Although initially in the study 68 neighborhoods were designated, and later increased by the City Planning Commission to 76 in October 2001 based in census data,[2] most planners, neighborhood associations, researchers, and journalists have since widely adopted the 73 as the number and can even trace the number back to the early 1900s.
The 19th-century division of the city along the axis of Canal Street into downtown and uptown is a prime example.
Various areas of the modern city which were separate towns in the past, such as Algiers and Carrollton, continue to be spoken of – but now as neighborhoods.
The large area to the east of the Industrial Canal and north of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal, little developed until the last third of the 20th century, is often referred to as Eastern New Orleans (or "New Orleans East", although that term usually refers to a smaller subset of the area).
Later in the 1980's there was a rise in the use of them as cultural identifiers with the emergence of bounce music and the recognition of the different dialects within them.