Park Slope Neighborhood

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.

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 by 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, Franco Ambriz, Peter Blauner, Peg Tyre, Siri Hustvedt, John Wray, Colin Harrison, and Kathryn Harrison, jazz tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, jazz pianist Michael Weiss, and actors Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Connelly, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Bettany, John Turturro, Kathryn Erbe, Ivan Rodriguez and Terry Kinney.

In December 2006 Natural Home magazine named Park Slope one of America's top 10 best "eco-neighborhoods" based on criteria including environmental and/or social policy; parks, green spaces and neighborhood gathering spaces; farmer’s markets and community gardens; public transportation and locally-owned businesses.

History

Early history

The area that today comprises the neighborhood of Park Slope was first inhabited by the Canarsee Native Americans. The Dutch colonized the area by the 1600s and farmed the region for more than 200 years. During the American Revolutionary War on August 27, 1776, the Park Slope area served as the backdrop for the beginning of the Battle of Long Island, also called the Battle of Brooklyn, the first pitched battle between the British and the Continental Army under the command of George Washington. In this battle, over 10,000 British Redcoats and Hessians routed outnumbered American forces at Battle Pass. What appeared as a major defeat for the colonials was actually the first of many of Washington's tactical retreats. The historic site of Battle Pass is now preserved in Prospect Park, and on Fifth Avenue there is a reconstruction of a stone farmhouse where a countercharge covered the American retreat.

19th-century development

In 1814, ferry service from the nearby Brooklyn Terminal linked the Park Slope and South Brooklyn region to Manhattan, a thriving business center at the time.

In the 1850s, a local lawyer and railroad developer named Edwin Clarke Litchfield (1815-1885) purchased large tracts of what was then farmland. Through the American Civil War era, he sold off much of his land to residential developers. During the 1860s, the City of Brooklyn purchased his estate and adjoining property to create the famous 526 acre (2 km²) park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Park Slope’s bucolic period ended soon after. By the late 1870s, with horse-drawn rail carts running to the park bringing many rich New Yorkers in the process, the neighborhood dramatically changed. Many of the large Victorian mansions on Prospect Park West, known as the Gold Coast, were built in the 1880s and 1890s to take advantage of the beautiful park views. Today, many of these buildings are preserved within the 24-block Park Slope Historic District, one of New York's largest landmarked neighborhoods. By 1883, with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope continued to boom and subsequent brick and brownstone structures pushed the neighborhood's borders farther. The 1890 census showed Park Slope to be the richest community in the United States.

In 1892, President Grover Cleveland presided over the unveiling of The Soldiers and Sailors Arch at Grand Army Plaza, a notable Park Slope landmark.

The Old Stone House is a 1930 reconstruction of the Vechte-Cortelyou House which was destroyed in 1897. It is located at Fourth Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets beside the former Gowanus Creek.

Baseball history

Baseball has played a prominent role in the history of the Park Slope area. From 1879-1889, the Brooklyn Atlantics (later to become the Dodgers) played at Washington Park on 5th Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets. When the park was destroyed by a fire, the team moved to their part-time home in Ridgewood, Queens and then to a park in East New York. In 1898, the "New" Washington Park was built between 3rd and 4th Avenues and between 1st and 3rd Streets near the Gowanus Canal. The team, by this point known as the Dodgers, played to an ever-growing fan base at this location. By the end of the 1912 season, it was clear that the team had outgrown the field, and the neighborhood. Team owner Charles Ebbets moved the team to his Ebbets Field stadium in Flatbush for the beginning of the 1913 season. The team went on to have historic crosstown rivalries with both the New York Giants and New York Yankees.

Crash of United Flight 826

On December 16, 1960, two airliners collided above Staten Island, killing 135 people in what was the worst U.S. aviation disaster to that time. One of the airplanes, a Douglas DC-8 operating as United Airlines Flight 826, was able to stay airborne for a few miles before crashing at Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue, destroying several buildings. Almost everyone on board was instantly killed, but one 11-year-old boy survived the night before succumbing to his injuries.

Blight and renewal

Through the 1950s, Park Slope saw its decline as a result of suburban sprawl and bearish local industries. Many of the wealthy and middle-class families fled for the suburban life and Park Slope became a rougher, working class Catholic (especially Italian & Irish) neighborhood.

The precursor to renovated brownstones and boutique bohemianism was an urban renewal process started by working families and a community of feminists, many of them lesbians. By the 1960s, an official revitalization movement was in full swing to preserve the neighborhood's historic row houses, stately brownstones, and Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival, and Romanesque mansions. With the historic Park Slope district (around Seventh Avenue) seeing a rebirth, so was the popularity to live in the general area.

In the late 1970s, the area around Fifth Avenue in Park Slope was suffering from widespread abandonment and blight, with more than 200 vacant buildings and 150 vacant lots within one mile. As a result of the neighborhood's close proximity to Prospect Park, and the many well-built apartment houses and brownstones, this region also became ripe for renewal. Through the 1980s, there also was a significant influx of immigrant families into the neighborhood, who occupied many of the one and two-bedroom apartments available.

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 increased by 3.5-4.4% per year, 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 renewal is the displacement of the immigrant population that settled in the 1980s. As the more affluent 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 renewal can also be seen along the popular 5th Avenue stretch, where numerous banks and bars have replaced old 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 clientèle when Barnes & Noble and Starbucks appeared in the neighborhood. While renewal 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.

Transportation

The neighborhood is well served by the New York City Subway. Several lines have stops in Park Slope, including the F train at Fourth Avenue, Seventh Avenue and 15th Street-Prospect Park/Prospect Park West; The 2 and 3 trains at Atlantic Avenue, Bergen Street and Grand Army Plaza; the N, M, and R trains at Prospect Avenue, Ninth Street, Union Street and Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street; and the B and Q trains at Pacific Street and Seventh Avenue at Flatbush.