Hoboken, Antwerp
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Photo © JWG
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Hoboken is a southern district of the arrondissement and city of Antwerp, in the Flemish Region of Belgium.
Name
A local children's story says that the name "Hoboken" is derived from a little boy who accidentally dropped his sandwich in the Scheldt, a river which flows through Hoboken. In the local dialect of Dutch, a "boken" is a sandwich and "ho" is a way of shouting "stop", so he must have shouted "Ho, boken!!!". The placename is actually derived from Middle Dutch Hooghe Buechen or Hoge Beuken, meaning High Beeches or Tall Beeches. To this day there is a hospital in Hoboken named "Hoge Beuken".
Hoboken, New Jersey
Since the first Europeans to live there were Dutch-speaking settlers to New Netherland, it would appear Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson river across from New York is named after Hoboken, Antwerp. Many European immigrants who set sail headed for New York from the port of Antwerp and eventually settled in New Jersey, but by that time the city had long been called Hoboken, a name chosen by John Stevens, the man who purchased the land on which the city sits in 1784. It's not known why he did. The Lenape/Delaware Indian for the area was Hobocan Hackingh. The Dutch may have phonetically bastardized the Lenape to conform to their own language. Various English-language spellings from the colonial era included Hoebuck and Hobuck.
