The New Yorker Thinks Park Slope Is Dead

Southpaw co-owner Matt Roff recently saddened both Moth and music fans alike after confirming rumors that the music venue, which opened in 2002 and has hosted such talents as TV On The Radio, Gillian Welch and Sufjan Stevens, is being converted into a kid's tutoring and rock climbing center. And yes, while FiPS writer Jess agreed that maybe we're a little fucked because of this, it's not like Park Slope is dead or anything, right? 

The New Yorker seems to think so.

Writer Andrew Marantz, who recently caught up with Roff and chatted about Southpaw's closing, wrote a piece called, simply: "Park Slope Is Dead."

"Just as a red giant becomes a white dwarf," Marantz writes, "an edgy block must lose its edge."

Roff, who grew up in the Slope, recalls witnessing the neighborhood transform from gang fights to yoga studios.

“I don’t like to use the word ‘gentrification,’” Matt Roff, a co-owner of Southpaw, told me on Saturday night. We were in the hallway near the club’s entrance, where we could talk without shouting. “I prefer—I don’t want to say ‘progress,’ either. I see it more as the nature of the beast. This is just how it goes.”

He [Roff] grew up in the neighborhood (Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street) when Park Slope was known for gang fights, not yoga studios. “My folks came in the seventies and it was rough, dude. Just bodegas and stuff, and this wave of ex-hippies buying houses for twenty thousand dollars.”

Yes, Park Slope has undergone a transformation over the years -- plenty of New York City neighborhoods have. But should a loss of "edginess" and gang fights be considered something so dramatic as death? How about simply change, or growth? What say you, long time Park Slope residents? How would you describe the transformation of this nabe over the years? Have we officially kicked le bucket?