PARK SLOPE: 1992

My friend sent me this story about Park Slope that appeared in the New York Times back in 1992.

By BRET SENFT
Published: November 1, 1992
PARK SLOPE is families everywhere and brownstones, street after street of them. Far enough from Manhattan for a neighborhood feel, it maintains, in its multiracial population and cultural institutions, what many residents call an urban sophistication.

“A very small-town community with a cosmopolitan attitude,” said George Etchison, a 20-year resident and owner of the Brownstone Gallery on Seventh Avenue, the Slope’s main street. The gallery’s current exhibition, “Made in Brooklyn,” features local artists and memorabilia from the borough’s heyday.

The “small town” was still a sparsely populated rural area in 1857, when the railroad financier Edwin C. Litchfield built an Italianate villa overlooking his vast property sloping down to the Gowanus Canal.

By 1874, the 526-acre Prospect Park was completed, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to encompass the villa, which now houses park offices. The designers, regretting the traverses of Central Park, their earlier commission, created a separate entity, Institute Park, for the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum and a 50-acre Botanic Garden, north of Flatbush Avenue.

Grand Army Plaza, the main entrance to the park, was patterned after the traffic circle around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe; Victory in her chariot pulled by four horses rides atop the massive Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial arch.

In the 1880’s, mansions and brownstones for the English and German upper class, with stained-glass windows, carved oak paneling and high-relief plasterwork, were built along the park and adjacent blocks. Along Eighth Avenue off the Plaza are Romanesque Revival mansions built in 1888 by Thomas Adams Jr., creator of Chiclets chewing gum, and in 1891 by George P. Tangeman, the baking powder magnate. The Venetian Gothic palazzo built in 1891 for the private Montauk Club has a terra-cotta exterior and friezes depicting its eponymous tribe. The Park Slope Civic Council holds an annual neighborhood house tour in May.

As the area developed, distance from the park was measured economically, with more modest brownstones built in the central and south Slope for Irish and Italian immigrants working as servants for the gentry, on the waterfront or in factories.

In the 1950’s, with middle-class flight to the suburbs and social deterioration, one-family brownstones were converted to rooming houses. In the 60’s, so-called Brownstone Pioneers — young professionals, along with artists and teachers — reclaimed the rowhouses, buying cheap and embarking on long-term renovations.

“We called it ‘the schoolteacher’s coup’ — buying an Upper East Side-quality brownstone on schoolteachers’ pay,” said Everett H. Ortner, writer, historian and co-founder in 1968 of the Brownstone Revival Committee. (His wife, Evelyn, a longtime community activist, led the seven-year effort that culminated in 1973 in the designation of a historic district bordering the park and Plaza.)

In those “coup” days, a brownstone cost less than $25,000. Today, they cost $360,000 to $500,000, says Roberta L. Faulstick of William B. May Company, although “many handyman specials in the South Slope” average $250,000.

Most prevalent, however, is “the resegmentation of the housing stock into luxury co-ops,” said Clem Labine, a 25-year resident and publisher of Traditional Building, a magazine for professional restorers. Two-bedroom co-ops in brownstones run $125,000 to $250,000, said Ms. Faulstick.

Rentals range from $700 for a studio to $1,600 for a three-bedroom duplex, higher if there is a garden, terrace or roof deck.

ON a recent Sunday at the park boathouse, David Kaplan and his family enjoyed the Touch of Autumn fair organized by park rangers. Mr. Kaplan, a vice-president with Citibank, held his son Isaac, 2 years old, while Bonnie Quint Kaplan and their daughter Nadine, 5, toured the nature exhibits that were in the boathouse that weekend.

“This is a very relaxed place to live compared to Manhattan,” said Ms. Kaplan, unwrapping a sandwich for Nadine. The family lives in a seven-room co-op in a tall luxury building at 35 Prospect Park West, offering, Ms. Kaplan said, “a Fifth Avenue feeling, since we’re right across from the park, in a building we couldn’t possibly afford if it were in Manhattan.”

Among the amenities are the park, with its carrousel, which was renovated by the Prospect Park Alliance, and the zoo, which is to reopen next year after a $36 million renovation; a half-dozen day-care centers; the Pinch Sitters Agency, for last-minute babysitters; a farmers’ market in Grand Army Plaza each Saturday; the 3,850-member Park Slope Food Co-op in two converted carriage houses on Union Street; the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, offering concerts and recitals, and, in warm weather, frequent brownstone stoop sales, the counterpart to suburban garage sales.

Inside the park bordering the neighborhood is the 11th Street playground, the nearby Bandshell and, across West Drive, seven ball fields for a thriving Little League population.

For the hungry, there’s a wide choice on Seventh Avenue, including New Prospect at Home (at St. John’s Place; take-out entrees, salads and pastries), the New Purity Restaurant (Union Street; since 1929); Inaka Sushi House (at Fourth Street) and the kid-friendly Two Boots Pizza (off Seventh at Second Street).

At Seventh Street, John J. Cortese runs the grocery his grandfather founded 77 years ago. His stock-in-trade, besides dry goods, fruits and vegetables, is children. As commissioner of the Park Slope Baseball League, he oversees 34 sandlot teams and coordinates umpires for 140 Little League teams in the spring.

“On Saturdays and Sundays, it’s a beautiful thing to see: wall-to-wall kids in Prospect Park,” he said.

A downside is the progressive neighborhood’s inability to reach consensus on social problems. Illegal street vendors clog the Seventh Avenue sidewalks on weekends and the homeless beg for change at several automatic teller machines. Does this bespeak urban blight or personal initiative? Neighborhood reaction is split 50-50, according to Craig R. Hammerman, assistant district manager for Community Board 6.

“THIS is a place where a marketplace of ideas are freely bantered about,” he said. “Thus, not merely the debate but the appearance of inaction can be frustrating.”

There are six elementary schools, with P.S. 321 on Seventh Avenue getting high marks for its heavy parental involvement. The Brooklyn New School, an alternative created by the district in 1987, with emphasis on individual hands-on learning, adjoins I.S. 88 (one of two junior high schools).

The once-troubled John Jay High School, with 4,000 students, got a $3 million Federal grant in 1989 to upgrade and introduce new curriculum, such as the law and justice program, with its model courtroom and forensic laboratory and a computerized library research system. The school has been divided into Houses (such as Law and Justice, Humanities and Computer), with corporate partnerships with I.B.M., which provided networked computer labs throughout the school, and Chemical Bank, which provided funds for special projects.

As for private schools, the Woodward Park School, created in 1978 in a merger with the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, uses progressive Bank Street methods of experiential learning for its 160 students from nursery to grade 8. Tuition is $7,000 to $9,000 a year.

Founded in 1886, the Berkeley Carroll School, with 640 pre-k-12 students, emphasizes math, science and foreign language and has computer instruction starting in kindergarten. The Beyond Berkeley Carroll program has students volunteering in soup kitchens, geriatric centers and environmental projects throughout the neighborhood. Summer programs include a day camp, Young Scientists Institute and the well-known Creative Arts program. Tuition is $4,500 to $10,800 a year

One thought on “PARK SLOPE: 1992”

  1. Here’s a similar “If You’re Thinking of Living In…” Real Estate article from the Times from five years before that:
    May 17, 1987
    JAN HODENFIELD remembers six years ago when a town house in Park Slope could be bought for less than $200,000 and Seventh Avenue was mostly bodegas, cobblers and neighborhood bars. Today, brownstones cost $750,000 and a Benetton clothing store opened on the avenue in October.
    ”When a Benetton opened on Seventh Avenue, we knew what had happened,” said Mr. Hodenfield, a freelance magazine writer. ”When I came to Brooklyn 12 years ago, it was certainly not chic. This is a really hot neighborhood now.”
    Park Slope, once a place where middle-class urban pioneers could find bargains on rowhouses, has become popular and, consequently, expensive. Its exquisite Victorian town houses, shaded by Norwegian maples and ginkgos, have in recent years lured droves of New Yorkers seeking refuge from Manhattan’s frenetic pace, cramped apartments and soaring rents. They have also helped win it a historic district designation as a ”vivid illustration of the characterization of Brooklyn as a ‘city of homes and churches.’ ”
    The influx has transformed what was largely a working-class neighborhood into an upper-middle-class enclave of expensively renovated private homes, co-ops, boutiques and restaurants.
    Residents prize the Slope for its proximity to Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Mu-seum, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Botanic Garden as well as for its hybrid atmosphere of small-town intimacy and big-city sophistication that the writer Russell Banks, who lives there, once called ”a sense of domestic refuge.”
    On a recent Sunday, its tranquil streets, bathed in the lambent green of budding trees, were full of parents with children strolling calmly toward the park. The sky stretched languidly above, free of the towers that corral it in Manhattan.
    ”The place lives,” said Jacqui Miranda, who edits a local newsletter and has lived in the Slope more than 16 years. ”We can see the sky here and trees.”
    ”It’s not quite as oppressive as Manhattan,” said Rachel Klein, a writer who bought a brownstone in the north end of the neighborhood in 1980. ”It’s greener, more casual, like a little town in a way. Everyone knows each other.” The area takes its name from its geography, lying on the long slope west of Prospect Park above Fourth Avenue, bounded by Flatbush Avenue to the north and the Prospect Expressway to the south.
    Real-estate agents say the supply of houses has been exhausted and prices are climbing steadily by more than 20 percent a year. Today, three-story brownstones range in price from $250,000 in fringe areas near Fourth Avenue up to $900,000 for properties on Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West, the boulevard that runs north and south along the park. Brownstones near the middle of the Slope average $750,000. Condominiums and cooperatives are similarly expensive but more available. One-bedroom apartments run from $90,000 to $180,000; two-bedroom units range between $120,000 and $200,000; three-bedrooms cost $300,000 or more. There is still a substantial amount of rental property available, agents said, ranging from $850 a month for studio apartments to $1,800 for a duplex.
    The escalating values have priced many out of the town-house market. ”For a lot of people, the dream of owning a house is becoming nothing more than a dream,” said George Cambas, a real-estate agent who has lived and worked in Park Slope since 1973. ”They are forced to settle for an apartment.”
    The neighborhood’s main commercial artery, Seventh Avenue, is also showing signs of changes wrought by rising rents. Boutiques and trendy restaurants have proliferated at a rapid rate along the street, which for years was a strip of laundries, newsstands, pharmacies, bodegas, bakeries, hardware stores and a sprinkling of Irish bars. Some of the notable local eating establishments are Raintree’s, a French restaurant at 142 Prospect Park West; J.T. McFeely’s, a steak house at 847 Union Street, and Thai Taste at Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street.
    Older businesses are moving to make room for more upscale establishments. The six cobblers who used to ply their trade on the avenue have all closed, while a D’Agostino’s supermarket, a hallmark of affluent neighborhoods, plans a branch at Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue.
    Kevin Mooney, who has run Mooney’s Pub at 99 Seventh Avenue since 1969, said he has been unable to renew his lease, and the unglamorous, low-key bar will soon move to Flatbush Avenue.
    ”They don’t want bars on Seventh Avenue anymore,” Mr. Mooney said. ”It was very, very sad, but we have to cope with the times.”
    MOST of the new renovations and developments under way are in the southern section of the Slope, once a working-class neighborhood with several light industries. Developers have pushed past Ninth Street, the previous mental boundary of the fashionable Park Slope, and begun converting old factories and abandoned apartment buildings into co-ops.
    The huge Ansonia Clock Factory at 12th Steet and Seventh Avenue was converted in 1982, spawning dozens of other projects. Today, more than 10 conversions are under way or close to completion between 9th and 15th Streets and Seventh Avenue and Prospect Park West.
    Park Slope is ideal for rearing children because of the nearby park’s ballfields, bicycle trails and zoo, but parents give the public schools mixed reviews. The local grade school, P.S. 321, is considered excellent with 84.7 percent of the students scoring at or above their grade level on tests. But the junior high school, I.S. 88., fared worse in the most-recent reading tests, with only 56.3 percent of the students scoring at or above their expected level.
    The neighborhood’s high school, John Jay, has been plagued in the past by disciplinary problems and high dropout rates, but school officials say it has made a remarkable turnaround in the last three years. Since 1984, the dropout rate has declined to 9.6 percent, from 24 percent, and the school has started a new program to improve the academic curriculum for college-bound teen-agers, according to Harold Genkin, the principal.
    The Berkeley Carroll Street School, which has 540 students in classes from preschool to 12th grade, is the only private school in Park Slope. Tuitions range from $5,400 for preschool children to $7,400 for high school seniors. The neighborhood also boasts several dance studios and the highly regarded Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, which gives many recitals each year.
    One drawback to living in Park Slope, residents said, is the rush-hour commute by subway to Manhattan, since trains are often crowded and delayed because of construction on the Manhattan Bridge.
    Park Slope was virtually empty countryside in the 1850’s when Edwin C. Litchfield, a lawyer and railroad executive, began developing industry along the Gowanus Canal. After the Civil War, he sold off his holdings near what is now Prospect Park, and developers built ornate brownstones as summer homes for Manhattan’s wealthy.
    During the first half of the century, the slope was a topographical social ladder, with the working-class occupying modest rowhouses at the bottom of the hill near Fourth Avenue and the rich living near the park. It deteriorated during World War II when speculators bought up private homes and turned them into rooming houses for workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the 1950’s, the remnants of the upper-middle class migrated to the suburbs and many buildings were left abandoned. Urban ”pioneers” moved in during the 60’s, buying dilapidated brownstones for as little as $15,000, and they began the renewal that still is in progress today. GAZETTEER Population: 65,202 (1980 census) Median family income: $15,974 (1980 census) Rush-hour commutation: 30 minutes to midtown via the D, M, Q or B trains from Seventh Ave. at Flatbush Ave., 2 or 3 trains from Grand Army Plaza, or the F train from Seventh Ave. and Ninth St. 20 minutes by car via Flatbush Ave. to the Manhattan Bridge or the Gowanus Expressway to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Median town-house price: $750,000 Median co-op price: $195,000 Median rent: $1,200. Public-school reading scores: P.S. 321 is 85th out of 613 New York City grade schools. Councilmen: Abraham G. Gerges (D.-L.), Stephen DiBrienza (D.). Historic building: The Montauk Club at Eighth Ave. and Lincoln Pl., a men’s club built in 1891 in the style of a Venetian Gothic palazzo. Its name is reflected in its varied Indian motifs.

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