Now that’s a baby bump!
Brooklyn the borough is fast becoming usurped by “Brooklyn” the baby — at least on out-of-town birth certificates, new data reveals.
The girl’s name has become the 34th-most-popular name in the country, according to the Social Security Administration, which oversees such things.
Nationwide last year, 6,068 bouncing baby Brooklyns were born in the United States — though Brooklyn’s no queen of the Big Apple, as the name didn’t even crack the top-100 in New York, where Isabella is the leader of the girl pack.
Out West, it’s a different story: In Utah, South Dakota and North Dakota, Brooklyn is in sixth place — its highest rank in the nation.
“Everyone in the country has an emotional connection to what happened on 9-11, and Utah is a pretty patriotic state,” said Josh Mills, 35, mayor of Herriman, Utah, whose daughter Brooklyn was born in 2002. “When we were picking out name, we wanted to commemorate the spirit of the city — it’s not Manhattan, but it’s close.”
It’s been a meteoric rise for “Brooklyn,” crawling all the way from 177th in 2000, and rising nine slots from when we cast a spotlight on the phenomenon in 2008. The name first entered the nation’s top-1,000 in 1992 at number 552 with a bullet.
It’s unclear what was the tipping point for the name’s nationwide popularity, but some point to soccer star David Beckham and Posh Spice — who named their son Brooklyn in 1999.
Or it could also be the name’s exposure through borough bombshells such as supermodel Brooklyn Decker, a DUMBO resident who’s married to tennis star Andy Roddick.
“I’m just surprised it didn’t make the top 10,” mused Borough President Markowitz, Brooklyn’s chief booster, who name-dropped Decker in his State of the Borough address. “The name connotes edgy, innovative, and brash — what parent wouldn’t want to call his kid ‘Brooklyn?’ ”
The name finds its origins from the herring-loving town of Breukelen in the Netherlands. It was eventually Anglicized to Brooklyn.
