In Defense of Park Slope
“But overall, this is a neighborhood that makes New York living startlingly desirable. The park is close and lovely — getting cleaner and better all the time. Subway access is fairly spectacular (less so on weekends). Many mom and pop businesses are still intact. There’s decent coffee, good produce, and community theater. On a sunny…
“But overall, this is a neighborhood that makes New York living startlingly desirable. The park is close and lovely — getting cleaner and better all the time. Subway access is fairly spectacular (less so on weekends). Many mom and pop businesses are still intact. There’s decent coffee, good produce, and community theater. On a sunny Saturday, the farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza is as life-affirming as a place can be.
Most of all, it feels like a real neighborhood. Friends bump into one another. They chit-chat. They have impromptu picnics. Small boys climb trees! This is one of those neighborhoods that has kept a whole generation of would-be surbanites from becoming suburbanites. That’s a good thing, no?”
— David Shenk writing in The Brooklyn Paper
spending all of your time in one neighborhood regardless of what that neighborhood is doesn’t seem that fun to me.
I live at connection of several neighborhoods and I enjoy all of them. One of those neighborhoods happens to be park slope.
I’m all for quality of life in the bit city, but reading this made me want to vomit.
GAP = Arc de Triomphe
Parchute Jump = Eiffel Tower
Gowanus = Seine
Europeans themselves say Brooklyn reminds them of Europe.
“Last thing – comparing PS to Paris is laughable. This guy needs to get out more.” By dirty_hipster 10:29 AM
The Memorial Arch at the Grand Army Plaza and its circular traffic problems, are often compared to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and its circular traffic problems. The GAP Arch heading into PS is said to have been pattered after the one in Paris and is often called the “Arc de Triomphe of Brooklyn”. This is googleable.
I LOVE Park Slope. I can’t afford to live there, but (like many of my friends) we head to the free concerts at Celebrate Brooklyn at least once a week in the summer, hang outside to listen to the benefit concerts. I really do wish I could afford there (Bob Dylan & Jackson Browne – you SOUNDED amazing. I go running and sometimes biking in the park at least once a week..it’s a true haven that you can indulge in even if you are not fortunate enough to afford it. Ahhh, sledding in Prospect Park in the winter!! For those that can afford it, I am not a hater, just a little jealous.
– a teacher who lives in Greenpoint, a super quick trip to the slope on the G line.
Park Slope is a really great place to live. However, I agree completely with Southbrooklyn’s comment that it’s the self-satisfaction in the newer arrivals in PS that grates. Smug to the point of being obnoxious. I had to say to a woman friend (who I otherwise love dearly) when she was bragging about PS 321 and pointedly saying to me she can’t understand why people live anywhere else “Hey you know not everybody can afford Park Slope, right?” Because I genuinely wondered if she could grasp that. Hilarious.
tybur, never take my comments seriously. Seriously.
As a relatively new resident of Park Slope, I thought I’d contribute my thoughts:
Sure, there are rich people aplenty in Park Slope. That comes with the $2-$3 million price tags on some of the houses. But Park Slope also has middle class families and young, single, decidedly not wealthy residents.
In the South Slope, I share a decent-sized 1BR with my girlfriend comfortably, and neither of us makes more than $32,000. We aren’t trust funded hipsters, but we’re young and involved in publishing/writing, not law/business, and we survive just fine.
We aren’t rich and we don’t share a skin color and we fit in perfectly well here. The “Park Slope stereotype” has grown to be larger than the truth.