Park Slope: Notes on a Middle-Class "Utopia"
Rosenberg, Jan
A familiar story, playing itself out in city after city: skyrocketing housing costs send upscale urban dwellers looking for new areas to "pioneer" (some would say invade) and to reshape to their...
...This child-centered, family-oriented Park Slope, anchored in its own institutions, has its own landmarks and symbols: the area around "the monument" at Ninth Street and Prospect Park West on Saturday spring mornings is one of these...
...Its early-childhood programs helped revitalize the temple, drawing Jewish families into (or back into) Jewish institutional life...
...Saviour's uniform, and dons a yarmulke to offset his St...
...Faced with dwindling membership and bleak prospects in 1970, its former grandeur faded, temple members had the good sense and good luck to create one of the early neighborhood nursery schools...
...The park block residents of Third Street, always one of the Slope's most beautiful and desirable blocks (and Sidney Hook's home through the 1940s and 1950s) organized the Park Slope Betterment Committee to promote the neighborhood's revival...
...The southern and eastern sides of the park, bordered by predominantly black neighborhoods, seem a distant land...
...Veterans of the antiwar, civil rights, and feminist movements quickly found each other in, and drew each other to, this budding urban community...
...A tennis pro from Sheepshead Bay, accountants and teachers from Bensonhurst, are drawn to the shops, the people, the élan of Park Slope, where they encounter the full range of young professionals priced out of the Village and the Upper West Side, searching for an affordable "outer borough" alternative...
...The park serves as more of a barrier than a meeting ground between white upper-middle-class and black and Hispanic Brooklyn...
...The kids, drawn from public, private, and FALL • 1987 • 565 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES parochial schools, wait at the monument for their teams to assemble and games to begin...
...Stroll through Park Slope on a warm Saturday night, past young middle-class crowds patronizing a cornucopia of chic new restaurants offering the latest in trendy cuisine: sushi, Tex-Mex, "continental," five types of Chinese, Thai, and various gourmet take-out shops...
...Saviour's and St...
...And across the East River, similar changes march through Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and particularly Park Slope—the "brownstone" neighborhoods ringing downtown Brooklyn...
...Completing the ambience are those emblems of yuppiedom, Benetton' s , a nearly-completed D ' Agostino ' s , and a recently arrived "closet designer...
...Clashes between rival Hispanic and Italian gangs made the area inhospitable to the middle class...
...By the mid-1980s, despite considerable expansion of gentrified Park Slope's boundaries, only highly paid professionals, bankers and the like (and those lucky enough to have queued up on time), could afford to own a home in Park Slope...
...This is New York Magazine's Park Slope...
...Ironically (but predictably) the end of redlining sped up the gentrification, which was soon to work against middle-class housing/investment opportunities...
...Saviour's shirt before visiting them on the Sabbath after his game...
...These Saturday-night sidewalks are filled with well-dressed, well-coiffed people in their twenties, thirties, and forties (hardly any are beyond their forties...
...the Community School Board has committed its resources to establishing an "alternative school" similar to the ones in Manhattan's District 4 founded by Deborah Meier...
...School politics reflect the neighborhood's concentration of leftists and liberals...
...Early antiredlining campaigns were organized by people experienced with bankers' power to make and break neighborhoods...
...In Manhattan, it has transformed areas once filled with machine shops and printing plants into the luxury lofts and art spaces of Soho, Noho, and TriBeCa...
...Interspersed among the restaurants are numerous real estate offices and nearly as many "new wave" florists (there's almost a florist a block in the heart of the Slope's Seventh Avenue...
...This middle-class family neighborhood was losing out to newer, more promising suburban areas...
...A New York Times article had trumpeted the neighborhood's virtues: its distinguished architecture and undervalued homes, its beautiful park, and the nearby presence of other artists...
...The single-room occupants they displaced have long since been forgotten by the current owners 566 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES and their neighbors...
...Many came in couples, expecting to settle in and eventually to have and raise their children here...
...Awash in a maroon and yellow sea of St...
...Connections between private neighborhood gentrification and the careful restoration of once-treasured, then-deteriorated public space suggest themselves to even the most casual visitor...
...One is the Park Slope of neighborhood day-care centers and nursery schools, of after-school programs and Little League, of PS 321 and JHS 51, of religious institutions, nearly moribund only a few years ago, revitalized by the in-migration of families since the early 1970s...
...The mix of people in public institutions, the subway rides to and from "the City," the architecture, the shared public grandeur of a partially restored Prospect Park— these eddies against the tide of privatization are reminders that one has embraced a postsuburban dream of a vital, complex, dynamic urban life...
...It's a cold, drizzly Saturday in April and the parade to officially open the neighborhood baseball season is about to begin...
...q FALL • 1987 • 567 568 • DISSENT...
...Congregation Beth Elohim (the Garfield Temple) also typifies the neighborhood...
...They, too, were drawn by the affordable space, the park, and the presence of others like themselves...
...Like artists, 1960s radicals were another important trickle in the early 1970s migration stream...
...But there are other Park Slopes flourishing, in ways less familiar, less commercial...
...One early "pioneer," a writer-editor who moved to Park Slope with her artist husband in 1968, left Manhattan for the Slope's beautiful, ample space, and affordable homes...
...They pressured the banks to give mortgages and held meetings to advise prospective neighbors on buying and remodeling homes...
...Several leading elementary schools have adopted the "Peace Curriculum...
...New craft shops display expensive, elegant objets...
...Mayor Koch is going to inaugurate the newly renovated playing fields near Prospect Park's new concert area and playground at Ninth Street, only a stone's throw from the beautifully restored Picnic House and Tennis House—all of which border the Park Slope side of Prospect Park...
...Hundreds of kids and their parents huddle together by team, waiting to march up Union Street and over to "the monument...
...Built in the 1890s as a one-family house with ample room for servants, the brownstone adapted quite readily to the changed circumstances of middle-class families in the 1970s...
...A familiar story, playing itself out in city after city: skyrocketing housing costs send upscale urban dwellers looking for new areas to "pioneer" (some would say invade) and to reshape to their taste...
...this is a place to be, and to be seen...
...The priests ask the non-Catholic parents and children in the league to participate in and respect their preseason service, now nearly purged of specifically Catholic references...
...The couple bought a prime park block house, though it was occupied by numerous tenants and the neighborhood was still redlined by the banks, and converted it from a rooming house to a triplex for themselves and a floor-through rental...
...Francis's baseball uniforms, elementary school kids (mostly boys, despite some organizers' best efforts) embody the neighborhood's vitality and—since many if not most are not Catholic—its ecumenical spirit...
...Ready but unable to buy houses in Park Slope, a neighborhood the banks did not yet believe in, activists successfully challenged the thenstandard diversion of neighborhood resources to finance suburban and Sunbelt development...
...I pull away quickly to park and get back before the first inning, thinking of my friend, Fred I., the envy of the "silent majority": while most of us quietly grumble that our weeks are dominated by Little League (in our own case, practices on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons and "official games" all day Saturday), Fred courageously manages to sneak off to his country house with his brood in tow every weekend...
...The churches and synagogues have made themselves centers of many family-oriented activities, from sports to preschool and after-school programs, potluck dinners and weekend retreats, that knit together some of the baby boomers with children...
...A six year-old boy worries about his orthodox Jewish neighbors seeing him in his St...
...A lone shoemaker hangs on, but for a dime store or bodega where you can still get an ice cream sandwich for under a dollar, you have to literally go down the Slope, an avenue or two away...
...A trickle of newcomers, led by artists seeking affordable housing and studio space, flowed into the Slope...
...But for even the most apolitical of Slopers, there is nagging doubt that their good fortune can endure in a Brooklyn increasingly overwhelmed by an underclass as cut off from prosperity as they are connected...
...Those from Wall Street who specialize in restructuring corporations can now hire someone to restructure their closets, though some spouses have been known to view this as a hostile takeover...
...The atmosphere is thick with style and expectation...
...To the middle class among a generation wary of suburbia's soured promise, places like Park Slope came to be seen as a contemporary alternative, the chance to build a familycentered urban life that is distinctly not suburban...
...The 1950s and 1960s brought hard times to urban neighborhoods all over the country...
...Park Slope was no exception...
...Over the years, personal, community, and political interests have converged around issues of housing and education...
...Not surprisingly, these 1960s veterans remain central to community politics in Park Slope...
...Parking is nearly impossible ("double Park Slope," my older son calls it) as I zoom up on a Saturday morning to drop off my child for his nine o'clock game...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
