Probably the best authority on a subject like this is the etymologist Barry Popik, co-author of the book Origin of New York City's Nickname "The Big Apple". He has contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and published academic articles in etymological and historical journals.

He also maintains a dictionary of some of his research on his website. A lot of it shouldn't be taken as much more than a "first draft", though some entries are more comprehensive than others, and all reproduce the citations, so you can at least give a "no later than" date for any word/phrase found in his dictionary. And being a New Yorker, Popik has looked into the origin of the city's neighborhood names.

The first of these types of abbreviations was SoHo, for "South of Houston [street]". It is generally accepted that this caught on, and may have been coined, because it imitated the name of the London neighborhood, Soho. In the London case, it's not an abbreviation for anything. According to the OED, "So ho" is a hunting phrase dating back to the 1300s, and the neighborhood of Soho used to be the hunting grounds outside the city. In fact, even earlier, London's West End had been referred to as "Soho" for the same reason, before the city expanded. It was the second Soho that retained the name, a name that is still in use today.

But in New York, it was an abbreviation, and we even know who may have coined it. That would be Chester Rapkin, an urban planner for the city Planning Commission who was author of a report about the "South Houston Industrial Area" in January 1963. Curiously, Rankin does not use the term "SoHo" or "Soho" anywhere in the report as far as I can tell, though when he died in 2001, the New York Times credited him with coining the term. Still, I don't know if he ever personally took credit, and it is possible someone else in the Planning Commission office is the one who originated it.

Whatever the truth, it does seem to have originated within that office around that time, because, on October 19, 1969, the New York Times first used the term "SoHo" and attributed the Planning Commission as the source:

"What's so special about the South Houston Industrial Area (known in planning jargon as SOHO), a 40-block district bounded by Houston St. on the north, Canal on the south, West Broadway on the west, and Lafayette on the east? For one thing, it coincides with one of the city's finest architectural areas, the cast-iron district. And for another, the spacious loft buildings that once harbored mostly small businesses have been infiltrated by thousands of artists and their families."

Not to get too off track here, but the Times article and the original Rapkin report both hint at why the name SoHo probably took off, beyond its connection to the London neighborhood. Before the late 1960s/early 1970s, the area of SoHo was known as part of the "Cast Iron District", a term you sometimes still hear today. But another you don't hear is the one that Rapkin uses most often in his report - "the Valley".

Usually, "the Valley" specifically referred to the twelve-block industrial area on the Hudson River that Rapkin's report was focused on. As he found, the city's suspicions were correct: this district was deteriorating as a desirable manufacturing/warehouse area, with the workforce and business occupancy contracting by about 1/3rd in the years before Rapkin's study. This was not a desirable place to own a business or do work. "The Valley" suggested a rundown, even dangerous neighborhood to New York City residents in the early 1960s.

Rapkin made several recommendations for what to do with the area, but one would prove to revitalize the neighborhood: the architecture is nice, so don't tear these buildings down. They can be converted into mixed-use commercial/residential buildings, as loft spaces. Some buildings and buildings on adjacent blocks were already being used that way (mostly illegally). And so that's what the city did, re-zoning "the Valley" for residential use in 1964.

But that invited the threat that developers would demolish the buildings and put in more profitable high-rises. So, in 1965, efforts by neighborhood activists to preserve the area from destruction began. In 1973, the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission protected these buildings from destruction, designating the area the "SoHo-Cast Iron Historical District".

By then, the name "SoHo" had caught on in a big way, often used by realtors/brokers to try to attract potential renters/homebuyers to the area around the old industrial "Valley". This is a trick that still goes on in New York City today. (Suddenly, there is an "East Williamsburg", a "Prospect Park South", etc.) During the 1950s and 60s, the destination for "beatniks" and "hipsters" in New York was Greenwich Village. But by the end of the 1960s, a lot of new arrivals (as well as old timers) found themselves being priced out of that neighborhood.

Conversely, "the Valley" nearby was not a place that many young New Yorkers had any desire to live in. But "SoHo" had no previous negative connotation. Between the late 1960s and 1980, "SoHo" became the new "Village".

By the late 1970s, the re-branded SoHo (which went far beyond the twelve-block South Houston Industrial Area by then) was such a successful real estate effort that the young new arrivals couldn't afford it anymore. They were moving on to the Lower East Side -- or, the "East Village" as part of it was being re-branded. For example, in the book Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth, author David Browne recounts how the band's lead guitarist Thurston Moore moved to Alphabet City in 1977 when he first arrived in New York, because SoHo was outside his budget. None of the other band members who already lived in the city could afford to live there, either.

But back to the topic at hand - abbreviations. Naturally, NoHo was the first adaptation of this abbreviation trend after SoHo, first appearing in print in the New York Times in 1972. Before that, the area was just part of the Bowery, known at the time as a particularly rough neighborhood.

Next came TriBeCa, first appearing in print in the New York Times in 1974. Before that, the area was most often referred to as the Lower West Side or Washington Market, an area whose reputation wasn't much better than the Valley's or the Bowery's. As with SoHo and NoHo, the rebranding successfully attracted (gentrified) new tenants to the area priced out of the neighborhoods to its north.

Popik writes that "After the 1960s success of 'SoHo,' many other neighborhood nicknames were suggested". He doesn't mention if there were any others in this period that failed to catch on, but clearly the most successful were SoHo, NoHo, and TriBeCa.

One more in this general period was also coined: DUMBO, a neighborhood previously better known as Fulton Landing. It's another one we might know the exact origins of, down to the people responsible. In his entry for Brooklyn's DUMBO, Popik reproduces part of a blog post by a man named Crane Davis. The full blog post gives some more background. According to Davis's account, in the 1970s, the city of New York had financed an "Artists in Residence" program, whereby accepted artists were given free/cheap art studios in empty Brooklyn and Manhattan warehouses converted to lofts. Many of these were in the area now known as DUMBO. But by the end of the decade, some of these artists had noticed the neighborhood becoming gentrified, just as had happened in SoHo and TriBeCa before them. They figured the artistic vibe of the area would soon be gone.

At some get-together in 1978, Davis and a few friends decided the area should be commemorated by giving it a name before its artistic community was gone forever. The name they came up with was DUMBO. They actually came up with two (DANYA = District Around the Naval Yard Annex), and then threw a big loft party whereupon the guests voted on which name they liked better. DUMBO was chosen, and this group started promoting the name. It soon caught on.

(cont'd...)