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.
11:46 Um, I make fun of the midwest christian right and honestly it’s not because I want to be one of them. The make fun of middle eastern muslims they join the military to murder and I’m pretty sure it’s not because they want to be them either. When your mother told you that they kids picking on you were just jealous, whe lied.
“Your ‘community’ is not what attracted the wealthier set. If it was, they’d join in, but they don’t because they don’t care about it. They came for their own reasons.”
Do you like know, ANYTHING about real estate investing? It’s a known fact in the real estate business that the bohemian artists and gays are what “gentrify” and make a neighborhood hip, and then the wealthier set follow. It’s happened over and over and over and over again all across the city. And other cities. There’s even an official name for it, in business and real estate and sociology. The Gay Bohemian Index. Um, you can look it up if you actually want to know something about this subject. So you don’t have to fake it anymore.
Slopers are so hell bent on pretending Park Slope was always always pure heaven with no crime. To the point they make up pure lies and fiction about it. WEIRD.
You know Park Slope was known as a lesbian community, right? They and liberal academics and artists are the ones who made Park Slope a place you’d want to live in.
11:52 – but you conclusion is based on a false sense of reality – if anything – a safe attractiv urban neighborhood is more accessible in NYC then at any other time since the early 1960’s.
Even the worst neighborhoods (crime wise) are far below Park Slope in the late 80’s. So if a ‘middle class’ person wants a nice Brownstone/apartment their are tons more neighborhoods that are safe, stable and available.
This article is so so wrong – Park Slope actually has virtually no chain stores, tons of ‘artists’ (or at least people who do not seem to work a regular job- ‘freelance’) and plenty (majority) (NYC) middle-class.
As for Suleiman Osman’s comments on ‘authenticity’ defined as – “postwar middle-class search for urban authenticity as a refuge from mass consumer culture,â€
Please STFU and get a real job – people just want a nice place to live and to raise their kids – 99.9% of everyone is just trying to survive – only the truly rich, very young, and college professors put so much thought into such nonsense.
it’s the intersection of class warfare and sexism. the middle class is shrinking, and, along with it, the availability to the urban middle class of their vision of urban utopia – a little house or brownstone apartment in a pretty neighborhood with some amenities and okay schools. people expected park slope would be there for them when they got around to saving up for a down payment and/or had some kids and were willing to put up with a little commute in exchange for all that. now, for some, it feels like that availability is shrinking – whether you live there, hoped to live there, or just liked the idea that you could if you wanted to – and that makes people sad, angry, disappointed. “stroller moms,” when intended to suggest that every woman with a kid in a stroller in ps is an upper-class, self-centered women who indulges her kids and herself, are the flash point because 1) they’re easily identified embodiments of the perceived new reality – that woman is taking up real estate that should belong to ME!; and 2) it always has been and still is acceptable to stereotype women based on a caricature of some distasteful element of them and to blame on them the downfall of whatever it is we’re complaining about. They’re devious yet clueless, defensive yet vulnerable – as easy to hate as they are to feel superior to.
hello? we’ve been making fun of all of Queens for decades
Why else would you bash someone elses neighborhood 11:39? If you dont live there, what possible motivation could you have to post negative vitrol about where someone else lives?
I guess the Park Slopers went to the GW Bush school of diplomacy
“They hate us because they’re jealous”.
11:02am, I’m not 10:25am but I think you are being too hard on him/her. I agree that the newer residents who send their kids to PS 58 are very involved in the school (I’m one of them, too). But I think 10:25am was referring to other things in the community. I confess that I’ve seen postings asking people to volunteer in Carroll Park, and haven’t done so, and I know there hasn’t been a Halloween haunted house for a while because there’s no one to run it. I do think there is a little bit lost and it was some of the slightly older timers who organized alot of that, not the newer families with kids.
Also, you’ve been here since 2000, so you aren’t really a newcomer anymore. It’s very difficult to find any family-sized apartment for less than $700,000 or $800,000 these days and the brownstones are selling for nearly $2 million. Many of those people simply don’t have the ability to donate hundreds of hours of time each year to the community. Even at PS 58, there’s a greater percentage of families in the lowest grades with more money than time to donate.
I’m not complaining as that’s just what happens and I agree with you that there is still a great community of families here helping each other out. But I do think the high price of real estate is driving out the kinds of people who made this neighborhood so wonderful, and it’s certainly preventing any middle class families from moving in.