You people who think Park Slope is the next West Village need to get a clue. If you want to see what a neighborhood will be like in five years, you don’t look at the present-day losers–the 40-year-old stroller-pushers and twentysomething Uprising employees who form the Park Slope stereotype. You look at the youth. And the youth are little thugs.
The number-one accessory I see on kids in Park Slope: gold chains. Second to that is tight black stretch tops, for girls and boys, and then eggs. Little males in Park Slope like to dress up ghetto and throw eggs at cars, churches, trees and people–the only way they can anger their permissive burnout parents. These kids are dead-set on turning the neighborhood into Bensonhurst.
I understand this won’t be of interest to those who don’t live in Park Slope, so if you don’t care, read something else. But since about 50 percent of white New York resides here (and drags cabs down to 8th Ave. every Saturday night so they can speed back into Manhattan and almost decapitate me, thanks), I know plenty of folks are still with me. What’s the new type of establishment you’re seeing in the neighborhood?
Gelato stands, that’s what. Not bookstores or yogurt warehouses–gelato stands. And places that used to sell just ice cream now sell gelato. They try to gussy it up with feminist logos to appease the current Park Slope mistresses, but it’s the same stuff you get down at the Kings Plaza shopping center.
I don’t have any kind of personal beef with this. Neighborhoods change. When my parents moved to Park Slope in 1988, it was all lesbians–my formative years were spent looking at the "Dangerous Curves: Dyke Dance" posters stuck to the bottom of every lamppost. Before that, the Slope was working-class–the only remnant of that era being John Jay High School, whose students are a lot more polite than the males currently brewing at P.S. 321.
And hey, Bensonhurst has its charms. Pretty girls, for one thing. And the Gap. And I don’t mind gelato. But if you’re thinking of moving your family to Park Slope, the safe, supportive, artistic capital of Brooklyn child-rearing, go drive down 86th St. (in Brooklyn, stupid) and take a look around. That’s what it’s going to be in five years.
And to the kids who threw eggs at me while I was carrying a 40-pound trunk, missed completely and then ran into their apartment building as I pursued them like an endangered grizzly: I haven’t forgotten. I will find and castrate you.
