Damn You, Hagstrom! Damn You, Ultan!

New York City is a city of neighborhoods . . . except when it comes to the Bronx:

Lloyd Ultan went looking for a Bronx neighborhood the other day called Williamsbridge.

He was overqualified for this seemingly simple task. Mr. Ultan, the borough historian, teaches a course at Lehman College on the history of the Bronx and has written or co-written eight books about the borough. He even wrote the 182-word entry on Williamsbridge in the Encyclopedia of New York City.

Williamsbridge is a section of the Bronx near Woodlawn Cemetery that has a clearly defined border separating it from Wakefield, another neighborhood to the north, according to city maps and Mr. Ultan’s entry in the encyclopedia: East 233rd Street. But as Mr. Ultan stood on White Plains Road at East 228th Street in theoretical Williamsbridge, merchants and residents, asked to identify the neighborhood, called it White Plains Road or Wakefield instead.

“I never hear it called anything but White Plains Road,” said Juliet Adler, 43, who works in a hair salon and has lived nearby on East 224th Street for six years.

In the Bronx, as Mr. Ultan has long suspected, it’s easy to find an address, but hard to find a neighborhood.

. . .

People throughout the borough’s 42 square miles, in fact, often have a simple, instinctive answer when asked to name the neighborhood where they live or work. One man sitting on a metal folding chair outside a flower shop at East 138th Street and Brook Avenue summed up the response one recent afternoon when he looked with both suspicion and pity on the person asking the question and said, in all seriousness: “The Bronx.”

Upon seeing Manny Fernandez’s knowing smirk, the man rose from his chair, folded it, and beat Manny over the head with the chair, just like Manny once saw on the WWF while he was mindlessly flipping through the channels after an exhausting day of traipsing through the Bronx searching for quotes about topics as inane as “Where’s Williamsbridge?”

I’m kidding.

But, seriously, shit just gets scary when the Times drops the Gertrude Stein bomb:

In a place where there is no there there, as Gertrude Stein once wrote of far away but equally abstract Oakland, Calif., it is perhaps no surprise that no one can say with certainty just how many Bronx neighborhoods there are there. According to a Department of City Planning map of the city’s neighborhoods, the Bronx has 49. The map publisher Hagstrom identifies 69. The borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., says 61. The Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit, in a listing of the borough’s community boards, names 68. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, lists 44.

Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the planning department, said the agency’s neighborhood map, “New York: A City of Neighborhoods,” was a guide, not gospel. Not even Dan Donovan, topographic engineer and urban planner in the borough president’s office, has definitive answers about the locations of Bronx neighborhoods.

“There’s no definition for neighborhoods,” Mr. Donovan said. “Every individual has definitions for their own neighborhoods and for the neighborhoods in the Bronx as a whole. It’s always been amorphous.”

[Lloyd Ultan is a smart guy — don’t blame us if he led you astray!]