Man Made Lake

The Park Slope Blues

   Park Slope has everything I want in a neighborhood. Lots of trains, a humongous park, good grocery stores, loads of restaurants and bars, stunning architecture, garbage-free sidewalks, huge trees on skinny streets, even cyclists. So why do I hate every fucking inch of it?

   Who am I to complain about yuppies? I drink fancy coffee and read the New Yorker; I despise the dollar stores and nail salons that dot this city. So what if there are "children's clothing boutiques" and doggie daycares and a million other frivolous ventures? I don't exactly take full advantage of the fortune tellers or the Polish bookstores in my own neighborhood. The stroller jockeys are obnoxiously self absorbed, but at least they clean up the sidewalk in front of their house.

   I've concluded that I hate Park Slope because it's static. It's come all the way from bombed out slum to hippie haven to rich rich rich, and it has nowhere left to go. No longer a neighborhood in transition, I'm unable to enjoy the unique entity Park-Slope-circa-2008. It's just Park Slope and it will always be that way: a stable demography and a stable streetscape- in other words, dull.

Montgomery Place:

More Red Hook

Red Hook, Brooklyn

   Scheduled to be the next big thing, Red Hook ultimately missed speculators expectations because it breaks two fundamentals laws of New York real estate:
   1. Stay away from water.
   2. Stay close to the subway.

   The story of any city's social geography is always tied up in conflicting land uses. Conventional wisdom says a prospective buyer should avoid noteworthy sources of crime and air pollution. In New York, historically speaking, industry has always hugged the water and where industry left it was replaced by public housing and freeways. It follows that 5th Avenue, running down the exact middle of Manhattan Isle, as far from water as possible, is the city's most famously rich and stylish thoroughfare.

   Proximity to the subway is perhaps a more intuitive issue, however it is a phenomenon largely unique to New York within the United States. The outerboroughs have the worst commute times in the country and you get what you pay for.

   There are noteworthy exceptions to these rules being built right now along much of Manhattan's west side. Perhaps the final clincher for Red Hook was the fact that there is still a fair amount of functioning industry along it's waterfront, including a not-so-small container terminal. 

   Whatever the case, I couldn't be happier to see a sliver of stability in the city's streetscape and demography. Gentrification isn't so much a welcome opportunity for investment as it is in some cities; here it's more like an outbreak of a terminal disease that leaves a certain inevitability on the minds of all the city's renters.

Further reading: The Degentrification of Red Hook, Nov 12 2007, NY Mag

Union City, NJ

    It's been a year since Kayt and I moved to New York, and since then we've been keeping a list of distinctly third world experiences we've had in this seemingly "developed" metropolis. Reoccurring themes include: suffocating bureaucracy, extremely selective law enforcement, a complete disregard for lane markings, pavement in laughable disrepair, unregulated buses run by the mob, haggling with unlicensed taxi drivers, illegal overcrowding of bars and music venues, massive pedestrian traffic, risky yet tasty food, intense entrepreneurialism, and a quickly diminishing middle class.

    Union City fits the bill quite nicely. This tiny square-mile city across the river from Manhattan is the epicenter of the Tri-State's Cuban population. On Bergenline Avenue, the main drag, crowded sidewalks come to a halt thanks to shops illegally spilling out onto the street. Every fourth or fifth vehicle is a dollar van - no exaggeration. And, of course, authentic food abounds.

FYI, in the last photo, 1-800-YO-LO-QUIERO translates to 1-800-I-WANT-IT.

Alleys of Philadelphia

    Center City has a surprising wealth of alleys- but not the type you find behind office buildings full of dumpsters and telephone wires. Row houses front the street, and in the wealthier parts, like Rittenhouse Square and Washington Square West shown below, homeowners go all-out perfecting their tiny facades and planters. Far too skinny for automobile passage and too cobblestoned for bicycles, these little streets form completley pedestrianized pockets in an otherwise congested metropolis.

    It often seems that Philadelphia longs for a time when it was a more significant city. So much of it's identity is tied up in colonial history and Ben Franklin. But it's physical idiosyncrasies are treasures too often overlooked. These tiny car-free alleys are, in my opinion, one of Philly's greatest assets.