Copywriter Daryl Lang has a blog about media, culture and transit, and in a post put up yesterday morning, it's the culture of Park Slope that gets put under Lang's microscope. Specifically, its gradual decay. The eight-year Park Sloper is moving out of the neighborhood, but not before explaining why in a scathing essay:
I am leaving Park Slope because I am increasingly impatient with people too socially deficient to act like good neighbors. People who won’t spare five seconds to help an old lady. People who can’t figure out their way around without checking their iPhones. People who don’t say hi to the neighbors with whom they share a stoop. These things are getting noticeably worse. Rather than stew here and become the local grouch, I’m recognizing that I have passed my expiration date in this neighborhood. Time to exit gracefully. But it's not only rude iPhone users that suffer Lang's wrath.
No Park Slope analysis is complete without a little ditty on those Park Slope Parents. They're tearing the place apart! Or so Lang writes: "People here still want to get along with their neighbors, but a gulf has widened between the multi-generation old-timers and the new residents. The new in-your-face parenting grates on the more conservative parents and the non-parents, and that friction make this place a fractured neighborhood."
So where's the writer headed? The enchanted isle of Manhattan, where the people "will be a whole new kind of despicable." Quite the entertaining read, and Brownstoner and Fucked in Park Slope have already weighed in, as have Twitterers and others, leading to a follow-up post in which Lang admits that 21st Street might not even be Park Slope proper. We always exaggerate the qualities of the ones we love, right?
· On leaving Brooklyn [History Eraser Button]
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