“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


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

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  1. Park Slope is beautiful and quite a bit more diverse than people think. I agree with those who point out that the stereotypical complaints can be extended to any neighborhood in any city.I guess we believe putting down someone else makes us look better.

  2. 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.) Sure, the boom brought in richer people as prices rose, and the changing demographic make-up of PS is echoed in other gentrifying parts of the city — but I don’t see why the forces causing those changes get dumped onto PS per se.

    Brian Lehrer on WNYC just had a segment on his show about stereotyping, and I honestly think that a lot of the PS snark simply boils down to that…

  3. having lived in PS and PH for almost 8 years, i think there’s 3 negatives.

    1) once you’ve walked everywhere/done everything, well, now you are stuck. it’s not an easy in out to manhattan, especially on the weekends.

    2) it did become progressively more bland as pointed out. as a parent, really felt like the upper west side (shorthand for yuppies/desk jockey’s) transplants, were not people that i wanted to hang out with. not a fan of academics either.

    3) because it’s so far from manhattan, and not a culturally leading hood like wb or bushwick, just seemed sorta sad. no great people, stores, galleries, restaurants, etc… just urban yuppie convenient. kinda felt like, well if i’m here, why bother with living in NYC? i moved from Chicago (going on 20 years ago), and because it’s possible to really get around in a car there, feel like, i would rather be in chicago where i could do a lot of stuff easier that’s more high end.

    ** not really that important, but i will add – probably some of the frumpiest chicks in the history of ever.

  4. “There’s no need to defend a neighborhood, be it PS or others. If you like it, live there, shop there, eat there. If you don’t like it, don’t live there, don’t shop there, don’t eat there. See how simple that was :-)”

    Thank you, Snappy. I love my neighborhood. For those of you who don’t — you don’t have to live here. ‘Nuff said.

  5. Park Slope is the urban version of Montclair. Rich white people raising impossibly bratty children in nice old houses. So? Not like it’s the only part of Brooklyn with a “neighborhood feel” where you bump into people you know on the street. It is quite suburban in its non-diversity.

  6. it’s funny , new yorkers love picking on non-new yorkers, manhattanites pick on brooklynites and non-Park slope brooklynites love picking on Park slope. All this obsession with where people live just to hopefully feel better about oneself or your finances. So absolutely childish.

  7. It’s funny how all the things/changes people in other neighborhoods (um, Bed Stuy) pee their pants about finally getting on their street (a grocery store, bars, greenspace, families, architecture, appreciating property) is what they lambaste re. PS. Really starts to just look like sad hater’s envy.

  8. From my moniker, you can probably guess where I live…
    True, the article is a little cloying but the premise is sound: Park Slope is a nice place to live – both for its people and for the place. In fact, commenters on this blog tend to be infinitely more “arrogant [and] elitist” than anyone I’ve ever met in PS.
    Complaints about parents and kids are city-wide – just take your pick of insulting stereotypes: do you prefer to hate on the pampered, undisciplined white kids of the Slope, the Heights, Tribecca, the UWS, etc or on the wild, noisy Puerto Rican kids hangin’ on the sidewalk with their families of the LES at 2am?
    Brownstoner’s resident curmudgeons always rally-’round the battle-cry, “It wasn’t like this when I was growing up!” It’s clear that most of you whiners did not grow-up in NYC, because in the suburbs, all this annoying parent/child behavior simply happens behind picket fences & closed doors. But the fact is, it still happens just the same.
    Parenting takes-place in public around here – just like dinner parties & lovers’ quarrels. So please, enough already: either move yourself to a suitably child/parent-free ‘hood OR squeeze out your own brood and raise them up as an example to the rest of us fools.
    I can hardly wait to see the results!

  9. There’s no need to defend a neighborhood, be it PS or others. If you like it, live there, shop there, eat there. If you don’t like it, don’t live there, don’t shop there, don’t eat there. See how simple that was 🙂

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