conuly | A few weeks ago somebody was looking for a book "set in the tri-state area".

(By which she means "set in Tribeca" and she might as well have just said that, except that would've been unhelpful in the opposite direction.)

The first big problem with the use of the phrase "tri-state area" is that the USA is a big country and google confirms that there are lots of places called the tri-state area by the people who live in or near them. Even if there was only one, I doubt people outside the area would call it that.

The second problem... well, not really a problem, more like a comment - is that I've been living in NYC nearly my entire life and I'm still not entirely clear on what the third state is. NY, NJ, and... Connecticut? Pennsylvania?

Poll #31217 NY Tri-state area

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Which is the third state?

View Answers

CT
38 (76.0%)

PA
14 (28.0%)

is potentially both of them! But usually Connecticut. Also, wow, our urban conglomerate really is... big.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

julian

I voted PA, though actually, when I think of a tri-state area involving PA, it's PA, NJ, and Delaware.

From:

austin_dern

When still a cub I happened one day to hear the Philadelphia, rather than the New York City, local news and the Philly anchor described a tri-state area of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This prompted me to ask my mother, well, why isn't ``the tri-state area'' New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania and she explained that you could call that whatever you wanted, nobody lived there (where the states come together).

From:

gwydion

I'm also from Philly. I think of it as PA, NJ, and NY because that's where most of the TV channels came from before cable, as Delaware's reception depended on sunspot activity, and I heard it referred to that way a lot, but I also had NJ relatives and I could have picked the NY formulation up from them, but I absolute heard PA, NJ, and Delaware all the time also growing up. Like, it was both, I think.

From:

frandroid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

Not to mention the northeast corridor, 50M peeps from Boston to DC!

From:

conuly

Man, climate change is gonna fuck us all up.

From:

frandroid

I'm looking forward to the various megawalls the US will try to erect, I say smugly from Upper Canada. :P

From:

jhetley

Given that upstate NY doesn't exist to NYC, I'd have to go with NY, NJ, and CT.

From:

conuly

Sure it does. That’s where the tap water comes from.

From:

jhetley

My sister lived on Manhattan for 50 years. I'm just repeating her statements. From her observations, NYC people believed that tap water came from taps . . .

From:

melannen

It's Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. (It would be Delaware-Maryland-Virginia except you just say delmarva then.)

(meanwhile, "the DMV" - which is not Delmarva - is a bad neoacronym and should be stopped.)

From:

conuly

I anticipated this answer and cleverly titled my poll “NY tristate area”.

From:

melannen

Then I will blame Dreamwidth for continuing to make their poll titles very hard to see. :P

I actually voted for Connecticut, but honestly, I don't think I've ever heard "Tri-State area" used for a grouping that had New York in it, except possibly for the Cleveland/Erie/Buffalo metropolitan area. (Or if I did, I must have assumed they meant somewhere else.) And Connecticut is part of the CT/MA/RI tri-state to me.

From:

redbird

I would say Connecticut, but there are so many books set just in New York City, never mind "the New York metropolitan area," that saying a book is set there probably doesn't narrow things down usefully.

From:

conuly

About 2 out of every 35 Americans live in the NYC metropolitan area, or slightly more than 1 out of every 1000 humans worldwide.

From:

adrian_turtle

This is one reason the joke in Phineas and Ferb works so well. The villain of the show says with an evil laugh that he will finish building his machine and then "take over the tri-state area!" It is occasionally mentioned that the place was founded by John Trystate.

From:

conuly

No joke: We actually have a bridge on the Island called The Outerbridge Crossing. It's named after somebody named Outerbridge, and clearly at some point during the development they all decided "Outerbridge Bridge" sounds stupid.

From:

alexseanchai

(is your computer clock a few days ahead or are these posts from the future on purpose?)

From:

conuly

The second. I hate having blank spots in my calendar on the journal, but I don't actually post every day. It turns out to be less work to habitually post ahead than to go back afterwards to fill in the gaps.

From:

ioplokon

I took the presence of tickyboxes as a hint & it paid off! :D

From:

conuly

I intended it as a hint!

From:

crystalpyramid

The tristate area is clearly PA, MD, and Delaware.

From:

conuly

Ah, but I anticipated answers of this sort and cleverly titled my poll "NY tri-state area".

From:

crystalpyramid

Very clever! Sorry for misreading-- I guess my eyes jumped right over the part with the poll number as unimportant.

From:

foms

There, add potential confusion that there is a NY-NJ-PA tripoint that is in the Port Jervis area. Is Port Jervis (about eighty or so miles away from the nearest point in CT) in the NY-NJ-CT tri-state area? At the Philadelphia end, the closest distance is about 40 miles.
There are also NY tripoints with CT-MA and with MA-VT but they are yet less populated.
Maybe, the NYC tri-state area?
(says a person who had a grandfather whose funeral was in White Plains, NY and is buried in the Greenwich, CT area)

From:

low_delta

I want to say New York, Newark and Long Island. I tend to think in terms of metro areas - without a metropolitan area, it hardly seems worth grouping states into a mini-region. But I see we're talking about actual states, and the CT border is only ten miles from New York city.

From:

conuly

The NYC metropolitan area extends into all three states (and also Pennsylvania).

From:

gwydion

Are you implying Pennsylvania isn't a real state, only a state of mind?

From:

conuly

Are any states real states when you get right down to it? Surely all boundaries at all levels are fundamentally a state of mind.

From:

gwydion

At my first college I was friends with a guy who used to entertain himself by convincing people North dakota didn't exist. It was a trick done with mirrors and back drops.

From:

low_delta

I find that funny because, given its size, NYC seems to give way to the countryside very quickly. At least when going northward, and by it's looks on satellite view, I'd say into CT as well.

From:

shadowkat

I only know it's usually Connecticut because the News tells me that. Also, I work for a major Transportation organization, and it only covers NY, NJ and CT.

ETA: from the comments, you can tell who lives in NYC and watches NYC Broadcast News. Upstate really doesn't get the same news, does it? Nor does PA. I'm guessing CT and NJ most likely do?

Edited Date: 2024-05-07 01:12 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

I have no idea what news they get upstate, I've never been there. But yeah, I guess everyone in the metropolitan area watches the same news mostly.

From:

shadowkat

Was thinking it over this morning - and it actually makes sense that someone north of NYC wouldn't think of NY, NJ and CT as tristate. The news media in NYC has to address situations in NJ, NY and CT, because it's viewing audience is in all three of those states. NYC and its boroughs are islands bordered by NJ and CT and NY. Hence tristate = NYC and its environs (which include CT and NJ).

From:

chez_jae

I used to work for a company called "Tri-State...". In fact, a lot of companies hereabouts are called Tri-State this or that. Living in northwest IL, we are very close to both WI and IA; thus, the tri-state.

From:

conuly

Different tristate.

From:

kengr

Also fun are "the tri-cities" (around here, that's an area near the Hanford reservation).

and then there's the "Inland Empire" (central and Eastern Washington) or central California.

From:

gingicat

It's Connecticut, but they really mean just the Fairfield County part of Connecticut.

From:

chelseagirl

Our NY TriState Chapter of Sisters in Crime (mystery writers' organization) has members in NY, NJ, and CT.

From:

movingfinger

There’s traditionally a lot of commuting into Southern Connecticut, but maybe it’s shifting to Pennsylvania.

From:

hilarita

As someone not from the US and with only the haziest grasp of geography, I abstained. Which it turned out was not a terrible answer!

From:

captainsblog

Growing up there, raised on Mets games, the usual reference to three states in commercials was to "New York, New Jersey and Fairfield County." Which was the Connecticut one.