Park Slope: Where Is the Love? (original) (raw)

First Person

FAMILY FRIENDLY Other neighborhoods have strollers, food co-ops and brownstones. So why is sneering at Park Slope an urban blood sport?Credit...Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

May 18, 2008

POOR Union Hall. First, there was the tempest in a sippy cup stirred up in Brooklyn last February by this bar-brunch-boccie spot’s ban on children in strollers. And just last week, a subcommittee of the Park Slope community board swayed by an army of pitchfork-wielding locals dealt the joint a harsh, if symbolic blow: no liquor license renewal until you do something about the noise. Though the full board overruled the committee within days, the blogosphere’s critics and conspiracy theorists had already drawn their conclusions: “It’s the revenge of the Stroller Moms.”

But it’s not just the moms; it’s where they live. “Park Slope isn’t even part of Brooklyn anymore,” wrote one commenter on Gothamist. “It’s seriously a lower rung of hell, filled with hateful English teachers.” And on Eater.com, one posted comment said: “Park Slope and its ilk are why NYC is becoming more and more pathetic by the day.”

Yep: community fussbudgets, whiny parents, taverns crawling with toddlers, hip watering holes edging out old-man bars. It’s everything New Yorkers love to hate about Park Slope.

Well, not everything. Check the comments on real estate blogs like Brownstoner and Curbed, or ask around. To its detractors, Park Slope is both haunt and hatchery of New York’s smuggest limousine-liberal yuppies.

It is, if I may further summarize the bad publicity, overrated and hypocritical. Its glorious brownstone blocks and jaunty cafes are awash in carpetbagger entitlement, ruled by snarling “Stroller Nazis.” The neighborhood is a ground zero of all that is twee and lame. It is, God forbid, the suburbs.

“Park Slope is a perfect storm of stereotypes that provoke derision,” said Steven Johnson, a local writer and a father of three. “Since Park Slope is the neighborhood most explicitly associated with urban parenting, it attracts the wrath of people who think parents have gone way overboard. I imagine there’s some horror fantasy fusion: the well-off Park Sloper and co-op member who is obsessed with his kids. Oh, wait, I just described myself.”

Perhaps you recall the much-publicized episode in which an innocent “Found: Boy’s hat” message on the Park Slope Parents listserv sparked a brief debate about gender semiotics. (“What makes this a boy’s hat?”)

“Every so often, we seem to fulfill people’s worst expectations,” said my friend and neighbor Lori Leibovich, whose contribution to SMITH magazine’s six-word-memoir book was “Husband. Kids. Park Slope. You know.” Yes, we do.

When I moved to the neighborhood in 1994, I promise you, Manhattanites did not think about Park Slope any longer than it took them to blow off a party invitation. But today, you mention Park Slope on a blog or even in conversation and, especially if the reference involves the word “stroller,” the haters lunge like sharks at chum.

How did it come to this? Most of the above could be said of just about any other neighborhood in our tidied-up, child-rearing-friendly New York City. Doesn’t the East Village have a Whole Foods? Hasn’t the Upper West Side become Short Hills?

How did Slope Rage become a meme unto itself, even among people who won’t take the F train below East Broadway?

We must take some hatred of Park Slope with a generous dash of salt (organic, artisanal, hand-harvested). Much anti-Slope invective is stirred up in comments on blogs, which are not known for universally trenchant insight (“Puke Slope!”) or for their warm embrace of, well, anything.

By the same token, when we talk about “people who hate Park Slope,” we are talking in large part about a certain stratum of the chattering, Twittering class. “This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny,” said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6. “I live in the Slope. I love it. I talk about it as much as anyone else does. But I founded a charter school near Brownsville and I don’t hear anyone talking about Park Slope over there.”

To be sure, much has changed here. When I first arrived, my friends would say things like, “Brooklyn? Do you need a passport?” and “So, do you think you’ll move into Manhattan someday?” (Actually, they called it New York.) Then, the Slope was the only place my roommates and I could afford a decent three-bedroom apartment. Then, Fifth Avenue was guys playing dominos and bodegas selling, as far as I could tell, only motor oil and sun-faded cans of Pringles.

Today, you don’t need a passport so much as a windfall. The junky Fifth Avenue shop where I bought an already-dusty broom and a ream of paper towels on the day I moved in? Now, on the same spot, I can get cedar-planked salmon and quinoa pilaf.

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THE PRIZE Are the brownstones of Park Slope awash in carpetbagger entitlement?Credit...Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Today, Park Slope is a brand, a concept. Fourth Avenue the Champs-Élysées of auto parts! is home to the vile Novo Park Slope condo-monstrosity and the ridiculous boutique Hotel Le Bleu, whose Web site reveals its high prices (up to $369), but not its location on a bleak slip between a taxi garage and a Staples. (What are the odds that its cocktail bar will serve as the gin joint of choice for the fabulous fictional Slopers in the drama about the neighborhood that is being developed, seriously, by Darren Star of “Sex and the City”?)

Many locals, and ex-locals, I talked to swore that something else has also changed. Phyllis Bobb, 42, lived here from 1990 to 2002, when she moved to Bed-Stuy because, she said, “there were too many yuppies moving in.” People on her block stopped sitting on stoops; a guy in the park kicked her dog. “It wasn’t a community anymore,” she said, and she’s still steamed. “I feel like a jilted lover.”

Then again, when I asked Paul Milkman, a teacher who has lived in Park Slope for 37 years, if he’s experienced this new rudeness, he has no idea what I’m talking about. Same goes for my mother-in-law; she and my father-in-law live around the corner in the brownstone they bought for five figures in 1972. “There are new layers to the neighborhood,” she said. “We feel economic differences, which are now dramatic, in ways we did not before, and they can be hurtful to some. But the sense of community and friendliness has not changed.”

MY in-laws arrived in Park Slope, then largely working-class Irish, as part of the first wave of gentrification. “Park Slope in the late ’60s was the leading edge of urban revitalization,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University Graduate Center. Founding block associations and planting trees, they were like urban kibbutzniks.

They were part of a “postwar middle-class search for urban authenticity as a refuge from mass consumer culture,” said Suleiman Osman, a Slope native and assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University, who is writing a book about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn. That authenticity, he said, generally lasts only for the first phase of gentrification. It’s a theme in modern urban history: the sense that authenticity is always slipping away. In short, this place was authentic until you people showed up. Repeat.

Outside any authenticity smackdown, what has remained constant in Park Slope is the glory of Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Museum; the relative quiet and calm; and the fact that for the same bazillion dollars you might get a few more square feet than you get in Manhattan (maybe on a block with a tree).

And maybe that, when it comes to anti-Slopism, is all we need to know. Josh Grinker, the chef and an owner of Stone Park Cafe (the salmon and quinoa place), practically answered my question before I finished asking it. Why do people hate Park Slope? “They’re jealous because they can’t live here,” he said.

Many others whom I asked had the same response. “There is all this class resentment in New York, and it’s very tied up in real estate,” Dr. Mollenkopf said. “People who are well-housed are the envy of others.”

Park Slope also may provide a peek into a crystal ball that some don’t want to see. “Hipsters and people who don’t have kids are terrified of becoming grown-ups and parents, which is what Park Slope has come to represent,” said Jeff Sandgrund, 30, a lifelong Park Sloper. “So you lash out against that as if it’s the worst thing in the world, when in five years, you know what? It’s going to be you.”

No consideration of Park Slope is complete without a discussion of stroller semiotics, of the stroller as synecdoche for the perceived evils of the neighborhood and indulgent urban child rearing in general. The high-end stroller which is not confined to Park Slope has become an epithet as inseparable from the Slope as “wine-dark” is from the sea.

To their detractors, expensive strollers are in-your-face, in-your-way status symbols. They say, “I paid for this stroller, to say nothing of my three-story town house, which authorizes me to take up nine square feet.”

Sharyn Wolf, a psychotherapist in Manhattan, had fun with the query, taking it even further. “They’re a metaphor for power,” she said. “And whoever is in power, we hate.”

As one Sloper recently groused on Brooklynian.com: “How come the mommies get to make all the rules around here?”

And lest we forget: these strollers, this privilege perceived and otherwise this Xanadu. Where is it? Brooklyn.

Brooklyn?

Brooklyn was supposed to be Manhattan’s little burnout brother. When I arrived in New York, Brooklyn was the place you could reliably feel superior to, if you thought about it at all. New Yorkers don’t hate the Upper East Side in the same way because that’s old money, old news. But Brooklyn? “There’s the feeling that yuppies in Park Slope are washing away Brooklyn’s grittiness and making it more like Manhattan,” said Jose Sanchez, chairman of urban studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. “Brooklyn was supposed to be different. Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be.”

That’s why our feelings about Park Slope are linked to our feelings about our entire city: our overpriced, chain-store city run by bankers, socialites and, it seems, mommies. The artists are fleeing and your friends, it seems, have become Park Slope pod people. (And they’re coming for you, too.) It’s starting to feel as if there’s nowhere left to hide. And that if we lose Brooklyn, we lose everything.

Though actually, if you could keep hating Park Slope, that would be great. Maybe if it really falls out of favor, I’ll be able to afford to stay.

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