Says New York Magazine: Ditmas Park is the 39th reason to love New York; our very own San Francisco. And they even mention blogger, Liena Zagare of Ditmas Park Blog.
What New Yorker with a repressed
slacker-hippie side hasn’t fantasized about ditching Gotham for calmer,
quainter San Francisco? Some locals have been satisfying that yen by
simply moving to Ditmas Park, the Victorian-packed enclave south of
Prospect Park. It isn’t just that the West Coast metropolis and the
west-of-Flatbush hamlet share an abundance of turn-of-the-century
painted ladies (which in Ditmas now fetch up to $1.8 million and reach
their height of Gothic-Oriental grandness on both sides of stately
Albemarle Road). You can also see similarities in the restaurant scene:
The reigning culinary draw, the Farm on Adderley
(1108 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-287-3101), references Chez Panisse (okay,
that’s in Berkeley, not Frisco) in its strident locavorism and
mismatched plates. And Ditmas’s tiny, cozy Cinco de Mayo
(1202 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-693-1022) can hold its own in the Mexican
brunch department against the Mission District’s Pancho Villa Taqueria
(although the latter’s burritos are admittedly better). Then there are
the political echoes, with the Beat- beloved City Lights bookstore and
Café Trieste intertwining at Vox Pop
(1022 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-940-2084), where, on a recent Sunday, you
could order a Cesar Chavez personal pizza, buy lefty tracts, and listen
to a live drum circle from a group called Manhattan Samba. “The vibe
there’s very San Francisco,” says local Joshua Levy, managing editor of
change.org, a “social-action blog network” based in, naturally, S.F.
“It’s a bunch of communists hanging out and drinking Fair Trade coffee
while reading conspiracy books,” he half-jokes. Not that every Ditmas
denizen embraces the comparison. Political-contribution records show
that chunks of Ditmas actually lean red, notes Liena Zagare, who writes
the popular Ditmas Park Blog. And Mary Kay Gallagher,
a longtime Ditmas Realtor, points out that those Bay Area Victorians
are mostly stuck together. “Ours are detached,” she says. “That means a
driveway and a garage and a backyard.” But is it big enough to leave
your heart in?
