There Went The Neighborhood

A friend o'FIPS sent us this picture of a child's Burberry jacket left on the ground of the backyard of PS 321 after school last week. Boy, how times have changed in Park Slope.

You moved to Park Slope the year Clinton (Bill) was elected the first time, before it was fucking Richie Rich-ville, and you started to feel like the poor relation. Back then, Fifth Avenue was all check cashing places and little markets that didn’t seem to sell anything except cans of Goya beans, and your Manhattan friends refused to come to your place.

Then Al di La opened and set the stage for Fifth Avenue as a prissy little destination restaurant row, instead of a street to avoid traversing alone after dark. Suddenly, people were coming from Manhattan just to eat here.

Then you started breeding, and then all these other people started breeding, and then people from across the river who could afford 3 million dollar brownstones thought they might want to breed here, too, and then there you go, you’re fucked in Park Slope.

The shitty corner store on sixth and Union, aptly named the Colon Deli, where you’d never buy actual food, but maybe something nonperishable and shrinkwrapped, like paper towels, re-opens as Union Market.

Tartan-patterned $250 Maclaren strollers that tipped backwards leaving your kid hanging upside down by his knees gave way to $800 Bugaboos, in chic black, and like, wheels made by BMW, probably.

The usefully schlocky SuperSaver closed, sat empty for awhile, and ultimately became a toy shop that looks like the MoMA design store.

The work-at-home moms at PS 321 drop-off wearing Keens and LL Bean down jackets were outnumbered by the stay-at-home moms wearing J Brand jeans and Tory Burch ballet flats. Moms with office jobs in textbook publishing gave way to moms with office jobs at Conde Nast.

Three million dollar brownstones turned into six million dollar brownstones turned into 14.5 million dollar brownstones.

And then one crisp, bright, glorious fall day, you couldn’t deny reality anymore; your fantasy that Park Slope was this utopia of liberal, literary, egalitarian, diverse bohemianism died…was brutally murdered, actually. There, on the ground, in the PS 321 cement backyard, amid the forgotten Land’s End backpacks and BPA-free Camelbak water bottles, was a gender-neutral* child’s size 110cm -– that’s US size 5/6 -- $850 Burberry trench coat, destined to end up just another casualty in the lice-infested lost and found.

You might as well pack up and move to Tottenville right now. You’re really not our kind, dear.

 

* You get the reference, old timer