was in was drained over half a century ago to make room for a new highway. Additionally, Automobile Alley and Film Row no longer have any car dealerships or film exchanges, respectively. The name "Deep Deuce" probably no longer applies, either. There are a lot of bricks in Bricktown, though.
• Some places with "Island" in their names are no longer islands:
  • In Brooklyn, Coney Island hasn't been an island for over a century. It used to be separated from the rest of Brooklyn by a small creek, but that was filled in around the 1920s. Parts of Coney Island can be considered a peninsula.
  • Ditto for Stonecutters Island in Hong Kong, now connected to the Kowloon Peninsula.
  • The Chicago suburb of Blue Island, Illinois. In the case of Blue Island, it hasn't been an island for literally thousands of years. Much of the current town is on a ridge that was an island in the ancient Lake Chicago, Ice Age predecessor to Lake Michigan. The "Blue Island" name is actually metaphorical—the area's first white pioneers saw the future town site as a forested island in the middle of a figurative sea of prairie, with the "blue" part coming from either atmospheric scattering or blue flowers atop the ridge.
• The term "Downtown" originally referred to the southern end of Manhattan in New York City, also called Lower Manhattan. It's not 100% clear whether the "down" part of "Downtown" refers to Lower Manhattan being the southern part of the island or if it refers to its position downstream on the Hudson River (since the Hudson runs from north to south). However, it has since been generalized to describe the busiest and/or densest part of a US city or town, regardless of whether that area is "down" or not. In fact, most "downtowns" are probably in the center of their cities, and many if not most are also not downstream of the rest of the city (since many cities are not built at the mouth of a river — though for ones that are, "downtown" is often appropriate in the hydrological sense of being geologically lower than the rest of the city).
• It's not uncommon for the old alignment of a state or national highway to be renamed "Old [highway number]". However, in some cases, the "new" highway is later renumbered, but the "old" one still carries the old number. For instance, there are several roads in western Michigan named "Old M-11" because M-11 was re-routed several times before it was renumbered US-31 in 1926, and the number M-11 was used elsewhere.
• Many towns across the US will continue to have a Railroad Street (or Station Road in the UK) long after the corresponding rail track has been dug up, a Church Street that no longer has a church on it, a School Street that no longer has a school on it, et cetera.
• There are some state routes that trail off from a national highway, typically one from the U.S. Numbered Highway System, but do not have a corresponding state counterpart that would normally be their parent road. For instance, New Hampshire has a Route 1A and Route 1B, which both act as bypasses to U.S. Route 1, but there is no NH 1.

Cities with multiple examples

• Beijing:
  • Beijing has major streets with the suffixes "-nei" and "-wai", meaning "inner" and "outer" respectively. That distinction related to which side of the city's wall they were on, a wall that was mostly knocked down on Mao's orders in the 1950s and replaced with the city's Second Ring Road.^note (Which can be as hard to cross as the wall once was.)
  • The Forbidden City, once the emperor's residence, is now open to anyone who can pay the admission fee.
• Boston:
  • The Back Bay has long since been drained and developed. By the same token, the name of the Boston Red Sox's home field, Fenway Park, in that area, reflects its location in what was formerly the wetlands at the edge of the now-drained bay.
  • Boston has three neighborhoods named after directions: The West, North, and South Ends. All three are relatively near downtown, with many miles of city in the direction they claim to be the "end" of (The West End, for example, is east of the Back Bay, the Fenway, Allston, and Brighton, and the South End is north of Southie, Dorchester, Roxberry, and Mattapan). Only the North End, up near Cambridge, is relatively near its stated direction, and it's still south of Charlestown and East Boston.
• London:
  • The place known as "the City of London" or just "The City" is actually a ridiculously small district of the greater London metropolitan area, but which coincides with the extent of London in the Middle Ages.
  • The district of Crystal Palace in South London takes its name from the Crystal Palace, which was re-sited there in 1854. A vast glasshouse originally erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the re-sited Palace was the most prominent landmark for miles around, and gave its name to the area (formerly Sydenham Hill) and most of the local amenities. It isn’t there now, though: it was destroyed by a fire in 1936.
  • The area of King's Cross, best known today for its railway station, was named after a statue of the recently deceased King George IV that was erected in 1835 but demolished as soon as 1842.
  • St. John's Wood in London has trees still, but is not a forest anymore.
  • Westminster's name comes from the fact that it was originally exactly that: a minster (i.e. cathedral, abbey, or other big church) built to the west of the City^note (see further up this page) of London. Today, London has grown to encompass Westminster and beyond, and it is usually thought of as being in the centre of the city. And while it does have a famous abbey (though the original Anglo-Saxon one that it was named after no longer exists), it is not the borough's current defining feature since the term 'Westminster' is widely used as a metonym for the central UK government, many of whose key institutions are based here including the Houses of Parliament.
• New York City:
  • One can argue that Gay Street in lower Manhattan has had its name become more appropriate as changing times led to a vibrant gay culture in the surrounding neighborhood, though the name actually originated, apparently, from the name of an 18th or 19th century property owner.
  • Madison Square Garden in New York City was originally located around Madison Square, but has had two locations away from it since 1925 (the current dating to 1968).
  • New Lots in Brooklyn, New York, has a lot of buildings now.
  • The New York Times built itself a new headquarters at the junction of Broadway, 43rd Street and Seventh Avenue in 1904. The intersection quickly became known as Times Square, a name that has persisted long after the Times itself moved to another headquarters in 1960. The New York Times current offices are now on Eighth Avenue, just a block off of Times Square.
  • Wall Street originally went along the outer defensive wall of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. The wall is long since gone, but the name stuck. Likewise, Canal Street was laid out along the route of an actual canal that drained a now-obliterated pond into the Hudson River.
    • Not only is the wall long gone, as a term for the U.S. financial-services industry it's somewhat artifactual since, while the New York Stock Exchange itself is still on Wall Street, the investment banks and brokerage firms that do the actual trading have in recent decades moved their offices to other parts of Manhattan, mainly Midtown.^note And beyond; a substantial portion of Goldman Sachs's operations are actually based across the Hudson in Jersey City (at 30 Hudson Street, Jersey City's second-tallest and probably most-iconic skyscraper).
• Philadelphia:
  • The street called "Sassafras Street" in William Penn's original plan is today called "Race Street" because of all the horseback street races that took place there in the late 18th century. Nobody is racing horses on Race Street today, and you'd have a hard time racing cars along most of its length (particularly the portion in Center City, since that's usually rather congested, and most particularly in the part that runs through Chinatown).
  • "South Street" was so named because it once formed the southern border of the City of Philadelphia, separating it from the townships of Passyunk, Moyamensing, and Southwark (the street had originally been called "Cedar Street" under the original tree-based naming scheme laid out by William Penn, but "South Street" became standard by the end of the 18th century). In 1858, these municipalities were merged, along with the rest of Philadelphia County, into the City, and now South Street is basically in the heart of Philly. In a subversion, it's still the southern border between Center City ("Downtown") and South Philly.
• Redding, California:
  • Redding has North, South, East, and West streets, which were named as such because those were the geographic borders of the town. Now they are in the middle of the western half of the city.
  • Redding also has the Lorenz Hotel, which is actually a business center with some apartments, as well.
  • Also, Redding is the county seat of Shasta County. The Shasta Native American tribe has been officially considered completely wiped out by the federal government.
  • Redding's Shasta High School yearbook is named the Daisy, even though that has not been their mascot for about a century (it's the Wolves).
• Rochester, New York:
  • The Inner Loop in Rochester, NY hasn't actually been a loop since December 2014, at which time the eastern half was removed, with the remainder now forming a "C" shape.
  • The Quarter Mile Walkway, the main thoroughfare connecting the Rochester Institute of Technology's academic buildings to its residence halls, isn't actually a quarter mile in length — it's actually closer to 0.4 miles from end to end. A popular folk etymology holds that the Quarter Mile actually took its name from a fundraising event in which American quarters were lined up along the full length of the walkway; in truth, while such an event did take place, the name predates (and presumably inspired) it. In fact, the walkway was originally one quarter mile long when first constructed, but it was later extended as the campus grew.
• Shanghai:
  • The Bund is either an inversion of this trope or plays it straight—depending on which meaning of the Hindi word "Bund" you prefer. If it means "quay", in the sense of an area where boats dock to be loaded and unloaded, well—it may have been once been a working waterfront but, except for one ferry terminal, it isn't anymore. If it's "embankment", meaning an area at the edge of the water built higher as flood protection, it wasn't an embankment until the current elevated walkway was built in the late 1980s.
  • The Chinese name for the Bund, Waitan, means "the outer bank" which it was in relation to what was then Shanghai when the ports and concessions were established in the 1840s—the Old City to the south, whose riverfront area is more in what is now the French Concession (see above), as opposed to the British and American International Settlement where the Bund is. It was peripheral then; within 20 years it was quickly becoming the center of the city.
  • The French Concession hasn't been under any kind of French authority since World War II.
  • The Waibaidu Bridge at the north end of the Bund is still sometimes called the Garden Bridge by foreign visitors. The Public Garden, from which that name came, is now called Huangpu Park and is a good deal less of a garden than it was, with the addition of a museum and the Monument to the People's Heroes.
• Tokyo:
  • The city's pleasure district, Kabukicho, was named after a kabuki theatre that was supposed to be the center of the district and its amusements. The theater was never actually built, but the name stuck.
  • The affluent Roppongi district was named after six Zelkova serrata trees (known in Japanese as keyaki) that used to mark the area. Three of them have been cut down since, while the other three were destroyed during World War II.
  • Akihabara, the legendary otaku capital, was named after a Shinto shrine that was relocated to Taito ward in the 1880s. Before then, however, it already lent its name to a railway station, so the name stuck.

Individual examples

• Through downtown Detroit, I-75 has an exit 51B and 51C, but no 51A. This is because the exit 51A, which connected to Woodward Avenue and John R. and Brush Streets, was removed in 1999, and the exit numbers were never changed.
• The AA Highway in Kentucky, officially signed both under that name and as Kentucky Routes 9 and 10, was named for its originally planned route from Ashland (in the state's northeast) to Alexandria (suburban Cincinnati). However, due to changes in plans at the eastern end and geographic convenience on the western end, the road ends in neither of its intended reference points. The western end was always planned to end at Interstate 275, which passes near but not through Alexandria; that terminus is in the small city of Wilder. Going toward the east, the road splits into two spurs near Vanceburg. One spur (KY 10) runs to the small town of Lloyd, intersecting with the four-lane US 23 before crossing the Ohio River. The other (KY 9) runs to another small town, Grayson, ending a little to the north of Interstate 64. Both US 23 and I-64 do run toward Ashland, with the former going directly into the city and the latter bypassing it to the south.
• Before the cession of the New Territories of Hong Kong, the dividing line between British and Chinese sovereignty was marked in part by boundary stones. Later Boundary Street was built along the former line (seeing how difficult it would be to defend apparently persuaded Margaret Thatcher to offer Deng Xiaoping not only the New Territories back but the entire colony — in any case, China claimed the whole of Hong Kong for itself since both Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories were ceded under coerced "unequal treaties"). Not only is it now an artifact because of the handover, it was an artifact title when it was first built (although it did have some effect on land taxes, as well as the fact that, technically, Hong Kong Island and the portion of Kowloon that was not New Kowloon were British sovereign territory, but the New Territories — including New Kowloon — were under British administration, but Chinese sovereignty).
• Brighton, on the Sussex coast, used to be bounded by North Street, South Street, East Street and West Street. Although South Street has long since disappeared into the sea, the others are still in place; but the town has grown far beyond its former boundaries, and North Street is now in the south of the town, within walking distance of the shore.
• The Hundred Steps in Hunstanton, Norfolk (leading from the Esplanade Gardens down to the beach at the bottom of the cliffs) hasn't had a hundred steps since the main promenade was extended to meet the steps about two-thirds of the way down. It was also called "New Hunstanton" when Henry Styleman Le Strange founded the town in 1846, and technically still is (Old Hunstanton neighbours it to the north) although virtually nobody calls it that.
• The United States Interstate Highway System. The term "Interstate" is applied to all federal highways, even those in Alaska and Hawaii which aren't geographically connected to other states.
• Washington DC's K Street, often used metonymically for the political lobbying industry in the US, is getting artifactual in the same way as Wall Street—many of the larger firms have moved out to other locations, sometimes in the DC suburbs.
• The Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge across the Hudson River in upstate New York was named for the ferry it replaced, connecting those two communities, which are pretty much directly across the river from each other. The bridge, however, is a couple of miles upriver from both of them, and as such the approach roads don't go through either Kingston or Rhinecliff.^note You can pass very close to Kingston if you're getting to the bridge from the New York State Thruway on that side, but on the other side you'd have to specifically be going to Rhinecliff to get there from the bridge.
• The central business and shopping district of New Zealand's capital Wellington is focused around the street named Lambton Quay. This and adjoining Customhouse Quay were, as their names suggest, originally on the foreshore in the city's earliest years after European settlement. However the powerful 8.2-magnitude Wairarapa earthquake of 1855 caused the uplift of a huge area of formerly submerged land, which, along with further reclamation, means the Quays today have ended up some 250 metres from the waterfront.
• The Long Path hiking trail, from New York City to (currently) the Albany area, was originally meant as simply a list of points of interest gradually going further north from the city that hikers could find their own routes between, rather than an actual built and maintained trail—hence it was called "path" to make the distinction. When the idea was revived in the early 1960s, 15 years after originally being proposed, it was as a conventional trail, but the name was not changed (not least because there's already a Long Trail in Vermont).
• Speaking of the Long Trail, it may have been that way a century ago when it was first proposed. But while it takes a month, usually, to hike the full length of the trail, it's not long at all in comparison to the Appalachian, North Country, Continental Divide or Pacific Coast Trails, among others that have since been built.
• The Love Canal toxic waste site in Niagara Falls, NY, was never actually used as a canal when it was built in the 1890s. It retained the name even after it was bought by a chemical company and filled in to hold its waste products.
• Prague's New Town (Nové Město) was founded in 1348.
• Yellowknife's downtown business district, New Town, probably is the newest of all these entries, dating only to the 1950s.^note Old Town is the original 1930s settlement on the peninsula projecting into the lake. But there's been a lot more development in the city since then.
• In Baltimore, Maryland, "North Avenue" was so named as it was once the northern border of the city. It is currently nowhere near the city limits, being actually rather close to downtown (less than half a mile north of the "official" northern limit of the downtown area). (Incidentally, as any Baltimorean or fan of The Wire can tell you, "North Avenue" is often used metonymically for the administration of the Baltimore City Public Schools, which have their headquarters at North Avenue and Calvert Street.)
• Chicago's North Avenue and Western Avenue once defined the city's northern and western limits. Western Avenue is now the city's western boundary for one and a half miles, but this is almost entirely a coincidence since that part of the South Side was annexed much later. Also, Michigan Avenue gets its name from once having been on the Lake Michigan lakefront, from which it was cut off first by the Illinois Central Railroad and later by Grant Park.
• Orchard Road, Singapore's main shopping district, was so-named because it contained plantation fields in the 19th century.
• The Pastures neighborhood of Albany, New York, was once the communal pasture for the city when it was within a stockade that surrounded the present downtown. It still has a surprising amount of open space, but you probably wouldn't want to annoy the many residents by grazing animals there.
• The Pont Neuf ("New Bridge"), the oldest still existing bridge in Paris.
• There are a couple of squares in the Sainte Catherine district of Brussels that were created by filling in what were originally docks. The sides of the squares still have street names beginning "Quai-", or "quay".
• In Reston, Virginia, the massive Reston Town Center project required considerable construction resources, and a temporary road was built to facilitate access for construction vehicles. Over two decades later, a number of businesses and residences have Temporary Road as their (permanent) address.
• Vermont's Route 22A is a continuation of New York's Route 22A, which splits off from that state's long Route 22 near the Vermont state line. Vermont itself has no Route 22.
• Scenic 17 Mile Drive in Monterey, California is no longer 17 miles long. It's just under 10, while the other portions of the road have been absorbed by the surrounding town and are not considered part of the scenic highway anymore.
• Stockholm has several places ending in -tull (meaning "-toll") signifying that this is a place where tolls were paid on goods entering the city. While city tolls stopped being a thing in the early 19th century, "the Tolls" are still considered the outer limits of the city proper, and there are still old-school Stockholmites who take pride in never having been "outside the Tolls".
• There isn't a university on University Street in downtown Seattle. The University of Washington was originally located there, but it was moved to its current location in the northern part of the city in 1895. This can cause some small amount of confusion to newcomers to the city, as the light rail's 1 Line has stops both on University Street and at the university.
• The US-23 Drive-In in Flint, Michigan had an accurate name for only six years: the road in front of it was US-23, until the highway was re-routed to a freeway in 1958. It was also right next to a grocery store called 23 Market, which once had several other locations throughout Flint — none of which were located on US-23 or a past alignment thereof.
• A neighborhood in the Japanese town of Chatan in the Okinawa prefecture has a neighborhood the locals call "Hamby." It's named after a former Marine Corps helicoptor depot of Camp Hamby. The land was since reclaimed in 1981, but numerous establishments kept the "Hamby" name (such as the main department store "Hamby Town" and the former flea market area "Hamby Free Zone"). And while there's no ward officially called "Hamby", the popularity of the name stuck around such that the local post office got named after it when it opened up in the early 2000s.

Places of worship

• The Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch has not been based in Antioch (or as it's known today, Antakya) since the 14th century, when it fled to Damascus to escape the Ottomans. The name is retained for historical reasons, as the church is considered one of the four ancient patriarchates of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
  • This is true with multiple religious institutions in the Middle East. The Patriarchate(s) of Alexandria (there are actually two—one of the Oriental Orthodox Copts and the other of the Catholic Cop ts) has(ve) been located in Cairo for a long time. The Patriarchates of Antioch (there are 3 of them among Catholics alone—the leaders of the Maronites, Melkites, and Syriac Catholics, plus Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches have their own) are based in Damascus or Beirut. The Catholic Patriarch of Cilicia (the leader of the Armenian Catholic Church) is also based in Beirut, not Southern Turkey which corresponds to the ancient region of Cilicia.
• The Mezquita de la Luz ('Mosque of Light') in Toledo, Spain became a Christian shrine called Christ of Light in 1187; it was called Bab al-Mardum's mosque when it was actually a mosque. It is not used for worship of any kind nowadays.
• The Mosque (or 'Mosque-Cathedral') of Cordoba, Spain has been nothing but a cathedral since 1236, and its official name is Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. The name "mosque" is just a tourism ploy, since it's the mosque-like architectural features that are the famous part, not the cathedral nave.
• The Old-New Synagogue is the oldest in Prague (it dates to the 13th century). Formerly known as New Synagogue, to distinguish it from the Old Synagogue (11/12th century). In the 16th century, the New Synagogue was built, and the other came to be called Old-New. (Neither the New Synagogue nor the Old one exists anymore.) A Jewish legend gives a different origin of the name — as the story goes, an angel brought stones from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem to serve as a foundation of the building, under a condition (Hebrew: al tenai, subsequently corrupted to alt-neu, German for "old-new") that they must be returned when the temple is rebuilt.
• Prince Avenue Baptist Church in Athens, Georgia, is located on Ruth Jackson Road, which is across town from Prince Avenue.
• The Synagogue of El Tránsito ('The Transit') in Toledo, Spain became a church in 1492 and takes its name from a painting depicting the death (or 'transit') of Mary that was housed there in the 17th century. It was turned into a Jewish museum in 1910, but not a synagogue.
• Southeast Christian Church, a well-known megachurch in Louisville, Kentucky started out as a small congregation in the southeast part of the city of Louisville (which has since merged with surrounding Jefferson County). While the church now has well over a dozen locations in and around Louisville, none are in the southeast of the "old" city, and the main campus is in Middletown, a quasi-independent city in far eastern Jefferson County. In fact, if you hear the word "southeast" in regular conversation in Louisville, there's a good chance the speaker is talking about the church and not the compass direction (especially since the word is not applied to any city neighborhood).

Rail stations

General examples

• In the United States, many railroad stations are called Union Station. These originally were used by trains from multiple railroads and joint owned by the railroads served. Today, most of these stations are owned by the city in which they reside, and are mainly served by Amtrak. Still the name has stuck.
  • This goes double for "Pennsylvania Station": most of these aren't even in Pennsylvania (e.g. the busiest and most famous, New York Penn), and the Pennsylvania Railroad doesn't even exist anymore.^note (Also, confusingly, the biggest railroad station in Pennsylvania isn't called "Pennsylvania Station" — 30th Street Station in Philadelphia was built in part to replace the previous station on Broad Street so intercity trains didn't have to pull into then out of a stub-end station. But the stub end Broad Street station was nearer to jobs for commuters, so a new, underground version was built for local trains. That station is called Suburban Station, even though it's right in the middle of Center City Philadelphia. The name refers to it serving trains to the suburbs. Meanwhile 30th Street Station just uses its location as a name.)
  • Some cities provide an aversion if their Union Station is served by not only Amtrak but also local light rails and commuter rails. Even though the organizations involved are all government-owned^note (Amtrak is federal, light rails are usually county or local, and commuter rails are usually either jointly owned by the counties they serve or owned by the state) rather than private railroads, it's still a union of different entities. Some examples include Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and New Haven, Connecticut.
• It is not uncommon for a town to only have one railway station, but for that station to have a name that indicates there were others in the past that it needed to differentiate itself from. "[Town Name] Central" is a common name for one example, even when there is no longer any other stations for it to be "central" relative to.
• It's somewhat common for US subway or light rail stops to have names that no longer make any sense, but were carried over from an existing neighborhood or building name.
  • Broadway is the name of a Long Island Rail Road station in eastern Queens, NY. It was named in 1866 for a street that ran through there before the borough of Queens was unified. By the 1930s, the street name was finally changed to avoid confusion with a street called Broadway in western Queens. But the station name has remained the same to this day.
  • Boston's MBTA's Blue Line has a terminal called Wonderland, named after a now-closed greyhound racing track, which in turn was named after an amusement park there that closed in 1911. Still, the name remains.

Individual examples

• Montreal's Berri-UQAM metro station was originally named Berri-De Montigny, since it was planned at the corner of Rue Berri and Rue De Montigny. But the construction of the metro's green line led to the consolidation of several smaller streets, including Rue De Montigny, into Boulevard De Maisonneuve. As a result, before Berri-De Montigny station opened in 1966, the street it was named for had ceased to exist anywhere nearby. (There's a small stub several blocks away.) It kept the name for more than two decades before it was mercifully changed at the request of an adjoining university.
• A railway station near Greenock in Scotland is called IBM, after the computer company who had a thriving factory there. Although part of the site was sold off to rival companies, half the site demolished and the area's name itself being changed, it retained the name by the time ScotRail suspended services to the station in 2018.
• One of the stations in Clydebank, Scotland, is called Singer. The station was opened to serve a huge factory that made Singer sewing machines. The sewing machine factory has long gone but the station retains the name.
• Melbourne, Australia's major railway terminus is named Southern Cross, renamed in 2005 from the previous Spencer Street Station. The timetable codes for the station still refer to it as "SPE" or "SSS" however.

Schools, colleges and universities

USA

• The "A&M" in Texas A&M used to be short for "Agricultural and Mechanical" when it was primarily an Ag school. Now that the school's subjects have expanded to include all manner of subjects, the "A&M" isn't short for anything in particular, and is kept out of tradition (which is very serious business here).
  • This trope also applies to most other universities with A&M in the title, such as Florida A&M, Alabama A&M, Prairie View A&M, Southern University and A&M College, as well as North Carolina A&T State University (the T is for Technical) and formerly Arkansas AM&N (the N is for Normal, as in teacher training; this school is now Arkansas–Pine Bluff). These schools have a different history, as all of them are historically black colleges founded when black Americans were not allowed to attend universities, and as such many of them were only supposed to provide agricultural and vocational training. Obviously, things have since changed and all of these are now bachelor's degree-granting institutions teaching all subjects.
• Amherst College, Massachusetts
  • The administration building still bears the inscription "CONVERSE MEMORIAL LIBRARY".
  • Two freshman dorms on the main quad are named North Hall and South College, despite not being on the north or south side of campus. The names hearken back to when South, North, and Johnson Chapel (which is between North and South) comprised the entire campus.
• Bank Street College of Education, in New York, hasn't been on Bank Street since the 1970s.
• Biola University was founded as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1908 and created an iconic downtown building within the decade. It tacked 'College' to the backronym in 1949, but stuck with the name otherwise despite moving to a suburban campus near the Orange County line a decade later (presumably because Bible Institute of La Mirada and the derivatives of such did not have the same ring to it).
• Case Western Reserve University is so named because it was created through a merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University. "Western Reserve" sounds really odd for a college in Ohio, unless you know that Connecticut's territory included a strip of land between Lake Erie and the 41st parallel that now lies in northeastern Ohio. Connecticut ceded sovereignty of this territory to to the national government in 1786, but retained the title of part of it until the mid 1790s, though it remained popularly known as the "Western Reserve" long after Connecticut sold out (Western Reserve College/University was founded in 1826). The name is still seen from time to time in the Cleveland area.
• The Complutense University of Madrid is named after its previous seat, Alcalá de Henares (called Complutum in Roman times; Complutense means "of Complutum"). The move to Madrid happened in 1836. Another, independent University of Alcalá de Henares was created in 1977.
• In 1929, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Protestant Christian denomination, founded Dalat International School, a day and boarding school in Da Lat (alternately Dalat), Vietnam to provide a North American education to children of missionaries to Southeast Asia. The school is still known by that name, but it became an artifact title in early 1965; with the escalation of the Vietnam War, the school was evacuated to Thailand's capital of Bangkok. Later that year, the school relocated to the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, and relocated again within that country in 1971 to its current location of Penang.
• Since the 1991 disestablishment of the "Normal Schools"^note Écoles Normales, where the primary school teachers were trained in France, the name of the "Higher Normal Schools"^note Écoles normales supérieures, "superior" coming from the fact they were conceived, during the Revolution, as the place of formation of the teachers of the 'Normal Schools', where some of the secondary schools teachers were trained, became essentially this trope.
• Louisville Male High School was originally an all-boys high school, with Louisville Girls High School its Distaff Counterpart. After the girls school merged with nearby duPont Manual High School to become co-ed, Male followed its lead (i.e., went coed).
• Columbia University's Low Memorial Library (the big domed building in the middle of campus that is a National Historic Landmark) is currently the administration offices. It hasn't been the campus's main library building since Butler Library across the quad was built in the 1930s. Yet Low still has "The Library of Columbia University" engraved across its frieze.
• Manhattan College moved its campus from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Riverdale section of The Bronx in 1922.
• New College, Oxford, is one of the oldest members of the university.
• Newark Academy was founded in 1774 in that New Jersey city. 190 years later, it moved west to Livingston, but has kept the name.
• The community surrounding North Hollywood High School was a part of North Hollywood, California when it was founded in 1927. The community broke off from North Hollywood and renamed itself Valley Village over a years-long process between 1985 to 1991, but the school's name never changed.^note Do not confuse with Hollywood High School, without the "North", which is still located within Hollywood's boundaries.
• Northwestern University in Chicago is an artifact from the time when the Upper Midwest was known as the Northwest Territory.
• Sir Howard Douglas Hall at the University of New Brunswick^note the first building erected on campus, and the oldest active university building in English Canada is still commonly called the "Old Arts Building," despite not having not hosted the Faculty of Arts in decades. It, too, is now purely an administrative building.
• The Old Horticulture Building at Michigan State University (affectionately termed "Old Whore" by students) houses... the Department of Romance and Classical Studies (that's "Romance" as in "Romance languages" — if you take Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, etc., your class will be there^note [in contradistinction to the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, which is centered at Wells Hall, a good 3/4 mile to the southwest]). It used to house the Horticulture department; today it is in the Plant and Soil Science Building, which actually is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Wake Forest University was established in 1834 on a plantation a bit to the north of Raleigh, North Carolina in an area known as the "Forest of Wake" or "Wake Forest", with "Wake" referring to Wake County. A town grew up around the college and was originally incorporated in 1880 as the "Town of Wake Forest College", with the "College" part dropped in 1909. In 1946, the university agreed to move to the much larger city of Winston-Salem, completing the move in 1956. Since then, the university has borne the name of a town where it's no longer located, and in turn the town's original namesake is no longer present.

China

• Two academic institutions in Beijing retain "Peking" in their English names despite spelling reforms requiring otherwise: Peking University, one of the leading universities in China, as well as Peking Union Medical College, the unchallenged top medical school in China.
  • Peking Union Medical College is a double example with the word "Union," referring to the fact it was founded by a consortium of protestant missionaries in 1906. In 1915, the Rockefeller Foundation assumed full control of PUMC, so the word "Union" became an artifact long before it was nationalized in 1951.

France

• The private school École alsacienne (Alsatian School) was founded in Paris in 1874 by teachers from Alsace (hence the name) who opted to remain French and thus moved to France while Alsace was annexed by the nascent Imperial Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. Nowadays, it's known as one of the best schools for the Parisian bourgeoisie's children (a high concentration of former pupils of the school was found in the successive Macron governments since 2017). The thing is, nothing about Alsace's regional history, culture or Germanic language is taught there, the school simply follows national French programs, and the founders are long gone.

Towns and cities

General examples

• In German, the common place name suffix -dorf translates to 'village'. There are plenty of towns and cities today, perhaps most notably Düsseldorf, that have far outgrown being a Dorf.
• Beijing and Nanjing: The -jing part means 'capital' from their days as the north (bei) and south (nan) seats of imperial power. Since the establishment of the PRC, only Beijing has been the capital, making Nanjing completely an artifact name, and Beijing half one since it's no longer necessary to draw the distinction. That said, there were several points at which only Beijing or Nanjing was capital; the sense is closer to "the city in the north/south that is often capital".
  • This is especially notable considering that both cities were frequently (Beijing has gone through at least 19 names over its recorded history) renamed to avoid this when they were not the capital; it is the reason why Beijing was renamed to Beiping during that Nationalist period when Nanjing was the capital, while Nanjing was renamed to Jiangning during the Qing dynasty when Beijing was capital. However, the Communists decided explicitly not to do this when they recaptured Nanjing.
  • Adding to the confusion (especially if you are reading classic Chinese literature, like Water Margin and the translator was careless or ignorant of Chinese history) since modern Beijing and Nanjing are not the only cities to have borne those names. For example, the "Beijing" (or Northern Capital, if properly translated) of the Northern Song Dynasty, the setting for the novel Water Margin, was Daming, a city some distance away from Beijing to the southwest.

• Some US cities remain famous for an industry that has since disappeared, especially after many Western countries saw industrial decline in The '70s and The '80s.
  • Milwaukee is often referred to by the nicknames "Brew City" or "The Brew", and its Major League Baseball team is called the Brewers, as it gained notoriety in the early 20th century as the headquarters of four of the country's largest breweries. Nowadays, its economy is centered around health care and only one large brewery (Miller) still operates in the city, but is headquartered in Chicago.
  • Troy, New York still proudly calls itself the "Collar City", from the long-gone era when men's shirts came without a collar and many manufacturers of the button-on collars were located in the city.
  • Rochester was the largest producer of flour in the world during the early 19th century thanks to its many grist mills along the Genesee River and Erie Canal, earning it the nickname of "Flour City". As the flour boom waned during the latter half of the century, however, this title morphed into the homophonous "Flower City", after both the city's major seed nurseries and the world-renowned Rochester Lilac Festival, which is still held annually to this day. Today, both of these titles are inscribed upon Rochester's de facto city flag◊.
  • Detroit's nickname of "Motor City" (which, in turn, inspired the name of Motown music) is becoming outdated as automobile manufacturing is outsourced to Asia. That said, all of the Big Three have their headquarters in or near Detroit^note General Motors in Downtown Detroit, in the iconic Renaissance Center, no less; Ford in neighboring Dearborn, where Ford has always been headquartered (being Henry Ford's hometown); and Chrysler (which is these days the American subsidiary of the Italian-dominated multinational automaker Stellantis) keeps its rather imposing HQ in Auburn Hills about half an hour's drive north of the city. and maintain multiple active assembly plants in Metro Detroit with no plans to close them for the foreseeable future, so it's ultimately an aversion.
  • Pittsburgh is widely known as "Steel City" and has a football team called the Steelers. However, large-scale manufacturing left the city decades ago, and like most former industrial cities in the Great Lakes "Rust Belt," Pittsburgh has since moved into healthcare, technology, and finance.
• Across central and western New York state are several communities with "port" in their name: Port Byron, Spencerport, Brockport, Gasport, and Lockport. All are inland, about 20 miles or so south of the Lake Ontario shoreline. All get their names from the days when they were, indeed, ports on the Erie Canal.
  • Another western New York community, Arkport, is an even older example of this trope. It got its name from the days when it was a port on the Canisteo River, using temporary riverboats known as "arks". That community's name became an artifact once the Erie Canal opened.
• Many former salt production sites retain salt-related names to this day. See: Halle^note Also known as Saale, from Proto-Indo-European "*séh₂ls" ("salt"), Germany; Mellieħa^note from Semitic root "m-l-ħ" ("salt"), Malta; Salina^note "Salt mill" in Italian, Italy; Salzburg^note "Salt fort" in German, Austria; Solikamsk^note "Kama salt" in Russian, Russia; Tuzla^note "Salt mine" in Ottoman Turkish, Bosnia and Herzegovina; Yancheng^note "Salt city" in Chinese, China and any town in the UK with a name ending in -wich^note Brine spring.
• Several towns and villages along the middle part of Andalusia still carry names ending in "of the frontier" (Jerez de la Frontera, Chiclana de la Frontera, Morón de la Frontera...), even though the frontier between the kingdoms of Castile and Granada disappeared in the 15th century.
• A surprising number of places◊ in Portugal and Spain are named after zebras, including O Cebreiro ("The Zebra Place"), Valdencebro ("Zebra Valley"), and Las Encebras ("The Zebras"). This is because the original zebra was a wild horse of the Iberian Peninsula — the African zebras were named after them by the Portuguese in the 15th century, and the word for that animal passed to English after the Iberian zebra was hunted to extinction in the 17th century.^note Wonderfully, the ancient Greek and Roman name for the African zebra was hippotigris — the Exactly What It Says on the Tin "horse tiger".
• In Russian, the word volok or volochyok means "dragging place", to signify a location where ships and cargo were once dragged from one river or lake to a nearby one. Now, it's not a common practice to do so, but a number of towns still have the word as part of their names. Vyshny Volochyok, notably, had a channel dug out to replace the ground route three centuries ago.
• Many common English place names stem from Old Norse, which would often affix a descriptor of the settlement at the end of its name. England today is scattered with towns that have names that no longer really reflect what they are, and these names often become even more inaccurate when they are exported to new settlements around the world. Common prefixes and suffixes to look out for include -by ('town/village'), stan- or stam- ('stone'), -ham ('farm'), -ay or -ey ('island'), -bury,-borough or -burgh ('fortified enclosure'), -ness ('headland'), -thorpe ('secondary settlement', or what we'd today call a suburb), -ton ('homestead'), or -wick ('bay').
• Several cities in the United States are named "Fort [Something]": Fort Worth, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Fort Wayne, Indiana; etc. It's been at least 200 years since these places have evolved from military encampments to major cities.
• On the district level in Russia, Tolyatti in Samara Oblast was formerly called Stavropol (informally known as Stavropol-on-Volga to distinguish it from a different — and larger — Stavropol) until 1964, but is still the center of Stavropol District today. Melekess District in Ulyanovsk Oblast is in the same situation, as its center was renamed from Melekess to Dimitrovgrad in 1972 and has remained such ever since.

Individual examples

• The city of Carnation, Washington was originally founded as Tolt (after the nearby Tolt River) in 1912, but was renamed to Carnation when the Carnation Milk Company opened a research farm there. It was renamed back to Tolt after the farm closed, but the post office and outsiders kept using the Carnation name until eventually in 1951 it was changed back to reflect that name's wider usage, and has kept the name ever since.
• Ciudad Real ("Royal City"), Spain, founded by a royal charter in 1255, right in the middle of the Campo de Calatrava, the lands then controlled by the Order of the Knights of Calatrava. The city took direct orders from, and paid taxes to the Crown, and was meant to disuade the Knights from breaking apart and forming their own state (or acting as one in practice). The distinction became moot when the King of Castile and his descendants became hereditary Grand Masters of the Order after 1487, and the Order's properties were completely secularized in 1855.
  • The city name became a further artifact when Spain was proclaimed a republic in 1931. During the Spanish Civil War, the city ended deep in Republican territory and was informally called "Ciudad Leal" (Loyal City) or "Ciudad Libre" (Free City), but it was never officially renamed.
• The city of College Station, Texas, was named for the railroad station, College Station, which was named because it served Texas A&M College. Texas A&M College long ago became Texas A&M University, and the railroad station named for it long ago was bulldozed to make way for a multi-lane road.
• The etymology of the word "ghetto" likely comes from an Italian pun, combining "borghetto" ("borough") with "getto" ("foundry"), a reference to the first Jewish ghetto in Europe being within the foundry district of Venice. The name stuck, even as many future examples of ghettos, both in its Jewish context and elsewhere, have nothing to do with steelmaking.
• Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, used to have an Artifact Title as well. Two of its many historical names were Đông Đô and Đông Kinh/Tonkin, both of which follow the same convention as Tokyo and translate as "Eastern Capital" in Vietnamese, because it was located to the east of its successor as Vietnam's capital, Thanh Hóa. It wasn't until 1831 that Tonkin was renamed Hanoi ('inside the rivers').
• The name "Hong Kong" means 'fragrant harbor' in Chinese, and it came from the many sandalwood trees in the area of what is now the village of Stanley... on the south side of Hong Kong Island, whereas the city itself is on the north side. And while the city has a harbor all right, it sure doesn't have many sandalwood trees.
  • Of course, when the harbor was more polluted than it is now back in the late 1970s or so, it was indeed 'fragrant', although not in a good way...
• When Edo replaced Kyoto as (official) capital of Japan in 1869^note When the Emperor moved there; the actual government had been based at Edo since Tokugawa Ieyasu decided to put the headquarters of his new shogunate there in 1603, it was renamed Tokyo, which means 'Eastern Capital', in order to follow in the tradition of Beijing and Nanjing (see above). This confused things mightily, since "Kyoto" is archaic Japanese for simply "Capital" — it was briefly renamed Saikyo, "Western Capital", but it didn't stick.^note This reflects the historical divisions in China and Japan respectively; in China, the major cultural division is between the north, centered in the Yellow River valley, and the south, centered on the Yangtze River valley, while in Japan the main split is between Eastern and Western Japan, centered on the Kantō; ('East of the Pass') and Kansai ('West of the Pass') regions, respectively. Incidentally, this is a common place name convention in China and Korea as well: the reason that the Japanese expeditionary army in Manchuria in early 20th century was called Kanto Army (or Kwantung Army) had to do with the Chinese "Kanto/Kwantong," i.e. "East of the Shanhai Pass."
• The word "Seoul," meaning "capital" in Korean as well as the name of South Korean capital city, is believed to have been derived from "Sorabul," the archaic name of Gyeongju, a city in southeastern Korea that was the capital of the Shilla kingdom that unified Korea in 7th century. The name stuck to the present capital of (South) Korea because, regardless of its official names, it was informally called "the capital" by most Koreans for the last 6-7 centuries that it has been the Korean capital, until, after the end of Japanese rule in 1945, Korean authorities decided to make it the official name, notwithstanding the fact that it is nowhere near the original "Sorabul."
• Why is Lackawanna, a town in Western New York named for a river and valley two hundred miles to the east in Pennsylvania? In the early 1900s, Buffalo's business elite convinced the Lackawanna Steel Company to move its production west from Scranton, where workers were getting increasingly militant. They set up shop not in the city but just south of it, in the town of West Seneca, where there was less infrastructure and thus they'd pay less in property taxes. In 1923 the Lackawanna sold out to another Pennsylvania-based steel company, Bethlehem. It kept the name, and later in the decade, with its own workers frequently going on strike, it encouraged the founding of the city of Lackawanna, so that a proper police force could be raised to deal with the strikers. Eventually Bethlehem renamed the plant for itself. The city's name stayed. Then in 1982 it closed up shop. So, Lackawanna is named after a company that no longer exists and had not been making its product in the city for a while before that.
• Las Vegas translates as 'The Meadows'. Though it was partially justified — the original Native American settlers dug many artesian wells in the area, resulting in several large patches of greenery in an otherwise desert landscape.
• The Chinese city of Luoyang was so named after its original location on the north of the Luo River.^explanation"Yang" denotes a place located north of a body of water or south of a mountain. After millenia of development and expansion, the majority of the city, including its seat of government, now sits on the south of the river.
• The "new castle" that gives the northeastern English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne its name was built all the way back in 1068, following the Norman invasion. It got its name due to being built on the location of a 1st-century Roman border fort, which was the "old castle".
• Novgorod ("New Town") in Russia, now one of the oldest cities there.
• Napoli (from Greek "Neapolis", meaning 'new city'):
  • Nablus (also from "Neapolis") in the West Bank has the same derivation, but the Greek morphed through Arabic rather than Italian. In a bit of a twist, it is one of the oldest cities in the West Bank (although not the oldest; that title goes to Jericho, whose ancient walls have been dated to the ninety-seventh century BCE), but only got its name relatively late in its history, when it was refounded by the Roman Emperor Vespasian as Flavia Neapolis. Before then, it went by Shechem, the name it has in the Bible and which is attested in documents dating from the third millennium BCE. Of course, the reign of Vespasian was nearly 2,000 years ago, so even the "new" name is quite old.
  • Naples (Napoli in Italian), Italy is one of Italy's oldest cities.
  • Naples, Florida, settled on November 6 1886, incorporated as a town in 1925, and incorporated as a city in 1949, is far more recent but all those dates come before the post-World War II air-conditioning boom that led to the massive growth of Florida.
• The neighboring towns of Orange and South Orange, New Jersey, were previously incorporated as a city and village, respectively. However, in the early 1980s, they, alongside several other municipalities in Essex County, reclassified themselves as townships in order to take advantage of revenue sharing policies (as townships were given more federal funding than cities, boroughs, or villages). This lead to the awkward official names of "City of Orange Township" and "Township of South Orange Village", respectively.
• Rio de Janeiro, 'January river', is actually named after a bay, but in the 16th century the Portuguese colonizers didn't distinguish those bodies of water.
• Sevenoaks in England, just southeast of London, varies between accurate and artifact at different times. It is currently an artifact, with nine oaks on the site, and there has been as few as one in the past.
• Shenzhen, China, which wasn't more than a small fishing village until Deng Xiaoping declared it a special economic zone in 1980. Now it is one of China's ten largest cities. Its name means "the deep drains" and seems ill-chosen for a city because it makes a lot more sense for the river that divides it and Hong Kong (see above).
• The city^note Technically, suburb of Southgate, Michigan, was named that in The '50s as the area was, at the time, along the southernmost extent of the urban sprawl surrounding Detroit, and thus was termed "the south gate to the Detroit metropolitan area". Today, Southgate is nowhere near that extent — from the southern city limit, Pennsylvania Road, you'd have to drive south to the Huron River (the border between Wayne and Monroe Counties) before suburbia ends and gives way to agricultural land. Even driving west from the western limit, Allen Road, provides more than five more miles of urban sprawl into nearby Romulus before ruralness takes prominence.
• In the UK, the Stoke-on-Trent area is often nicknamed "The Potteries", while Stoke City FC are known as "The Potters". The area became a centre of ceramics production from the early 17th century, but since World War II this has steeply declined and modern output is at a fraction of its historical heights.
• Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, New York, are still sometimes collectively referred to as "the Tarrytowns", despite residents of the latter having voted in 1996 to change the name from North Tarrytown to capitalize on the tourist business (legitimately, as the existing real-life locations mentioned in Washington Irving's story really are in the village).
• Washington, D.C. became this once the city of Washington and the District of Columbia came to refer to the exact same 68 square miles of territory. Originally, when the US government decided to found a new capital not part of any state, the District of Columbia was composed of two counties: Washington, land from the state of Maryland; and Alexandria, land from Virginia. Both counties contained several towns, but then things got weird. First, Alexandria County was returned to Virginia due to various political disagreements (slavery being one of them) and was renamed Arlington County.^note Though it's still a major suburb of DC and is home to several major federal offices, like the Pentagon. Next, Washington County was consolidated as a single city. But with no other city or county to differentiate from it, the name "Washington, DC" has become quaint in its redundancy, not helped by the fact that an entire state of Washington now exists on the other end of the country, requiring careful wording and context to not confuse the two.
• The City of Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory was named for the visual effect of the Whitehorse Rapids, rapids which were in the Yukon River, that looked like a herd of white horses were charging through them. With the construction of the Whitehorse Rapids Hydroelectric power dam in 1957, the rapids are now submerged beneath what is now Schwatka Lake.
• Wichita Falls, Texas was named for a prominent waterfall on the Wichita River, but a flood destroyed the falls in 1886, just ten years after the name was adopted. After dealing with a century of countless visitors asking where the falls were, the city constructed a new artificial falls in 1987.
• There are still descendants of the Dene band that gave Yellowknife, Canada its name, but there have been too few members for them to be an organized band since the 1960s.

Other places

General examples

• The US National Bowling League was a very ill-fated attempt at a franchise-based pro bowling league that only last one season (1961-62). In particular, the owners of the Dallas Broncos and the Fort Worth Panthers invested heavily in their teams, to the point of building brand new bowling stadiums for them. After the league folded they were faced with the question of what to do with the buildings, and in both cases they converted them to concert venues. The Bronco Bowl and Panther Hall both had long runs hosting major acts until they both got closed and demolished.
• Two for reporters in New York City:
  • The reporter's room in City Hall is called "Room 9" despite several changes in how rooms were designated, even after renovations to the building in The New '10s.
  • Police reporters used to work out of a trailer outside One Police Plaza called "The Shack". They're now in a room in the building itself, but it's still called "The Shack" as tribute to the old thing.

Individual examples

• Bastille Square in Paris and a number of landmarks around it (Bastille Opera, Bastille subway station and formerly, Bastille railway station) are named after the Medieval fortress (bastille) and later prison that was destroyed in 1790 and that they were built over.
• The Colosseum, one of the great sights of Rome, was known as the "Flavian Amphitheater" in Ancient Roman times. The name Colosseum ("Of/By the Colossus") was an informal name that arose in the early Middle Ages in reference to a colossal statue of Nero that stood nearby. Such statue fell into disrepair and disappeared at some point before 1000 AD.
• The Cultular Center Caisa in Helsinki is now located in Kallio, but the name made more sense when it was in Kaisaniemi.
• Great Wolf Lodge's newer resorts are hardly lodges at all; they are more like suite hotels than lodges.
• Disney's Hollywood Studios — formerly MGM Studios — one of the four major theme parks that comprise Walt Disney World, used to be an actual production studio in addition to a theme park. For instance, most of Disney's animated films from the 90s were produced there, as were several live-action tv shows for the Disney Channel, and a few non-Disney properties like World Championship Wrestling, which taped most of their secondary syndicated shows there in the mid-90s. But over the course of the 2000s, actual film production was moved elsewhere, and Disney changed the name of the park after ending its relationship with MGM in 2008. However, it's still known as "Studios" despite no actual filming taking place there. Interestingly, the park's direct competitor, Universal Studios Theme Park, still has a working production studio.
• The California amusement park Knott's Berry Farm hasn't been a farm in decades. It started as a berry farm in the 1920s owned by the Knott family, with a roadside stand selling fresh berries, jams, and pies. In 1934 the fruit stand developed into a full-fledged restaurant. From there, the family added minor attractions to entertain customers, which became a bigger draw than the restaurant itself. In 1960 the farming operation was moved to Modesto so that the original site could be developed into a full-fledged amusement park. Today, it has over 40 attractions including 10 roller coasters. The name "Knott's Berry Farm" has become as artifactual as it gets, since the Knott family sold the farm in Modesto to ConAgra in 1995 and the amusement park to Cedar Fair in 1997, meaning neither the farm nor the park is owned by the Knott family anymore. But the park continues to wear the name as a point of pride in its humble origins.^note In fact, they specifically refused to sell to Disney to keep the House of Mouse from assimilating it and erasing its history.
• Lake Lucerne in Switzerland is also known in the local languages as "Lake of the Four Cantons", which has been used since medieval times. It was originally called the Lake of the Three Cantons, due to being the border between the 3 original founders of confederation (Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden), and renamed after Lucerne joined. Eventually Unterwalden was divided into the cantons of Nidwalden and Obwalden, so now there are 5 cantons surrounding it — but the name remains as "Four Cantons". However as Nidwalden and Obwalden are what is frequently called "Half Cantons" (for complex historic reasons the esteemed reader can research on their own time), it might make sense to count only a total of four if you squint.
• The Montmartre Funicular in Paris was converted into an inclined lift as part of a 1991 overhaul, but it is still officially called a funicular.
• One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie) in Auckland, New Zealand, the namesake for a U2 song and a teen drama series, no longer has a tree. The single radiata pine on its summit was felled in 2001 after being attacked by a Māori activist with a chainsaw, and attempts to plant a replacement tree have met legal resistance.
• The airport code isn't the only remnant of Beijing's former romanization. It still has Peking opera, Peking duck and Peking University. Also, multiple non-English languages are still using the previous romanization or a variant of it (e.g. Pékin in French and Pequim in Portuguese).
• Madrid's Retiro Park (originally the Jardines del Buen Retiro, "Gardens of the Good Retreat") was once part, and named after the Palace of the Good Retreat, which was built in 1630 for the retreat of Spanish monarchs from the administrative duties that took place in the Royal Palace. The gardens were opened to the public in the mid-18th century and the palace was turned into military barracks before being demolished for good in 1868. It still remains a good place for a personal retreat from the city due to its large size, however.
  • The even larger Casa de Campo ('Country House') remained royal property until it was nationalized in 1931. The house it's named after (Vargas Palace) has not been used as a residence since then.
• The Seven Sisters are a series of cliffs on the south coast of England — but thanks to coastal erosion since they were named, there are now eight rather than seven.
• No sheep have grazed in the area of New York's Central Park called "Sheep Meadow" since the 1930s, when they were removed out of fear that people made desperate by the Depression would eat them.
• San Francisco's legendary Winterland Ballroom (which closed in 1978 and was demolished seven years later) was called that because it was originally built as an ice skating rink.
  • And the Cow Palace, on the border of San Francisco and Daly City, was originally built to host livestock expositions and rodeos. It still does, but it's also hosted plenty of concerts, wrestling shows and some political conventions (including, most famously, the 1956 and 1964 Republican National Conventions) as well as having been the home arena for the NBA Golden State Warriors and the NHL's San Jose Sharks in the past.
• Wrigley Field, home of baseball's Chicago Cubs, retains its name despite the Wrigley family selling the team and stadium to the Tribune company in 1981. Both are now owned by the Ricketts family.
• The planet Mars is often called "The Red Planet" despite the fact that, if you actually look at a photo of Mars, it's clearly more orange than red. The reason for this nickname is because, when Mars gets close enough to Earth, it shines a reddish light. The ancient humans dubbed Mars as being red because of this, and since this was before the invention of even telescopes, they had no way of knowing Mars's true color. By the time humans invented telescopes or NASA probes that were able to prove Mars is actually orange, the title of "Red Planet" had already stuck.

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