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Park Slope Information
Park Slope is a neighborhood in the western section of Brooklyn, New York
City's most populous borough. It is known for its vibrant cultural community and
is considered one of Brooklyn's major cultural centers. The neighborhood is part
of Brooklyn Community Board 6.
Park Slope is roughly bounded by Fourth Avenue, Prospect Park West (Ninth
Avenue), Flatbush Avenue, and Fifteenth Street. It takes its name from its
location on the western slope of neighboring Prospect Park. Seventh Avenue and
Fifth Avenue are its primary commercial streets, while its east-west side
streets are populated many historic brownstones.
The neighborhood has many historic buildings, hip restaurants, bars, and shops,
as well as close access to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Central Library (as well as the Park Slope
branch) of the Brooklyn Public Library system.
Many famous writers, actors and musicians live in Park Slope, including John Linnell of the band They Might Be Giants, writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul Auster, Peter Blauner, Peg Tyre, Siri Hustvedt, John Wray, Colin Harrison, and Kathryn Harrison, jazz tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, and actors Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Connelly, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Bettany, John Turturro, Kathryn Erbe, and Terry Kinney.
By the 1990s, partly as a result of inflated Manhattan rents along with the inflated dot-com economy, people who might otherwise have lived in Manhattan began moving to Park Slope in large numbers. The influx was mainly families and young professionals: hipsters tended to move to Williamsburg, while yuppies tended to move to Park Slope and Greenpoint.
During the second major boom for the neighborhood, Park Slope evolved into a racially and economically mixed neighborhood, a place where stock brokers live alongside poor and middle-class working families. But, this phenomenon is far from natural and is the result of much planning and activism by local community organizations, like the Fifth Avenue Committee, that fought to maintain much of the neighborhood's diversity. A 2001 report by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that from 1990 to 1999, rents in New York City jumped anywhere from 37 percent to 48 percent, depending on what kind of building the apartment was in. The explosion of property values inspired real estate agents to be increasingly generous about the borders of Park Slope, not unlike the expansion of Fort Greene into Bedford-Stuyvesant; South Slope, Prospect Heights, Windsor Terrace, Gowanus, Greenwood Heights, and Boerum Hill all became to some extent part of greater Park Slope.
The negative impact, however, of this gentrification is the displacement of the immigrant population that settled in the 1980s. As yuppies began to move into Park Slope, the rising rents made it difficult for low income residents to stay. Thanks to rent stabilization and the "cachet" of specific addresses, it is not uncommon to find those same early immigrants who moved into the neighborhood living adjacent to renters paying two to three times the rent.
The commercial impacts of the gentrification can also be seen along the popular 5th Avenue stretch, where numerous banks and bars have replaced neighborhood staples such as the Salvation Army and once popular dollar stores. Similarly, on 7th Avenue, many small family-owned bookstores and coffee shops saw a reduction in clientele when Barnes & Noble and Starbucks appeared in the neighborhood. While gentrification and the ensuing rush of brand name stores normally signal a driving down of prices, in some industries such as food services, prices have gone up. The establishing of base prices by corporate businesses have led smaller establishments such as the local convenience store to raise their prices, yet still maintain them under the base.