By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
''What's Edison? Is that a city?'' former New York mayor Ed Koch asked last week. ''I just never heard of it.''
He has now.
According to the federal government, New York is now part of the New York-Newark-Edison metropolitan area.
Edison Township, N.J., is a sprawling series of subdivisions, strip malls, warehouses and office buildings named after famed inventor Thomas Edison. More than 30 miles from Manhattan, it doesn't have a true downtown. But Edison (pop. 97,687) has become such a powerful economic engine in the New York region that it shares top billing with the biggest city in the name of the nation's biggest metro area.
''For all too long, the major so-called suburbs or edge cities have been lost in the shadow of New York,'' Edison Mayor George Spadoro says. ''We're not lost anymore. We've wandered in from the wilderness.''
Adjustments in the names of some of the nation's 362 ''metropolitan statistical areas'' by the Office of Management and Budget reflect the growing clout of suburban America. The proportion of Americans who live in metro areas grew from 63% in 1960 to 80% in 2000. Much of that growth was in the suburbs.
One result: Suburbs little known beyond their immediate region are creeping into the official names of large metro areas. The changes won't affect distribution of federal funds, but national status is at stake.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, long known as the Twin Cities, have a new partner in their official metro moniker: Bloomington, home of Mall of America, one of the world's biggest shopping centers.
Does that make them the Triplet Cities or the Tri Cities, wonders a bemused Doug Grow. He's the columnist for the Star Tribune, which bills itself as the ''Newspaper of the Twin Cities.''
''People here aren't going to change no matter what the feds say,'' Grow says.
Officials in West Palm Beach, Fla., want to fight the feds. They're sending protest letters to members of Congress. The city was its own metro area until growth from Miami spread north. Now, West Palm Beach is lumped into the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach metro area.
Not even a visionary like architect Frank Lloyd Wright anticipated the dramatic growth of suburbs.
''Wright's idea was that if you really wanted to get out of a city, you had to get out 10 miles beyond where you thought it would grow and then go another 10,'' says Robert Lang, author of Edgeless Cities. ''He was fearful of how much an American city could eat up.''
That's why in 1937, Wright chose Scottsdale, Ariz., outside Phoenix to build one of his masterpieces: Taliesin West, his winter home and architectural school. Now a suburb of resorts and pricey homes, Scottsdale is part of Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale.
More obscure places are gleeful about their new status:
* Joliet, Ill., whose name was synonymous with a state prison for more than a century, is bumping shoulders with Chicago, the city of big shoulders 40 miles away. The metro area now is Chicago-Naperville-Joliet. The correctional center has closed, and Joliet averages 1,000 new homes a year.
* The Sugarland Express, a 1974 movie starring Goldie Hawn, misspelled the city's name but gave Sugar Land, Texas, its first brush with fame. Now it's linked with its giant neighbor in the Houston-Bayview-Sugar Land metro area.
The upscale suburb can't wait to shout it from the rooftops. ''We'll use it every chance we get,'' City Manager Allen Bogard says. ''We'll jab our friends in Houston.''