ONE Monday morning, on the way to her office in the basement of the
Montauk Club in Park Slope, Louise Crawford passed a man staring up at
a tree. Lingering for a moment, she asked him what was so interesting.
It turned out that a yellow-throated songbird known as a Nashville warbler, in its northward
migration, had made a pit stop in the neighborhood and was perched on a
branch.
Not exactly a lunar landing. And even on a slow news
day, the warbler’s arrival seemed unlikely to attract the attention of
the news media. But Ms. Crawford, who writes a Park Slope-focused blog,
Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, and whose role in the borough’s blogging
family most closely resembles that of the nurturing matriarch, was
elated.
“It’s a good story,” she said. “It’s an exclusive.”
Later that day, the post went up: a short account of the human
encounter and the bird sighting, tinged with Ms. Crawford’s
recollection of her father, an amateur ornithologist, taking her as a
child to Central Park on bird-watching excursions.
Such musings,
embroidered with the personal, are a critical element of “placeblogs”
like Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, whose writers frequently and
sometimes obsessively punch point-of-view histories into their laptops
to yield sites that document everything from a neighborhood’s
significant quakes to its slightest tremors.
Or, as Placeblogger.com,
a Web site that promotes and tracks blogs with a hyperlocal focus, put
it: “Placeblogs are about the lived experience of a community, some of
which is news and some of which isn’t.”
In the past year, the
word Bloglyn has been cropping up a lot, a reflection of the fact that
Brooklyn, particularly brownstone Brooklyn, has emerged as possibly the
center of the placeblog world. Web forums serve as virtual town hall
meetings (complete with hecklers), and bloggers peer with equal
interest at controversial development projects, restaurant openings and
the most minute of neighborhood minutiae.
After tracking blogs in
about 3,000 American neighborhoods for six months, a study released
this year by the Web site Outside.in declared Clinton Hill the
“bloggiest” neighborhood in America.
No other Brooklyn
neighborhoods made the top 10. The people conducting the survey
acknowledged, however, that Brooklyn neighborhoods could have taken up
a lot of space on the list; as if wary of placing an entire ball club’s
roster on the all-star team at the expense of the rest of the league,
they chose Clinton Hill for the No. 1 slot but omitted the others. And
as Steven Berlin Johnson of Park Slope, a creator of Outside.in,
explained, in terms of socioeconomic makeup, the national top 10 and
the Brooklyn top 10 look a lot alike.
“On a per capita basis,”
said Robert Guskind, founder of the year-old blog Gowanus Lounge, which
he says gets 85,000 page views per month, “we have more bloggers than
any other part of the city, and more than anywhere that I know of. More
than in Manhattan, and way more than in Queens.” Mr. Guskind, who is
also the Brooklyn editor of Curbed.com, said he was not aware of any placeblogs in Staten Island or the Bronx.
Ms. Crawford is typical of the breed of individuals running these quirky byways of the information highway.
In
accordance with the unwritten rules of placeblogging, Ms. Crawford
considers her three-year-old blog an “informal portal” with no pretense
of objectivity and, by definition, an automatic interest in anything
that ever happens in or relating to Park Slope. This is why she
welcomes e-mail tips from readers sharing observations like “I think I
heard a gunshot” or questions like “What was that smell last night?”
For Ms. Crawford and her audience, absolutely nothing is too trivial.
The
quirks of her own life reflect her postage stamp of home turf. Ms.
Crawford, a mother of two, writes a parenting column called Smartmom
for The Brooklyn Paper, and observations on education and child-rearing
factor prominently in her blog. In a recent entry on her daughter’s
fifth-grade graduation ceremony at Public School 321, she wrote:
“Graduations. Parties. They’re going on all over the city. These are
the milestone moments that require Kleenex and a strong margarita
afterwards.”
Inspired by The Atlantic Monthly’s list of the 100
most influential Americans, last year Ms. Crawford compiled the “Park
Slope 100,” a list that included well-known Slope figures like the
writer Paul Auster and the actor Steve Buscemi, but also lesser-known
residents, like a stoic local barista who serves coffee and muffins
with a particular grace, and her therapist.
“I just kind of threw that in,” Ms. Crawford said of this last inclusion. “Nobody mentioned it.”
