I was disappointed to have excavated this historic thread: http://rabble.ca/babble/out-and-about/obnoxiously-saccharine-or-pretenti... and seeing that it had been locked.
I suspected "Liberty Village" (Toronto) was a real-estate-promotion aka speculation-driven moniker. Yep.
From the Wikipedia article on the place: Liberty Village is a neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is bounded at the north by King Street West, the west by Dufferin Street, the south by the Gardiner Expressway, the east by Strachan Avenue, and the northeast by the CP railway tracks. The Liberty Village name was introduced as a positive 'brand' by the property owners and developers in the area in conjunction with the City of Toronto. The neighbourhood aims to distinguish itself from Parkdale, which now begins west of Dufferin Street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Village
Yep, they even changed the boundaries of a "non-posh" district they carved this enclave from.
Though according to the article, the pretext for the district name-change was FAR from posh:
Liberty Village's name comes from its central street, Liberty St. named in honour of a historic prison reform, the initiative of then Provincial Secretary William John Hanna who forced the closure of Toronto's Central Prison located north of the CNE and west of Strachan Avenue in 1915.[citation needed] Before it closed, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women used to be on the site where Lamport Stadium currently stands. The street where the prisoners, when released, would directly walk on to became known as -- "Liberty Street".[1]
By the way, the article has been criticised as reading like an advertisement, and anyone who knows more about Toronto local gentrification and speculation issues is welcome to edit the thing!
There was a similar attempted "Village" renaming here in Montréal, with speculators rebranding "Griffintown" as "Le Village Griffintown"... (Griffintown is an established historical name referring to a lost Irish neighbourhood, and there has been no attempt to gallicise it).
Though of course this thread is open to ALL over-the-top names, not only fakey-posh ones!