The Times Gives It Up For Alterna-Slopes
The Times had a case of Brooklyn fever this weekend, taking some precious column inchage to profile two neighborhoods that most readers of The Gray Lady probably hadn’t heard of until recently, Windsor Terrace and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The subjects of the Windsor Terrace article, a couple who were pleased as punch to land a…
The Times had a case of Brooklyn fever this weekend, taking some precious column inchage to profile two neighborhoods that most readers of The Gray Lady probably hadn’t heard of until recently, Windsor Terrace and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The subjects of the Windsor Terrace article, a couple who were pleased as punch to land a four-bedroom house in the nabe last year for $999,000, had this to say about how their new home stacked up versus the Slope: It’s a little less precious over here, and a little more real. We kind of like that.” (The director of the Jack Nicholson flick As Good As It Gets thought it was unprecious enough to cast one of the houses above on Fuller Place as Helen Hunt’s working-class digs. The idea that these places are now within reach of people with working-class incomes is, of course, laughable.) Despite initial concern about the “clusters of young men hanging out on some of the street corners,” the star of the PLG article ultimately was won over by the area’s racial diversity and proximity to Prospect Park, snapping up a small Victorian house just outside the historic district for $240,000 back in 2002. She now shares the house with her 11-year-old daughter, her brother and his wife.
Less ‘Precious’ Than the Slope? Certainly Cheaper [NY Times]
A Wished-For House With a Hideaway Nook [NY Times]
Photo by redxdress
To anon at May 14, 2007 4:35 PM re: Park Slope:
Park Slope may seem like a model of many things, but a lot of luck was involved with its rebound.
The limestones and brownstones were once known as “teachers’ specials” because they were cheap enough for teachers to afford back in the days when banks red-lined the neighborhood.
Many factors contributed to the long-term rise in prices, but a chief contributor was the general change in banking and mortgage lending.
Red-lining lost its meaning as the mortgage market matured. Once banks had no choice but to hold the mortgages they issued. There was no secondary market in which they could trade mortgages to diversify their risks. That changed.
Because lenders did not want to lend to buyers looking in Park Slope, prices were low. Thus, those with some cash were able to get relative bargains. But they had to accept the urban pathologies that affected the neighborhood.
There was a great study of gangs in Brooklyn written by Harrison Salisbury around 1960. He describes a neighborhood almost no one would recall today. But my father-in-law bought a house on 3rd Street near the Park in 1960. My wife’s family remembers it well.
To anon at May 14, 2007 4:32 PM from kings country almanac:
I lived on Seeley Street in Windsor Terrace. Don’t worry about the psychos who lived next door to me. The child-abusing grandparents are aging as is the grandson they abused.
Grandma Psycho was the worst, by far. Angry in ways psychiatrists have yet to define. But she’s been a heavy heavy smoker for decades. If she’s not hooked to an oxygen tank already, the connection will occur soon.
Grandpa was a good saloon man for years till he quit drinking. Did the drunk weave home from Farrell’s every night for years and years. At least two sons went into the gutter with him. But the crackhead son was fathered by someone else.
Another son, the one living in his childhood bedroom, caught some of his mother’s anger. She’s got the generic hate-em-all anger. He’s a little more focused. A guy with a real Ted-Bundy women-hating turn. Likes to wear hats and shoes that make him look taller.
It’s gets worse. The crackhead son whose child was slapped around by the grandparents was long rumored to be a suspect in a Windsor Terrace murder that occurred about 15 years ago. A push-in robbery gone bad. An old lady who’d come home from the bank after withdrawing some cash. The thug grabbed the dough and gave her a shove that knocked her down and killed her. No one’s been arrested, unfortunately. Her husband put a monument in their yard on 17th St.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Windsor Terrace is a great place. It’s just this one family that fills a hole over there. Most people don’t know how sick they are. You have to live next door and share a wall and a back porch to know.
Anyway, there was once a lot more family fireworks in households in Windsor Terrace. It’s gotten much better in recent years.
The Yuppies that Denis Hammill wrote about in the Daily News have paid off the previous generation of homeowners, giving them big retirement money to buy those places in North Carolina and Florida.
Denis Hammill calls the Yuppies buying the Windsor Terrace homes scum. He joined a protest against a building on Prospect Park Southwest and 16th Street several years ago. Too bad.
The secret of PS 154 is certainly out. The school may claim to operate under capacity, but they held a lottery for pre-k spots this year (like PS 107, 321, etc.) and turned away lots of folks.
4:24, i agree and thus why i think people should be more respectful of park slope (whether they like it or not in terms of a place to live) as it was one of the first hoods to gentrify…not only here in new york, but park slope is a model for gentrification of inner city neighborhoods throughout the u.s.
i’ll have to look it up, but i read a book not long ago about park slope in the 60’s and 70’s and how many urban communities looked at it in terms of using it for their own initiatives.
I was “lucky” in Fort Greene because my property appreciated in value so much that it ended up being worth as much as a Carroll Gardens townhouse. This notion that certain neighborhoods are doomed in terms of livability, safety and being suitable places to invest is silly.
All I’m saying is that all this Ditmas Park and PLG anxiety sounds like te same BS everyone said about Fort Greene fifteen years ago.
kings county almanac 4:12-
uhhh..where did you live approximately? just trying to avoid the area if they’re still there
The “As Good As It Gets” house is on the corner of Windsor and Howard, not Fuller.
Also–yes, New York went through a miserable depression 30 years ago (unemployment, crime, destruction, you don’t the know the half of it)BUT not every neighborhood was “abandoned.” Ditmas Park had down times, but people kept right on living there–more crime than now, but WAY cheaper (lots of extra $$ to send kids to St Ann’s, as many in the nabe did). PLG also fell on hard times, but let’s not overlook the fact that people kept right on raising families there. Is it because they were mostly black families that everybody forgets they existed? And WT never really crashed, but it had a large population of lifetime drug users–like someone said, including white guys in their 50s–right up until like ten years ago.
New people may be shaping these areas to their own tastes, but you’re not saving the nabes. The folks who stuck it out through brutally hard times (in some instances twice, the 30s and 70s)saved them for You.
When I lived in Windsor Terrace my neighbors took in their grandchild. To save him, according to them, from their son and his crazed girlfriend who were crackheads.
Sounded good. The selfless grandparents taking in their unfortunate grandson to save the kid from his insane parents. Yeah, well, then the grandmother started beating the kid because he couldn’t tell time, he couldn’t remember his mulitplication tables and he couldn’t spell. Beat him. Knocked him out of his chair when she drilled him on his school work.
I could hear the slaps and the screaming through the common wall between our houses.
Yeah, I called the cops and that’s when my neighbors started threatening me. Not the grandparents. But one of their several idiot children. The main threatener was the 35-year-old son who still lived at home. Today’s he’s about 45, still occupying his childhood bedroom. His brothers drift through. There’s a married daughter who lives nearby. But her husband won’t go in his in-laws house. He hates his in-laws because he knows they are psychotic abusers who scream at all their grandchildren and each other.
Thank you anon 3:38, but I’ve never felt especially courageous–I didn’t move to PLG to prove a point. To be honest,I wouldn’t have looked here except that I was priced out of PS, where I was renting–I was perfectly happy there, but PS houses were pushing $100K in ’74!–BIG bucks, believe it or not.
I went on the ’74 PLG HT, fell in love with the area, and the rest is history.
I only know ONE person who moved here to make an ideolgical/moral point–I admire him, he’s a truly good person, but we can’t all be saints.