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
9:54, a little restraint please. It was a horrifying story, and would have been equally horrifying regardless of where it happened.
Windsor Terrace is a neighborhood that Pete Hamill wrote about in his book “A Drinking Life.”
He covered the boozing years of his youth in Park Slope as well. But some of his best memories included his trips to Farrell’s bar on the corner of 16th Street and 9th Avenue. A community of drinkers. His father took him to Farrell’s, and as Pete said, he not only came from a dysfunctional family of drinkers, he came from a dysfunctional neighborhood.
There’s still no better bar than Farrell’s if you’re looking for a link to the Irish drinking past in the borough. But it’s fading, even at Farrell’s.
It wasn’t long ago that I was talking to a fellow at Farrell’s who’d been a bat-boy for the Dodgers around 1948. You meet guys like that in there. Firemen, cops, transit workers, sanitation workers, teachers, local politicians, and the occasional screwball.
About 10 years ago there was a major robbery at the World Trade Center. The two hapless dupes who robbed the bank at the Trade Center of a couple of million dollars were seen on a security videotape after removing their masks.
The tape was shown on the news. When it played on TV screens all over, the daytime drinking crew at Farrell’s snapped to attention and beat a path to the pay-phone in the bar. The two clowns were regulars.
9:32, someone would “mess” with one of these neighborhoods before buying in Ditmas because he or she would rather be closer to the Manhattan, closer to the park, and most likely living in a limestone or brick townhouse, which heats and cools efficiently, has minimal roofing costs, and doesn’t need to a $10,000 to $20,000 paint job every decade or so. There are also a good percentage of homes with driveways and garages — not as many as Victorian Flatbush mind you, but quite a few.
Ditmas is gorgeous, but those 100+ year old wood frame houses are an enormous responsibility. And, as our inspector said when we recently bought a limestone in one of the neighborhoods the Times recognized this weekend, Brooklyn is termite central.
So I’m really not sure what you’re getting at here, touting the superiority of your neighborhood over the two mentioned above. You can’t be referring to safety concerns, as wasn’t a woman just stabbed to death on Newkirk last week? Ditmas/Midwood/Fiske Terrace certainly looks like a placid suburban community, but it has urban concerns, just like the rest of Brooklyn. And there are just as many posts on this board about Victorian Flatbush as there are about Windsor Terrace and PLG, and people don’t invade those threads and bash the neighborhood only to advertise their own home turf. So let these areas have their due.
proximity to prospect park, 9:38, is why.
Where was the PS bashing? It’s a simple fact — Brooklyn isn’t **just** PS and PS is not the most desired nabe for a lot of folks, for a lot reasons.
Prospect Lefferts Gardens is just bad news. There are too many enormous rent-stabilized apartment buildings and proximate housing projects. Anyone who buys a house there will be in a tiny minority surrounded by many hostile neighbors consumed with avarice.
Such buyers WILL be targets.
I don’t know why anyone would mess with either one of these neighborhoods when they could do much better (in every respect) in Ditmas Park, Midwood, Fiske Terrace, etc.
And Kensington (just below WT) was profiled last weekend in ‘The Hunt’
http://kensingtonbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2007/05/ny-times-hunt-in-kensington.html
Perhaps, like me, he’s been ready to kill someone after trying for over half an hour to park his car in park slope – and its all being internalized.