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.
3:49 is a complete idiot who probably got beat up every day in public or private school.
Perhaps the reason your public school did not offer lessons in music etc. is because it did not get enough support from the community. If anyone has ever taken a step inside PS 41 elementary school in the West Village for example, it could easily be mistaken for a private school.
Furthermore, the people we are taking about here can afford to send their kids to private music and swimming lessons etc. with the money they are saving from public school.
I hate it when someone has nothing to contribute to the thread, so they criticize the critics of grammar.
“Who cares what private schools in Kansas are like.”
Yea, you’re right. We should only care about kids in Brooklyn.
No one else matters.
I hate it when a poster has nothing to contribute to the thread so all they do is critic others grammar.
Losers.
Are we in Kansas?? No we’re not, 3:43. Who cares what private schools in Kansas are like.
3:36 – good point. I guess I should have listened a little more. Grammer was actually the public school years. So I guess at least I’m right about the generalizing thing.
Hate to break it to you, but there is a lot more music and art in public school than there is in private.
Ask any kid in private school in Kansas what a clarinet is, and they look at you like you’re an alien.
I too went to private school. As the only Black or one of a handful for most of my elementary school years I knew full well the lack of facilities and resources and the pressures on students from their home life, as well as on teachers. I saw the homework that my friends in public school got and my homework. I knew that my public school ffriends couldn’t swim but I could because I took it in school. I played an instrument they did not, etc… I was far from sheltered or pampered and knew that I had many choices, one of which was to do well while on scholarship at my prep school so that I could get into a top college – on scholarship and make a better life for myself. Your issues sound to me like they stemmed more from your parents not teaching you a sense of self, than from your merely attending private school. My father would tell me everyday “just because you go to school with white kids, don’t you start acting white.” He really didn’t mean any harm by the comment, but in his own way he was telling me to remember who I was and I did. That said, I do wholeheartedly support the improvement of the Public School system through a number of means one of which is Charter schools.