Photo by M.V. Jantzen

Next time you find yourself sipping whisky at Jack Rose, pounding the treadmill at Mint, getting your hair cut at Wise Owl Club or cooling off at Pleasant Pops, you won’t just be patronizing Adams Morgan businesses, you’ll also be promoting a newly discovered neighborhood.

SoMo.

That’s the name Adams Morgan Main Street has decided to bestow upon its southern end, centering around the nexus of 18th Street, U Street, Florida Avenue and Champlain Street. Apparently, community leaders were concerned that the businesses around there are not getting the same kind of love as their counterparts up the hill at the glitzier, northern end of the Devil’s Playground.

“It’s southern Adams Morgan,” Lisa Duperier, Adams Morgan Main Street’s president, says in a phone interview. “It had been kind of a dead area for a while.”

Duperier says the 2009 re-opening of the intersection of Champlain Street and Florida Avenue as well as the recently completed reconstruction of the intersection at 18th, U and Florida brought that end of the retail and nightlife district back to life. But, according to Duperier, not everyone recognizes those blocks as Adams Morgan. Hence the rebranding.

“The theme is rediscover Adams Morgan,” she says. But why brand it “SoMo” instead of plastering the area with the same “Adams Morgan” banners as decorate the upper reaches of 18th Street?

Honestly, I have no goddamned clue. Though Duperier is correct in her assessment that the southern portion of Adams Morgan long trailed the rest, it has largely evened out thanks to the appearance of a handful of new businesses and the persistence of existing joints that stuck it out. More importantly, the entire neighborhood’s boundaries are quite well defined: Florida Avenue to the south, Harvard Street to the north, 16th Street to the east, Rock Creek Park to the west.

It’s like they’re trying to break up the Trapezoid of Iniquity!

Worse, though, this “SoMo” business is just a cheap attempt to give a sing-songy name where one is not needed. People aren’t going to start calling the part of 18th Street up by Smoke & Barrel and The Diner “NoMo.” It’s all AdMo. From the slick douchebags queuing to get into Town Tavern down to the sick douchebags booting on the curb in front of the Blagaurd, it’s all Adams Morgan. In any measure, if there’s anything we need less than a neighborhood called SoMo, it’s one called NoMo. For one thing, it sounds an awful lot like NoMa.

Actually, let’s talk about NoMa.

Neighborhood rebranding is a weak bet, anyway. While it sometimes can be pulled off with a wholesale renovation of a neighborhood—think of the gradually increasing use of made-up NoMa in place of Swampoodle—it usually doesn’t take. Developers in the south London district of Southwark this year launched a campaign to use the construction of a new skyscraper as reason to rebrand the area “London Bridge Quarter,” Rocky Casale wrote in July for The Atlantic Cities:

The Shard, London’s much-publicized newest skyline addition, lives in the south London district of Southwark. The district is familiar to London residents for its Borough neighborhood, home to a rollicking open-air farmers’ market that is a main weekend attraction in the city. Sellar Property Group, backed by a consortium of Qatari investors, is redeveloping a large swath of the surrounding area, centered around the old London Bridge Station. Convinced that neither Borough nor Southwark were strong enough brand names, Stellar invented the moniker ‘London Bridge Quarter,’ after the landmark bridge and station that feed into the construction site.

Residents felt the proposal was cool, impersonal and a tad corporate. Signs blaring “London Bridge Quarter” now line the neighborhood, but few, if any, are actually using the name in conversation.

A few repaved blocks in Adams Morgan is not on the same scale as what is now Europe’s tallest building, but the intended rebranding effect is similar. But in our case, SoMo just reeks of arbitrariness. Can we all make up our own neighborhood names now?

Case in point: I live on 11th Street NW in what most people would call Columbia Heights. Last year, The New York Times wrote about my neighborhood when it was filling up with barhoppers flowing between places like Red Rocks, Room 11, Wonderland Ballroom, Bloombars and Meridian Pint. I’m also only a few blocks away the campus of Howard University.

What I’m saying is that you could say I live in Columbia Heights, but maybe I should start telling everyone I’m in HowHip.