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Jake Zavracky is a musician living in Park Slope. He explains what it's like to live amongst the baby strollers and power moms. (Check out previous entries on what it's like to live in Colombia, Canada, Qatar, New Jersey, and Illinois, and suburban Mass). More from Jake on this site here. Go check out his music here.
The Park slope neighborhood of Brooklyn is a strange place for a bartender/unsuccessful composer to live, in that it's usually cost prohibitive, and the sidewalks are littered with babies and small children, who I don't get along with very well. I mostly disagree with their decision making. Plus they don't drink so they're of no use to me. You can probably infer from that statement that I don't have any children of my own, which is true and very unusual in my particular section of Park Slope; that is 8th Avenue and 5th St. I live in the heart of Park Slope.
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The reason I can afford to live here is because my particular apartment, which is quite large by New York City standards and would normally be very expensive, probably in the $3000 range, has been rented by my roommate or various members of his family since 1975, and due to rent stabilization we pay less monthly rent than people in government housing in Bushwick, which works out well, because we don't have any money.
But we are fish out of water here.
If, like a lot of people that read this blog, you are a Bostonian and you also don't know much about New York, Park Slope is the rough equivalent of the South End, which is where I used to live before I moved to Brooklyn about 4 years ago.
The South End was also an unusual place for an unsuccessful composer to live but I moved there just before the explosion of rich people in that neighborhood, when it was still affordable and a little seedy, and for some reason my landlord never raised my rent, probably because I never bothered him with things, which may have made me stick out as desirable in what almost certainly must have been a building filled with people that would complain about the most minute details on an hourly basis. I paid the same rent in the South End for about 7 years before I moved to Park Slope.
The past 60 years in Park Slope have gone something like this, and much of this also roughly applies to the South End: in the 1950s the people that had lived here moved to the suburbs, in the 60's minorities and working class people moved in, in the late 60's and 70's they were joined by artists and hippies and then in the 90's and especially the 00's most of those people were priced out by wealthy whites who liked what the artists and hippies had done with the place. This is an oversimplification; Park Slope has rent stabilization and the South End has a number of government housing projects, so it will be difficult for this new ruling class in the neighborhoods to execute what seems to be their desired goal of a full ethnic cleanse.
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The unrelenting influx of rich white people with small children into Park Slope seems to have everyone playing by new rules.
One of the rules, not making any noise that they might find objectionable, including having an outdoor conversation after 8PM or any kind of fun at any time of day, appears to have stemmed from these people having moved to New York without first having realized that New York is a noisy place. This despite overwhelming evidence; all you have to do is turn the television on and wait 15 minutes, and some show or another will come on that demonstrates that fact rather plainly.
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Rather than say to each other "it's very noisy here, maybe we shouldn't have moved here, let's go somewhere else since we can afford to go anywhere we want", these people prefer to make Brooklyn adapt to them instead. This is achieved by various methods of complaining to the police and community boards, and by calling up local bars on a Saturday night and saying, in all seriousness, things like "It's 10:15, can't you close down your patio? It's so late!"
There are other things with which this new ruling class in Park Slope takes exception. In order to believe in the veracity of these things, you have to spend a lot of time making very loose tangential connections.
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In Prospect Park, which is a park, as is mentioned right in its name, there are people who sell ice cream. Selling ice cream in the park is hardly a new concept, but a group of people called Park Slope Parents, who are apparently out to destroy fun forever, have decided it's pivotally important that this not be allowed.
They reason that because their children see the ice cream and want the ice cream, which is something that kids tend to want, that makes things too difficult for them as parents. One of them, and this quote has not been altered or augmented for comic value in any way, says this: "I should not have to fight with my children every warm day on the playground just so someone can make a living!”
Right! Perhaps we should also get rid of toys, puppies and any other thing a child might desire. Also anything that might make you have to fight with your child, because, as is promised going into having children, they should always be really easy to get along with.
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There are also bitter complaints and campaigns against any restaurant that has the nerve not to have a kid's menu, no matter how ridiculous that might be as it applies to restaurants that were almost certainly initially intended to be exclusively for adults.
You may ask why I stay here at all if I dislike it so much, in which case I'd refer you back to the paragraph about the low rent. And, I don't dislike it, it is unbelievably beautiful with rich architecture and plenty of greenery. I may have forgotten to mention that prior to now. And if you leave the house after 9PM all of these problems magically disappear, and down on 5th Avenue, which only hours before was lousy with strollers, there is a great bar scene.
But why these other types of people stay here at all is rather bewildering. Even given that Park Slope is one of the more welcoming areas of the city to white children, it still doesn't seem like a very good place to raise them, simply because there's no backyards and scant places for kids to run around, other than the aforementioned upscale restaurants. There is the park of course, but that is fraught with the peril of running into a minority selling ice cream.
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Again, I'm not pretending to know anything about raising children and I could understand any parent including my own reading this and getting infuriated with me. I love my niece and nephews, and the kids of the friends I have in Boston. But the kids here in Park Slope do seem very unhappy. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a smiling dad here. Or a smiling mom for that matter. Most parents look absolutely miserable, and they appear to hate each other and their children.
But by far the best demonstration of the divide between some of the people here and reality has nothing to do with children. It is the signs you see on trees in Park Slope that instruct people not to allow their dogs to urinate on trees or those little plots of vegetation you see in the sidewalk. This is because the ruling class has decided that they own that space now, even though it's in the middle of sidewalk, which previously belonged to the city. [UPDATE: or does it? See comments].
Ownership was apparently transferred once these people decided to plant gardens around the trees, which gives them license to instruct anyone with a dog to not let that dog urinate in their "tree garden." One sign reads "This is a tree garden, not a dog toilet!" Another sign, which is suspended atop an intricately woven web above a plot without a tree in it, says "Dog latrine closed!"
Ownership was apparently transferred once these people decided to plant gardens around the trees, which gives them license to instruct anyone with a dog to not let that dog urinate in their "tree garden." One sign reads "This is a tree garden, not a dog toilet!" Another sign, which is suspended atop an intricately woven web above a plot without a tree in it, says "Dog latrine closed!"
In other words, these people have invented a new thing, a "tree garden", on property that isn't even theirs, and are now livid at anyone not following the proper protocol for the thing they just invented, which gives them the sort of righteous indignation that is required to hang up a sign angrily outlining the rules they just made up for the thing they just invented.
Children love to make up their own games that have little rules which they get mad at their playmates for not following. It allows them to always win the game they have just invented. If they are in danger of losing their own game, they can change the rules, or introduce a new rule that allows them to win. Even if it is a direct contradiction of a previously stated rule, whatever works for them in the situation that they're in is the correct rule to follow at the time.
DISCLAIMER: The writer of this piece is aware that he's an idiot.
--JAKE ZAVRACKY
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9 comments:
Uh, the sidewalk IS my property actually, I just am required by law to let you walk down it. I live in Queens not Park Slope, but if your dog pees on my tree I will beat your face in. I pull two bags of dog crap out of the tree pit every week and that's two too many, dumb city assholes.
JAKE GO FIGHT THIS GUY
Actually he's right, we have to change that bit about the city owning the sidewalk.
jesus, way to STAND YOUR GROUND jake. the law was behind if you shoot this guy i think. fucking brooklyn pansies.
seriously though, don't shoot anyone. unless we're talking about shooting little hamilton the stinkeye when he doesn't get the fuck outta the way when you're trying to order a hot cocoa or whatever it is they drink in brooklyn.
Really most of this piece is bogus anyway...... if everything was factually correct there wouldn't really be anything humorous about it. (by the way, it's supposed to be humorous)
OTHERWISE I THOUGHT THIS WAS OK
Fucking breeders.
this is beautiful.
KG
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