Interesting Park Slope Read: How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back

In 1982, writer Kay S. Hymowitz moved to Park Slope with her husband and two young children. In a recent article for City Journal, she talks about witnessing the transformation of Brooklyn from a place of "shabby respectability and drug-fueled violence" to New York Mag's “most livable neighborhood in New York City.”

Here's an excerpt:

Our neighbor’s house reflected the Slope’s perilous condition. When we first moved in, Mrs. Lehane, always wearing a faded but neatly pressed dress, thick stockings, and lipstick, used to sweep the sidewalk with the intensity of a corporate lawyer on a gym treadmill. Now, her lipstick was smudged, her dresses were torn, and her stockings sagged. Instead of elderly renters, she took in “former” alcoholics and drug addicts living on disability payments. Mrs. Lehane’s children had moved to Long Island, but her foul-tempered granddaughter moved in, supposedly to oversee the house. The granddaughter’s violent fights with her boyfriend would sometimes wake us in the middle of the night. One day, Mrs. Lehane disappeared—to a nursing home, I heard. Many of our friends and acquaintances—fed up with vagrants on their stoops and graffiti, or terrified for the safety and education of their kids—left as well. I don’t know what combination of denial and passiveness made us stay. It seemed inevitable that something terrible would happen.

And so it did.