Where Are We?

Something about Carroll Gardens moniker has always confounded merchants. You never see a Cobble Hills Deli or Parks Slope Hardware, but misspellings of the nabe named after Declaration of Independence signer Charles Carroll are rampant.

For a long time a newsstand on Smith Street was called the Carol Gardens Newsstand, spelled like the first name, not the last name. That has since been corrected by a new awning. The most common misprint is of the above type: Carroll Garden. As if the area was named after a single garden somewhere, instead of the many spacious front yards to be found along many of the deep-set brownstone blocks.


This fish market, long on Court Street, makes the same mistake. But look: they got it right on the awning! Did the awning come after the sign, after a few people had pointed out the error of the sign spelling?


This dry cleaner, meanwhile, gets it right, as does the below podiatrist.


And then there are the folks who the spelling right, but the neighborhood wrong: