slope-strollers-05-2008.jpgMaybe 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.


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  1. “i’ve got a crisp $5 bill waiting for the first person who has anything interesting or original to say on this subject…”

    I rented an apartment at 415 Bergen between 5th and 4th from 1991 to about 1997. One summer day I was hanging out of my second-floor window looking into the street. All of a sudden a guy I knew from the barber shop on 5th between Bergen and Dean (now a coffee shop) was chasing another guy down Bergen, firing a gun. The “chaser” fired at least three shots but missed, then stopped running, turned back and walked quickly away in the other direction. The cops never showed up. I saw the guy a few weeks later. I didn’t talk about what I saw. I’m not sure that would happen these days. Or, then again perhaps it might.

  2. Heather, oh mon dieu! Je ne sais pas ou devrait le francais trouve un magasin qui vend les smoothies a prospect park ouest. Pres de les fleurs et les fruits et legumes dans le marche a Grand Army Plaza? Je m’excuse mais je ne parle pas francais. Tabernacle!

  3. Really 4:25? I’m stupid?

    The question posed was how does eating organic contribute to GLOBAL WARMING and I provided the answer.

    Your response indicates that your reading comprehension is very low (isnt that a sign of stupidity)

    and who says that “chemicals and pesticides” are “most harmful” to the environment anyway (besides you)

    Can you cite a single study that compares the ecological risk from pesticides and chemicals to the expected effects of global warming?

  4. have lived in PS for only 4 years, but all of the press on the neighborhood seems strangely out of touch with what you experience day to day.. People seem to seeing what they want to see. The myth of the slope is alive and well but the real place is getting buried underneath people’s projections.

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