Hey, that article by freelance journalist Lynn Harris, who interviewed many of us two months ago for an article about Why People Hate Park Slope originally intended for New York Magazine, is in the Style section of the Times this Sunday.
Props to Harris: she did email to say that the piece would probably be in the Times this week. The great thing about Harris is that she stays in touch with those she interviews and lets them know what’s happening with the article she writes.
That’s a nice journalistic habit.
The Times’ piece, called Where is the Love, explores the hatred that Park Slope evokes in some:
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.
The article comes complete with a photo of a mom with a stroller taken at the Green Market at Grand Army Plaza. Quoted are many familiar names, including James Bernard (one of the Park Slope 100), who founded the magazine The Source and is on the board of the new Brooklyn Prospect charter school in Park Slope:
“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.”
Also quoted are Slopers Suleiman Osman, an assistant professor of American Studies, who is writing a book about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn. Steven Berlin Johnson of Outside.In, and Josh Grinker of the Stone Park Cafe. No she didn’t use any quotes from me.
It’s an article about a strange cultural phenomenon: the demonization of a neighborhood in a city full of neighborhoods that are fun to make fun of. I guess Park Slope is the current "it neighborhood" to hate. And people love to hate. They really do.
In a world where there is so much to be angry about, it’s funny that Park Slope should absorb so much NYC rage. But hey, it’s got to go somewhere.
I thought that NYT article was a bummer. Park Slope is great. What did it ever do to you? Leave it alone.
I think people are projecting a lot of things onto Park Slope, mythologizing the parents, the strollers. It’s no different than any other neighborhood in some regards, but on top of that it has so much more to offer. Has anyone been to Tribeca lately? Think of the zombies in Darien, in Westchester–Park Slope isn’t homogeneous like that. It’s full of very differnt people, living together, near a park. That’s all it is. A nice collection of buildings with people who like living near green space. It’s a park with a slope.
As a regular interviewee of Lynn’s articles on why people hate Park Slope, I have to make clear that one reason for any antipathy I might have for Park Slope is NOT that “Brooklyn was supposed to be different,” according to some quoted in Lynn’s article. It continues: “Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be. And if we lose Brooklyn, we lose everything.”
Let me shout this out – Brooklyn, in many of its long-established neighborhoods outside of Park Slope and the surrounding “Heights”, is still a bastion for clannish, homogeneous, xenophobic collections of ethnic tribes holding onto their frozen identities as Italians, Irish, Polish, Hasidic, Russian, Jamaican, etc., hold-outs who believe that surrendering to the melting pot that is New York City at its best is tantamount to selling their soul to the devil.
I do not hate Park Slope because it is ruining what the rest of Brooklyn is. If I hate Park Slope, it is because of what Park Slope pretends to be and isn’t – an enlightened enclave of modern parenting.