Our Neighborhood In The News

It was all-Park-Slope-all-the-time today in the Sunday Times. The City section lead with a big piece about Brooklyn bloggers that focused on the Slope's Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, and cited outside.in's survey of America's Bloggiest Neighborhoods a few times. (Too bad they never quite managed to explain what outside.in was exactly.) Then it was onto the Real Estate section, which opened with an ominously titled piece, "The Park Slope Parent Trap." The article ended up being largely a love song to the hood, with a few obligatory skeptics quoted just to make it seem well-rounded. The thing that struck me about the piece was that it was one of the first times I've seen someone say in print what I've often said to friends or visitors about what it's like to live here: that it's the closest thing you can get in New York to living in London. (Big green parks, low-rise Victorian housing, gardens everywhere, etc.) The "Parent Trap" piece reminded me that I never linked to a piece on "Why does everyone hate Park Slope" that ran in TimeOut NY Kids, which included this excellent quote from a "novelist" named Steven Johnson who appears to live in Park Slope:

At least to non-locals (such as Brooks, who doesn’t realize that Williamsburg is actually where the “hipsters” are), the Slope seems to represent all that is reprehensible about gentrified New York and modern urban parenting. “Non–New Yorkers think of it disparagingly as a hipster alterna-playground, and Manhattanites think of it as a sanctimonious PC stroller derby, like one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op,” says novelist Steven Johnson, a longtime Sloper who jokes on his blog that “all writers with young children in NYC are legally required to live” there. “To the outside world, it’s too cool for its own good, and inside New York, it’s not cool enough.”

I've had one or two people come up to me since this was published, and gripe about the "one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op" line -- thereby confirming all the Gawker stereotypes of humorless Park Slope. So just for the record, I wasn't saying that I think of the Slope in this way. I love Park Slope, probably to a fault. I was saying that's what other people think about what goes on here. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Co-Op. (Which is itself a topic for another post...)

Comments

[G]

You know, I always liked the idea of Park Slope... then we tried to find an affordable, decently sized place to live. Too many people with too much money willing to do whatever they can to get their kids into PS 321. After a year of searching for a family apartment, we ended up in Clinton Hill. Much more to our liking here. To each his own, I suppose.

There's a little bit too much smugness and privilege in the Slope for my tastes. But, we do go there frequently.

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