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
” don’t get the assumption in some posts here that people can’t be ‘interesting’ if they are white, straight, have kids or earn above a certain amount.”
it’s called self hate
I don’t get the assumption in some posts here that people can’t be ‘interesting’ if they are white, straight, have kids or earn above a certain amount.
This article is unnecessary and would be better served to be written about Dyker Heights or something. By that I mean, a place people truly don’t expect.
Happens to be true though; watching the world pass by in Park Slope is my main activity in life. And I like life.
park slope is so far from manhattan? once you’ve walked everywhere and done everything? gimme a break. you really sound jaded.
Look at a map already. I don’t live in P.S. but I walked from east54th/lex to park slope last evening.
“Can anyone explain why PS gets trashed more than other, affluent, brownstone neighborhoods with lots of parents/kids & white people?
“I can say from personal experience that PS is not as homogenous as the snarky PS haters think. There are plenty of folks who live in PS who bought before the boom, or are living in smallish rentals, and are not big earners but working hard at non-finance jobs (teachers, nonprofit workers, writers, etc.)”
For me, it because I do remember when it was really different, and it wasn’t very long ago. It was once a much more diverse neighborhood, racially and economically, plus there were lots of lesbians. Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens — when I moved to NYC/Brooklyn 25 years ago as a young person those neighborhoods were more expensive than Park Slope and pretty white and, at least in my personal experience of Carroll Gardens, less gay friendly. Park Slope was different. It was where my young, gay, racially diverse crowd lived.
Now, it’s so much more bland. It feels filled with Manhattanites. And I don’t think there are “lots” of people working in non profits or as school teachers who live in the Slope, not any more. Yeah, there are some, but I know *so many* who were priced out out out.
So my special feelings of disdain for Park Slope are because I was one of those pushed out by gentrification. Of course, I was the one doing the gentrification 25 years ago. But just because I know I’m being unfair doesn’t change how I feel.
> Have you ever actually been to Park Slope?
I lived there for 9 years. Ignoring Chinese food, I’d like to know where on 5th ave I can get food quickly, without walking 10 blocks (in PS proper). The hot dog guy (4th st), cardboard sandwich from snice, pizza town, pita dude @ 9th st. This is what I can think from 9th st all the way to Pacific st. Now, food after 10pm? Nothin’.
I live in PS I am not left-wing, I see plenty of lesbians and my kids arent spoiled – (I beat any entitlement out of them)
> almost no quick or take out food
Have you ever actually been to Park Slope?
Girls climb trees too, David Shenk.