Geographic Profile: Park Slope, Brooklyn

I moved to Park Slope in August 2004. When I told my grandma – a lifelong Brooklynite – where we bought a condo, she replied, “well that’s not a great area.” Of course, she was talking about 20 or 30 years ago. It turns out, the Slope today is a great area. The combination of beautiful 19^th century architecture, a clear grid system of streets, and proximity to Prospect Park, subway lines, and Manhattan combine to offer what I think of as the best neighborhood in New York City.

7th avenue, looking north from about 8th street

Physical Design
Park Slope, as its name would suggest, is built on a gently sloping hill, with the park at the top. The neighborhood is defined by a grid system of streets, including two main commercial avenues – 5^th and 7^th – running north-south, and about 20 residential side streets running east-west, with the named and lower numbered streets at the northern end. 7^th Avenue has been the traditional commercial strip, with more established shops and restaurants, but recently, 5th Avenue has also become host to a growing number of hip gourmet restaurants, boutiques and bars.

Both the streets and the avenues of the Slope have perfect proportions to accommodate a comfortable walking lifestyle. The avenues – lined with mostly four- and five-story buildings that are built fully out to the sidewalk – features only one lane of traffic in each direction, buffered from the curb by parked cars. The streets are mostly one-way, except for Union and 9^th street, which divide the neighborhood into thirds. The street design keeps traffic slow, which makes it comfortable for strolling or outside of a restaurant or cafe to people-watch. The outer edges of the sidewalks on both the streets and the avenues are lined with trees, creating a sense of enclosure when walking on the sidewalk, as if moving through a well-defined shaft of space, with the clear goal of the next corner down the block. A full array of business operate on the avenues, including locally owned pizza joints, “bodega” style groceries, and hardware stores, in addition to the more fashionable restaurants and shops. Because of the centralized commercial strips and the walkable scale, Park Slope is the kind of place where the shoppers and store owners know each other by name, and you always have a good chance of running in to a friend when you’re out and about.

the litchfield villa, built in the 1850's in what is now the western edge of prospect park. mr. litchfield owned much of what is now park slope.

History

Park Slope contains Brooklyn’s largest historic district, with some of the nation’s best examples of late 19^th century Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne, and Renaissance Revival style brownstone rowhouses. The impetus for the development of Park Slope, then referred to as Prospect Hill, was the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. Most of the neighborhood was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as a commuter suburb of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. One of the defining features of the neighborhood that attracted residents was Prospect Park, which borders the neighborhood on its eastern edge. The Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Manhattan’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and it contains some of the City’s most beautiful open meadows, forests, and undulating hills. Although the neighborhood declined after World War II, by the late 1970’s new residents were moving in, and restoring much of the historic character and original charm to the neighborhood.

a typical park slope street

Culture
Park Slope has a reputation as a politically progressive activist community. Much effort has been expended in the preservation of the historic integrity of the neighborhood, and Park Slope is the “Recycling Capital” of New York City. Voluntary recycling programs had been ongoing in the neighborhood since the 1970’s, and the neighborhood has hosted such innovative waste management programs as the first Citywide Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day, an intensive recycling pilot program that diverted 35% of the municipal solid waste into recycling waste streams, a battery recycling project, and annual voluntary Christmas Tree Recycling drop-off points, which eventually grew into a Citywide collection program.

Social concerns also occupy a high place on the neighborhood’s agenda. The area is home to numerous civic, merchant and social organizations that offer many forums for social discourse. The Park Slope Food Co-op is the largest member-owned and operated food co-op in the country, with over 10,000 members, many of whom participate on the Co-op’s political committees, addressing issues like genetically modified foods and the use of pesticides. The area also prides itself on its diversity and contains a spectrum of socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. For example, it has the highest lesbian population in the City and has played host to Brooklyn’s annual Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Pride parade and celebration since 1997.

Of course, when walking the streets of Park Slope, you can’t help but notice all the babies, and all the yuppies. It seems like as soon as Manhattan professionals hit about 30 and have a kid, they buy a $3,000 titanium stroller and immediately transfer to the Slope. I have regularly seen double and – if you can believe it – triple strollers rolling down 7^th avenue on weekends, giving rise to the uniquely Park Slope phenomenon of “stroller gridlock. And “gentrification” has become a related hallmark issue in the Slope. For the past 20 or 30 years, many parts of the neighborhood were occupied by a blue-collar Latino community. But more recently there has been a rise in more affluent young professionals, and the shops and restaurants that cater to them. Real estate prices have ballooned, and building owners who used to rent are starting to sell. On the first of each month, you can see a new young urban professional moving into the apartment formerly occupied by an older Latino family.

the montauk club on 8th avenue

"Gentrification?"
As you can tell, there are many things I love about my neighborhood, but I tend to have mixed feelings about gentrification. On one level, it is clear that the neighborhood's hot real estate market is driving out families who will have to find another place to live. But that has already happened in Manhattan; which is why more people are moving into the Slope to begin with. I always feel awkward walking home from work in my business suit past the stoop-sitters who camp out all day on my block. But my family also has history in Park Slope. At the turn of the century, my Russian immigrant great grandfather owned a grocery store on 5th avenue, and he lived with his family on 6th avenue at 11th street until roughly the mid-1920's. So it seems different families have been replacing eachother for generations. Gentrification is often discussed in terms of it being a problem, but it is a complex topic, especially in relentlessly free-market American cities like New York, where everybody wants a piece of the same pie.