Despite pouring rain I made it out my door for the 5th Avenue annual street fair and consumed the following items of deliciousness.
- Empanadas
- Sausage and broccoli
- Taquitos
- Corn
- Chili
- Cupcakes
It's kind of funny that this big street fair in Park Slope occurred in the same weekend that the New York Times published an inflammatory article about the hostility directed towards my neighborhood in Brooklyn. Many neighborhoods in New York City have a reputation or stereotype, fair or unfair, regarding its denizens--Williamsburg is known for its hipsters, Murray Hill for its cookie cutter doormen apartments occupied by privileged recent Penn graduates, Upper West Side for...well, just watch You Got Mail, and so on--and Park Slope is popularly (or unpopularly) categorized as a neighborhood of "limousine-liberal yuppies" and "Stroller Nazis."
“There’s the feeling that yuppies in Park Slope are washing away Brooklyn’s grittiness and making it more like Manhattan,” said Jose Sanchez, chairman of urban studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. “Brooklyn was supposed to be different. Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be.”
That’s why our feelings about Park Slope are linked to our feelings about our entire city: our overpriced, chain-store city run by bankers, socialites and, it seems, mommies. The artists are fleeing and your friends, it seems, have become Park Slope pod people. (And they’re coming for you, too.) It’s starting to feel as if there’s nowhere left to hide. And that if we lose Brooklyn, we lose everything.
Of course as James Bernard, "a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6" points out all this inflammatory dialogue occurs in a vacuum--a vacuum of essentially white people talking about other white people: while it may appear Park Slope is a focus of many conversations, Bernard says "I don’t hear anyone talking about Park Slope over there [in Brownsville]."
Read more here.