I was born on Staten Island but I grew up in Bay Terrace. There are restaurants in Manhattan, some of them are in Greenwich Village and some are on the Upper West Side. “In” versus “on” vis a vis location. What’s the rule? I Googled and Binged the subject and didn’t come up with much. I guess most people are like me and they just play it by ear. It still seems very arbitrary to me and just so I make it clear that it’s not exclusively a New York thing, I’ll note that when I visit the Chicago one speaks of being “In Chicago” but if you go to Wrigley Field you’re “on the North Side” as opposed to being in an area downtown where you’re “in the Loop.” Back in New York, you can be both “in Brooklyn” and “on Coney Island”. In France you can be “in Paris” and “on the Champs-Eysee”, though I think the distinction there is that one is almost always “on” a particular street or avenue while “in” a city. Still, none of this addresses one of the great regional linguistic conflicts: Friends and reade
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