My Saturday wanderings started with a very popular and prosperous part of Brooklyn: Park Slope.
If you’re financially sound and new to NYC: Park Slope calls. And a lot of people are hearing that call. There are definite reasons for that. It’s a nice area with beautiful buildings and a magnificent, terrific, wonderful, beautiful park right next to it: Prospect Park. I’ll be posting separately on that.
Okay, for those people who don’t know Brooklyn: Park Slope is probably just a couple of miles east of Manhattan’s Financial District (that’s at the southern tip of Manhattan). It is easily within reach of Manhattan because of a bunch of subways plus the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a bit north of Coney Island, but it is so far from Coney Island, in a cultural sense, that they practically aren’t on the same planet.
Park Slope is the home of a lot of artists and performers, as well as oodles of the non-hoi polloi (I love getting technical). The prices range from sub-Manhattan to Manhattan equal. The sub-Manhattan prices are in places that call themselves “Park Slope”, but don’t quite share the same zip code(s). The area is quite hilly (that’s the “slope” part) and apparently lays claim to being the area of the story “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. Well, there are lots of trees in this part of Brooklyn.
The area has a lot of brownstones and rowhouses and the like. Here are some on 7th Avenue, which seems to be a main commercial drag in Park Slope.
And a few more.
The thing I love to point out (this is my jealous side) is to look at the window air conditioners. The buildings are old, magnificent, often expensively remodeled, and incapable of handling central air conditioning. You see it all over Manhattan, too.
The houses below are magnificent. They’re on 9th Avenue about a block away from Prospect Park and are probably way, way, way outside any price range I’d ever consider.
Yeah, they’ve got the occasional window air conditioner, too.
Some of the buildings have some interesting art.
There’s even some small art. Here’s a bit of tree protection (probably protecting it from dogs which doesn’t bode well for the art).
Okay, Park Slope is a terrific looking place. But is there more to it? Sure, but my other impressions are so minimal that you can take them for what they’re worth.
The Park Slope Coop (I prefer the more correct “Co-op” to differentiate a cooperative from a chicken house) is an interesting throwback to the 1970s.
The place is busy and filled with non-standard foodstuffs. It is also a little dirtier (although not unsanitary) than I like my grocery stores to be. It has the real feel of the 1970s cooperative food store that I used to go to long ago. But that’s not for good reasons. There are lots of little repairs that need to be done (as in “we’ve got more important things to do rather than repair a few tiles or re-paint a wall”) and the displays are unprofessional. I used to do some retail and it’s always a good idea to pull the few remaining items to the front to make the display look full and flush. At the Park Slope Coop, every single can was pushed as far back as it could go. And almost every line of product wasn’t fully stocked. It isn’t for nothing that Whole Foods is doing so well: they’ve got the co-op feel and selection types down pat, but they’ve done a lot of professionalizing of their appearance.
On the other hand, as I went it a pretty loud woman (apparently just in a boisterous and happy mood) greeted an old friend with the statement “I just finished my film shoot. It was intense, man!”
Another Park Slope image in my mind: lots of stoop sales (people putting out homewares for sale, but having no yard, put it just off the building’s stoop). I saw about four stoop sales in three blocks. My favorite: a family had out a wide variety of stuff. Not a great quantity, but a great variety. It included two mannequins, an accordian, and an old PC. I took a picture, but it came out poorly, so won’t be shown.
And they did have a great flea market that day. It appears to be a weekly event. I thought it was pretty good.
It included furniture, coins, typewriters, old watches, original art, and (most poignantly) family photos. The quality appeared generally on the good side, so it beats most flea markets hands down.
There are lots and lots of real estate offices. As usual in NYC, all of them have posted “for sale” and “for rent” samples on their front windows. Most of the offices actually have a number of their postings marked “SOLD” or “Under Contract”. I don’t know how true/timely they are and think that’s just to drum up interest on the part of sellers.
I had lunch at a little Tex-Mex place. Not worthy of any note, so I won’t.
Overall, Park Slope is ethnically very caucasian and middle American. I don’t think I heard any foreign languages on the street, but people and events were actually very muted.
-H
Famous Ankles 