St. James Place Block Association

I AM PARK SLOPE
Will diversity be part of our future?
January 21, 2007 6pm
admission: $5.00 suggested donation

The BAX Platform is a hybrid conversation series combining the best of your front stoop and kitchen table with the unique perspective of the newsmakers - making sure all things are considered.

Featured Panelists: Chris Owens - Founder and Chairman of the Paul Robeson Independent Democrats (PRIDE), and an ardent advocate against the Atlantic Yards development; CB6 Chair Craig Hammerman; Brooklyn Pride?’s Doreen De Jesus; longtime Park Slope residents, mother and son Marianna Gaston & Javier Gaston Greenberg (Marianna helped found Brooklyn New School); Pauline Toole & Gene Russianoff - Park Slope Parents and (Gene) staff attorney for New York Public Interest Research Group; Susan Fox of Park Slope Parents; Emily Millay Haddad (recently featured in a New York Times story on Park Slope); and Nancy McDermott, a founding member of NY Salon in conversation with BAX Executive Director Marya Warshaw
Amid a ''fast-changing, perpetually gentrifying (NY Times)'' neighborhood, what Park Slope lacks is a conversation between the people who dug their heels in decades ago and its more recent settlers. In the 70s, it was ''hippie slope.'' Then in the late 70s and early 80s it became known as ''dyke slope.'' By the 80s, Wall Street companies were giving prospective employees bus tours of the neighborhood. Who?’s here now and what values do we/can we/should we hold as neighbors? Join us to explore and discuss this hot-button topic.

Diversity

I've lived in Park Slope (in the same apartment) for the past 12 years now, and I've watched it become less and less diverse during that time; gentrification has been the death of many of the things that made the neighborhood desirable to me even before I had the chance to finally move here. The panel assembled to speak at BAX's event is interesting; I like some of the panelists because I think they have a commitment to positive growth in the neighborhood, but other panelists seem to represent only a small substructure of the neighborhood - but who are extremely vocal about the ''shoulds'' of living here (and I specifically mean the Park Slope Parents group - they're a group of very affluent parents who devote considerable space on their listserv to discussions of what kinds of high-priced consumer goods should be bought for their kids, how best to pay nannies off the books, where to get a contractor to do interior renovations on their condos/houses/coops, and the like, and who refuse to discuss the impact of the Atlantic Yards project on the neighborhood at large because it's ''too controversial'' - ooh! Controversy! How dreadful!).
When I moved here, I had people from the other end of the Slope ask me why I'd essentially moved to the wrong side of the tracks (I live on the ''wrong'' side of Fifth Avenue and 9th Street, at least from the perspective of Garfield or St. John's Place). I have a rent stabilized apartment on a block where many, if not most, of my neighbors have lived here for decades, raised families here, work in the neighborhood, and for the most part seem like solid, good people to have as neighbors. Kids live and play on this block; the neighbors talk to each other and actually look out for each other. And I can still (just) afford the rent. And that's the good side. The negative side, though, is that rents are going up through the roof right here on this block; I had to fight like hell for two years to keep my apartment when my former landlord tried to harass me out by accusing me of damaging his property. I won my case, but the stress made me physically ill for most of a year. There's been a huge turnover in tenancy in my building; now I've got some 20-something moron living below me who moved in last spring, threw a hellacious party that annoyed people living across the street because it was that loud, and he has the cojones to complain to me regularly about the innocent noises that my son makes while playing in our apartment. I still want to stay on here, but when maintaining a decent quality of life - and enjoying what remains of the positive aspects of the neighborhood - involves having to literally fight to hang on, there are days when I wonder whether the neighborhood's just OVER. Thing is, I've lived in a lot of different neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and Park Slope still has many amenities that make it far more interesting than - for instance - Flatbush or Bay Ridge.