Beating a Busted Bugaboo?
Maybe there’s more to the Park Slope stroller mafia debate than points about how it shows how white people are jealous of other white people or assertions that negative stereotypes come from I-don’t-wanna-grow-up hipsters. Maybe, as Lynn Harris posits in yesterday’s Style section, Slope bashing is an elegy for a former New York: Brooklyn was…
Maybe there’s more to the Park Slope stroller mafia debate than points about how it shows how white people are jealous of other white people or assertions that negative stereotypes come from I-don’t-wanna-grow-up hipsters. Maybe, as Lynn Harris posits in yesterday’s Style section, Slope bashing is an elegy for a former New York:
Brooklyn was supposed to be Manhattan’s little burnout brother. When I arrived in New York, Brooklyn was the place you could reliably feel superior to, if you thought about it at all. New Yorkers don’t hate the Upper East Side in the same way because that’s old money, old news. But Brooklyn? There’s the feeling that yuppies in Park Slope are washing away Brooklyn’s grittiness and making it more like Manhattan, said Jose Sanchez, chairman of urban studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Brooklyn was supposed to be different. Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be. That’s why our feelings about Park Slope are linked to our feelings about our entire city: our overpriced, chain-store city run by bankers, socialites and, it seems, mommies. The artists are fleeing and your friends, it seems, have become Park Slope pod people. (And they’re coming for you, too.) It’s starting to feel as if there’s nowhere left to hide. And that if we lose Brooklyn, we lose everything. Though actually, if you could keep hating Park Slope, that would be great. Maybe if it really falls out of favor, I’ll be able to afford to stay.
But maybe all press is good press.
Park Slope: Where Is the Love? [NY Times]
Photo by redxdress.
Biff, we’re talking about a very specific subject here. I’m very well aware and don’t need to be reminded of Myanmar or China and the suffering of those poor people…to whom I have already donated $$$…so you don’t need to be so self-righteous.
2:20pm — Apparently, in order to achieve liberal credentials you must allow your kid to be sent far from home instead of to the local neighborhood school you have spent the last years working to improve. Of course parents would object. What you just described is the typical right wing conservative spin: “liberals want to send all your kids to crummy schools to achieve equality.”
Guess what, I believe in universal healthcare. I guess I’m a hypocrite because I pay for good insurance and I don’t choose to go to the crappiest city hospitals for my medical treatments. By your standards, I have no right to fight for better health care coverage for all.
In fact, if Park Slopers were the hypocrites you state, they’d send their kids to private school, not try to improve the local public schools, which is what they have done, NOT just 321, but nearly every school in Park Slope is now a decent public school.
Stop trying to use the Republican line to scare everyone from wanting to make this country a better place for all. Stop acting as if the only way to do that is for us all to experience the things we are trying to change.
I know I am asking for trouble with this, but here goes . . .
It is getting extremely difficult to keep score of who is criticizing whom for what and why. Who, exactly, is it that won’t grow up, slopers or their critics? Is sweeping the sidewalks a good thing or bad and are the slopers who are hated the ones that do or do not sweep? Are “stroller moms” hated because they are too tolerant or not tolerant enough? Are slopers too liberal or do you wish they would spend more time working towards achieving the goals of their liberal beliefs?
Just to position myself among the various stereotypes that have been thrown about on this post, I am neither (a) a teacher/artist/lesbian/sidewalk-sweeping hippie who helped begin the area’s revival in the 70s, nor (b) a celebrity actor/Wall-Streeter with a $3 million brownstone purchased in 2006 nor (c) a mom. I followed the trajectory of many slopers of a certain age. Moved into the neighborhood in the mid-eighties, worked full-time at my “liberal” activism for a few years, got an advanced degree, got married, and became a parent (in my case, a dad). Began as a renter, bought a co-op in the mid-90s and bought a south slope house in the early 00s. There are many layers and waves to the Slope’s gentrification and it is hard to generalize about any of it. Am I what the haters are mad about? Is it the half-generation before me that began the revival? Is it the more recent Wall-Street influx? Is it only moms people hate, or dads, too? After all, I did the whole bit — stroller, bjorn, music together, etc.
It is hard to understand the venom without understanding who it is coming from. Here is what I propose: Any poster who has used the term “stroller mom” as a pejorative in the last 3 months, and anyone who has posted on this thread with a comment critical of Slope residents, please post on this thread and identify yourself demographically — age, gender, owner or renter, parent or not, and neighborhood of residence. Look withiin your soul for a few minutes and tell us, in earnest, what it is you really don’t like about people who live in the slope. I know this is the web, but have the integrity to come forward and tell us something about yourself and why and how the Slope affects you in a negative way. Is this really all about bumper stickers and organic food? Do you wish you lived here but are priced out? Do you live here and wish the neighborhood were less family-oriented? Did a mother pushing a stroller say something obnoxious to you on 7th Ave (and what was it)? Or is it something else? And what is it that you would have Slope residents do differently that would allow you to feel that your work here is done and you can drop the subject?
The citizens of Myanmar and Sichuan Province would kill to live on blocks that some posters here consider a “disgrace”.
1:23, Can you please explain how eating organic foods contributes more towards global warming? I’m intrigued by this theory. Thank you in advance.
I’ve been complaining about that hill since 1990, 2:18. It just wasn’t until I was pregnant that I realized how annoying it could be when one needs a bathroom and a glass of water and is at the bottom of it.
Furthermore, before it was trendy, everyone thought PS was kind of boring. I do admire the community spirit, and I find some of the parenting resources there really useful, but there are reasons it’s an easy place to mock.
Plus, again, there’s that hill.
Enjoy navigating it with your laundry, stroller and goldenpoodle in two feet of snow!
People critical of Park Slope keep mixing up their stereotypes. I can’t even figure out what kind of “stroller moms” they are complaining about. Is it the bugaboo-pushing rich yuppies? Or the middle class “crunchy” moms who yell at the rich yuppie moms who don’t breastfeed, and are apparently too frumpily dressed to be allowed out of the house? Or the young, rich hipster moms who hate both groups and dress their toddlers in the t-shirts of their favorite bands?
Gosh, the only moms I know in Park Slope actually don’t fit into any of those categories — they are just like most of the people who post on brownstoner, trying to raise their kids with decent values, improving the public schools, who bought in the ‘hood when it was possible to do so on an average family’s salary.
Get a grip everyone. Park Slope has good and bad people just like every other neighborhood in Brooklyn. It also happens to already be a great neighborhood to live in, so people are jealous of the positive publicity it gets. I don’t even live in park slope, but the bashing is so ignorant and unnecessary.
I’m late to this thread and a bit off-topic, but AMEN 10:54! I’m not an old lady, but I do sweep my sidewalk and keep it clean, and I grew up in CG in the 50-60s and still live there. The rest of my block (landmarked, by the way) is a disgrace. There used to be pride of place, pride of home, but no longer. Very sad.
10:47
Slow down there buddy. You leave Amherst, MA out of this little ruckus. What are you anyway some closeted Williams grad looking to pick a fight on a blog?
As to the article:
The author is really wasting ink here with this piece. I guess it would have been too much work to point a lens on Crown Heights and talk about a neighborhood with issues worth discussing.