FIVE FAKE FACTS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT NEW YORK CITY!
I recently witnessed a tour guide have an emotional outburst over incorrect information that was being spread by less informed tour guides in his city and it got me thinking about all the incorrect information that is spread all the time. Sometimes it's because of a tour guide that didn't do his/her homework, but often it's information that has been passed around so much that it has become fact just because it's so widely known.
As I'm always up for creating a bit of disorder in the universe, I thought I'd invent my own fake information to spread to unsuspecting tourists. For this I decided to create some fake facts for one of my favorite cities in the world, the city so nice, they named it twice, New York, NY! Enjoy and let me know what additional fake facts you'd add to my list.
Madison Avenue: Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch was a huge fan of the movie Splash in the 80s. One of his favorite moments in the movie involved the fake street name Madison, so he convinced City Council to rename Fourth Avenue to Madison Avenue.
Penn Station: The station name was originally supposed to be spelled with one “N”, but a mistake in the order caused all the signs to be misprinted and the mistake was only noticed when the signs were delivered. Rather than put the project months behind schedule and incur the expense of reprinting the signs, they decided to use the new spelling and to pretend like they had intended to spell Penn with two Ns all along.
The Empire State Building was never supposed to have an observation deck as they didn’t think there would be enough oxygen outside the building at that height to keep people alive for longer than 10 minutes.
Every year the Statue of Liberty drifts about six inches closer to Manhattan due to a calculation error when they were building its foundation that doesn’t anchor it properly. So every time there is a full moon, the moon exerts enough force on the waves to nudge the Statue about half an inch closer to Manhattan.
Saks Fifth Avenue was originally just called Saks. Unfortunately, at the time there was another store called Sax that sold saxophones just a few blocks away and everyone would always mix them up. Eventually, Saks added “Fifth Avenue” to their name to clear up the confusion, and Sax eventually went out of business because guys playing saxophones back then couldn't get dates and so they never had kids to pass on their love of saxophones to, poor guys.
Also, let me know about some of the fake facts that you've been told over the years about cities, landmarks, etc.