I do not know the origin of the term "Manhattan distance". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry says the concept comes from Minkowski in the 1800s, and a Google Scholar and Google ngram search suggest the term originates from around 1960, and the more common older term was "rectilinear distance".
I do not know the origin of the term "Manhattan distance". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry says the concept comes from Minkowski in the 1800s, and a Google Scholar and Google ngram search suggest the term originates from around 1960, and the more common older term was "rectilinear distance".
(See https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Manhattan+dist... .)