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
ever notice how park slopers always say ‘it FEELS like a REAL neighborhood.’ yes, it’s become a lovely facsimile of real life, and the way it is lived by actual humans. kudos on the verisimilitude!
“I live in Park Slope, by choice.”
Seriously, it’s a really nice neighborhood. I’ve lived here 4 years now and have had one minor run in with self-entitled parent. Hardly a reason to denigrate the entire neighborhood. Yeah it’s a bit expensive. But so is Pari . . . um, Malibou.
Even today, the vast, vast majority of residents are neither self absorbed nor rich. But keep going with the insults.
what’s so great about living on the side of a hill?
“Slopers are portrayed as knee-jerk leftists who anxiously helicopter over their children and arrogantly exult in their elite status.
But that’s not the neighborhood that I know.”
It’s always very difficult to see the forest for the trees when you’re in the middle of the forest. If he is one of those arrogant, elitist parents who thinks that his kids can do no wrong and is entitled to walk two abreast with his double wide strollers so others need to walk in the street, of course he wouldn’t notice what is so plainly obvious to others.
His comparison of PS to the Ivy League undercuts his entire argument and only shows why he can’t see what everyone else can.
Epiphany “Yeah if you’re white.”
I’ve lived here over 25 years; before that Boston, Philly, suburban NJ and rural PA. One of the reasons I moved here was the ethnic diversity both of the neighborhood and the public schools. I know housing has become so expensive that my adult kids will have to struggle to live close by. But even still, if you watch the kids pour out of MS 51 (5th Ave. @ 4-5Th) at lunch, you will see representation that is white, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern and there are also recent child immigrants from around the world. It’s great and we all benefit from getting to share the neighborhood and one another.
I hear St. Goldstein is to be levitated on a puffy cloud of his supporter’s cognitive dissonance to a $2.5 million dollar townhouse in Heaven/Park Slope.
Its true, the weather in Paris sucks ass.
Epiphany – ’bout time you had one, no?
“Sure, it’s expensive to live here and I wish it weren’t. But so is Paris. Go pick on Le Marais for a while”
Last thing – comparing PS to Paris is laughable. This guy needs to get out more.