From the West Village to Fort Greene, With Few Regrets
This weekend’s real estate section in the Times has a story that’s likely to resonate with many ex-Manhattanites who’ve moved to Brooklyn and find the living across the East River a whole lot easier. The article is about Hali Lee and Peter von Ziegesar, a couple with three kids who uprooted from the West Village,…
This weekend’s real estate section in the Times has a story that’s likely to resonate with many ex-Manhattanites who’ve moved to Brooklyn and find the living across the East River a whole lot easier. The article is about Hali Lee and Peter von Ziegesar, a couple with three kids who uprooted from the West Village, where they’d lived for 15 years, to Fort Greene. The pair bought a house (a former crack den, actually) on South Portland Avenue in late ’05 and say that while they miss a few things about the city (chief among them their old proximity to the Village Community School on West 10th Street, which their kids still attend), Brooklyn has presented a number of quality-of-life advantages. The perks, according to Ms. Lee, include an environment that doesn’t feel like a high-end mall, as the Village did; a space where their brood’s noise doesn’t disturb the neighbors; their new borough’s down-to-earth population (There are mixed-race couples, and black people here who aren’t nannies); and the fact that their kids can now go play on the sidewalk and in the backyard.
In a House, You Can Make All the Noise You Want [NY Times]
Photo by lunalaguna.
3:22 I take up your challenge though I have little time (making our brownstone millions is so time consuming), but here are a few of my favorite examples of smut:
Gee. Like what we need are yet another self-hating white dude and a banana who can’t wait to dye her skin white. The hood is going downhill, nonstop.
the surest sign that they are clueless is the fact that they consented to be in the article in the first place. There are many many people in this city with their same attitudes, but a few notches up on the smarts scale, who would be aghast about anything that publicly put the lie to their “we’re just ordinary folk” schtick.
An annoying story of lefty trustafarians and their mores. My, how pioneering of them, moving to Ft Greene (to a former crack-den no less, for which they dutifully paid $1.8 million). Still on that St. Ann’s waiting list for the brood, though. Have to continue to slog back into Manhattan for private school…
Attention money lefties: want to live among real black people but don’t want to be mugged. In Ft. Greene they have actual black people who aren’t nannies, but are sanitized so that they won’t mug you. You can feel authentic and cool…and safe, all at the same time. Of course, you can try Bed Stuy or Crown Heights, plenty of what you are looking for their except for the not-getting-mugged part.
Meet your new neighbors: The Smuggersons!
Don’t these people get joint pain from patting themselves on the back so vigorously?
They inhereted a pile of money, 10:34. And the daddy grew up in New Canaan, CT (the WASPiest place on earth) so he’s still trying to cover his tracks with this salt-of-the-earth schtick.
Can you sense the drug-rush of the crackies who used your pad to get high before you moved in?
The people featured in the NYT articles weren’t so busy making money that they couldn’t take time out to blow-hard to newspaper reporter about their fabulous lives.
I agree that these people are idiots for sharing their story with the NYT. Why bother? It just invites hateful comments from most people who read it, and I find it an invasion of privacy. You KNOW the journalist was salivating as soon as Ms. Lee uttered the “black people who aren’t nannies” comment.
“Black people who aren’t nannies”? These people are incredibly sheltered!
Brooklyn used to be a place to get away from the money-is-everything and money-defines-who-you-are strain of life in Manhattan.
Trouble is, it’s become that. It’s bourgeois, money and status-centered. Bankers and lawyers buying $2mn brownstones. All under the veneer of being laid-back and ‘jusk folks.’
the “we’re so casual, and laid back”, but are dying to get into st. ann’s thing is exactly what’s wrong with fort greene these days-it’s rich, bohemian wannabees playing house, claiming to have “found” brooklyn.
3:59 – Your 1 example and “Positive Energy” are so much more welcomed and deserving of this space than anyone else.
3:59 – I can count on 2 hands the “Good” Public Schools in Brooklyn. Compared to the hundreds that are here, that is sad.
Why do you think Public Schools in Long Island are so much better? Is it because of more funding? No, its because they are much smaller districs that are easily managed and the unions are isolated and marginalized.
The Teachers Unions in NYC are a political entity first and foremost.
3:57
You are dead wrong.
I see public schools in New York City improving almost daily. Schools like ps. 29 that were 5 years ago not on anyone’s radar are now sought after schools.
Many schools in Williamsburg have improved, as have schools all over the city.
Your negative energy is a waste of space.
Public schools suck Here for 1 big and 1 Small reason – Unions being the big reason one and Parents not being involved the small.
Unions keep ineffective and low-quality teachers employed at the expense of our children and their self-interested lobby. Money is wasted and virtually disappears into the system without a trace.
Look at the numbers, Public schools spend more per child than most private and parochial schools yet the end product is crap. Why? Because the government cannot effectively and efficiently run a school and unions ensure no teachers are hired, fired, promoted, or rewarded for merit as opposed to tenure.
Super involved parents have been able to impact some schools like PS 321, but this is rare, and merely sending your kids into a highly dysfunctional system and “getting involved” is not enough to stem the tide.
Private schools educate kids more efficiently and dont have massive lumbering bureaucracies, special interests, and unions to support. Good teachers are rewarded for being good, and bad ones are eliminated.
It is sad that so many of you think the public schools here have a chance. They do not, unitl the massively corrupt and broken system of Public Eduction is addressed (For instance when pigs fly) with real reform and not the same old feed the bureaucracy more tax dollars with no results or accountability.
3:55 = adds an incredible amount to the conversation
3:51:
you have it backwards….most public schools offer music.
most private schools do not.
notice i didn’t say, most private in brooklyn, but MOST private, period.
3:53 = total ass who adds nothing to the conversation.
3:52 = rush limbaugh