Gawker has word that writer Lynn Harris is writing another piece about why people hate Park Slope. This time it’s for New York Magazine. Back in 2006, she wrote a piece for Time Out Kids about the very same topic. Here’s my post from that time:
A bunch of locals spoke to Time Out Kids for an article called, Why Do
People Hate Park Slope. The article is out now in the June issue of
the magazine on page 8.
The reporter, Lynn Harris, sent an email to those who were quoted to
prepare them. She thinks that the tone of the piece was "far more
snarky and anti-Slope than her original version."
The word smugness managed to migrate into the piece and it wasn’t her word. I sort of expected snarky because of the subject matter. Here’s the lede:
"It
had to happen, Now that Brooklyn’s brownstone-laden Park Slope is more
fashionable, it has become de rigueur to bash, slam, and otherwise
trash-talk the nabe. The Slope has arrived — with its famous authors
and Hollywood actorsensconced in fancy fansions — and so have its
detractors."
Harris talked to Steven Berlin Johnson,
Susan Fox, Catherine Bohne, Peter Loffredo, a frequent commenter on
OTBKB and Park Slope Parents and others, including me.
What I was
getting at was why Park Slope is easy to hate — because it seems like
we’ve got it all. We were easier to love when we were scrappier,
schleppier Legal Aid lawyers and social workers. Now it’s rich people
in fancy brownstones with a great school and a small town feeling. It
seems like we have it all.
Who wouldn’t hate Park Slope?
you people are narcissists and boring–maybe it’s the meds you are on or not-
So true, Brooklyn Girl. I, too, live (have been here for 28 years!) in a too-small apartment. I raised two children here. They did not attend the esteemed 321 but another one of the schools that you mentioned. It was great and they did well.
I have always loved the small-town feel of PS. It is truly a community made up of smaller, overlapping communities; I mostly enjoy (and am sometimes amused) by all of them.
I choose to be here.
“Now it’s rich people in fancy brownstones with a great school and a small town feeling. It seems like we have it all.”
But it’s not. I don’t know anyone who lives in a fancy brownstone–everyone I know has a love/hate relationship with their too small apartments (as is the case all over the city).
It isn’t “a great school”–it’s a series of great schools: the vaunted 321, but also 107, 10, 295, 51, 88, and others.
And finally, it isn’t a small community, but a collection of communities with disparate interests that occasionally overlap.