Crazy Stable: NoProPaSo (La Ti Do)

The realtors call it Caton Park but Brenda at Crazy Stable coined another term: NoProPaSo, sounds like something Julie Andrews sings with the Von Trapp kids in the Sound of Music.

And she told it to a  New York Times reporter for Peaked Roofs, Crossed Fingers, an artcile about the landmarking of Victorian Flatbush in the City Section. Here’s her post about that article.

In this morning’s Times City Section, a full-page story
tells the tales of how many Victorian Flatbush enclaves yearn for
landmark status to avoid being pillaged by developers and scarred by
teardowns and high-rises. The CrazyStable’s little sliver of Flatbush,
Caton Park, is given a respectful and fairly accurate accounting:

Caton
Park, which sits just south of the Parade Grounds athletic fields, is
one of Victorian Flatbush’s smaller micro-neighborhoods, with about 50
Victorian homes on a handful of blocks. Its diminutive size means that
each house remodeled (or, as many in Victorian Flatbush like to say,
“re-muddled”) represents a blow to the neighborhood’s prospects for
preservation.

The reporter, Evan Lerner, gets it
slightly askew when he says thatWilliam Styron "lived in one of the
many large homes that were subsequently converted into boardinghouses"
(Styron lived on the corner in a home that had already been converted to a boardinghouse), but I quibble. Here is the gem:

Some
residents worry that too many homes have already been torn down or
remodeled beyond recognition. The neighborhood also has the
disadvantage of being the product of a number of different designers,
unlike some of the areas to the south. But these drawbacks
have not stopped the community’s more preservation-minded residents
from seeking to keep intact the area they call NoProPaSo (North of
Prospect Park South).

Gack! There is just one problem here: Absolutely
nobody on earth calls Caton Park NoProPaSo except…me. As a joke in
the blogosphere. A joke I shared,  with broad eye-rolling irony, with a
New York Times reporter.