The wikipedia entry for John Mandeville says:

In the body of the work, we hear that he had been at Paris and Constantinople...had been at Mount Sinai...had been in Russia, Livonia, Kraków, Lithuania...had been at Cansay (Hangchow-fu) in China..

The ‘at’ here certainly sounds archaic except for Mt Sinai. (Could this part of the entry have been lifted from an old encyclopedia? It doesn’t say in the discussion page for the entry.)

There is Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris but in Paris doesn’t sound right somehow maybe because it is an event though we wouldn’t say ‘the attacks at New York’. The wikipedia entry for this play says:

The Massacre at Paris is an Elizabethan play by the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe. It concerns the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which took place in Paris in 1572…

Is ‘at’ ever used now? When did the full switch occur, if it did, according to OED and why? We say “I will meet you at (or in) Burger King” but not, as far as I know, at Bognor Regis.

Any thoughts welcome.

I can’t find at v. in in any of my style manuals. And the OED2 is somewhat inconsistent, probably the result of entries being written decades apart. For at the OED2 says, in what seems to be a very old explanation:

With proper names of places: Particularly used of all towns, except the capital of our own country, and that in which the speaker dwells (if of any size), also of small and distant islands or parts of the world.
Cf. in the Isle of Wight, on Inchkeith, at St. Helena, at Malta, at the English Lakes, at the Cape, in Cape Colony. Formerly used more widely: at Ireland, at London.

For in it says:

In is used with the proper names of continents, seas, countries, regions, provinces, and other divisions, usually also of large cities, esp. the capital of a country, and of the city or town in which the speaker lives.

Both uses date back to Old English and the OED provides cites up to the mid-nineteenth century.

I would say that size is the determiner. If the location is precise, use at. If it is somewhat more general, and can also be expressed as “within the bounds of,” use in. For small islands, I would use on.

Isn’t it “on (not ‘in’) the continent?”

That is even when not used as a proper noun. eg “On the continent of Europe, Africa, etc.

When I was learning French as a lad, I was interested in how the various senses of prepositions mapped.

I would say that he was having a party at his house, but a barbecue in his garden, that he lives at 24 Park View, but in the village of Sandford.  I think this is one of those formations where there are no hard and fast rules, only custom and practice.

I’ve seen “at” employed in place names to make them seem more upscale (e.g. “Fox Chase Estates at Mendham”, “The Shoppes at Bartonsville").

And back in the 1980’s when that baby got a baboon heart transplant, Dan Rather seemed (to me) to enjoy reminding viewers that the hospital was “at Loma Linda”.  He somehow made the “at” seem extra sharp, and it stuck with me as an example of an “at” place name.

At is used commonly, at least here in the US, in the names of universities with multiple branches - e.g., University of North Carolina at Asheville or State University of New York at Oneonta.  This has always sounded strange to me.

Happens in the UK too eg University of Kent at Canterbury.

Not so here in California, though. The individual campuses of the two state university systems are referred to without any prepositions: University of California Berkeley or California State University Monterey Bay.

University at Buffalo,The State University of New York; University at Albany, State University of New York. From googling and their websites. How come the latter doesn’t have a definite article? Trademark stuff?

Don’t see much of this kind of thing in Australia.