Park Slope Manifest Destiny Strikes Again

Truly, we realize that someday, this battle will be lost for good. Probably on the day that the Whole Foods at Third Street and Third Avenue opens, marketing wholesome goodness from a toxic site on the shores of the Gowanus, and people start calling it the Park Slope Whole Foods. We’ve already seen a Holiday Inn Express on Union Street between Fourth Avenue and Third Avenue on Union Street be named the “Park Slope Holiday Inn Express.”

Still, to have a reader point out that the Brooklyn Artists Gym, which is located on Seventh Street between Third and Second Avenues (at 168 Seventh Street), refers to itself as being in Park Slope is a hard pill to swallow. We note many events that take place at BAG and we think it’s a cool institution. We post them, partly because we always considered BAG to be in Gowanus. A shared artists’ space in Gowanus is cool. One in Park Slope is, well, artists’ space in Park Slope. There is this difference, no? (Nothing against Park Slope per se, but there are lines of demarcation.)

For those who will bicker with this definition, we’ll point out that BAG’s neighborhood is part of the Gowanus rezoning discussion.

Like we said yesterday, the cool, artistic thing to do would be for the Brooklyn Artists Gym to embrace its Gowanus identity as hip and great

Red Hook "Until Recently Wasn’t a Neighborhood"? Really?

We didn’t know that Red Hook “until recently wasn’t a neighborhood” until a GL reader pointed us in the direction of Time Out New York’s 2007 Eat Out Awards. And, there in the “Readers’ Choices section,” in the entry about Good Fork in Red Hook, appears the following curious–well, utterly freaking bizarre–statement: “It’s significant that this double winner is in Red Hook, which until recently wasn’t a neighborhood, much less a dining destination.”

So, we looked at the sentence over and over and over and each time we read it, it still said the same thing. To which all we can says is: WTF?

Did the writer mean to say that or is it a vanished adjective or phrase? It is, frankly, hard to think of any good possibilities here. Did it originally read “Red Hook wasn’t a nice neighborhood” or “Red Hook wasn’t a safe neighborhood” or “Red Hook wasn’t a neighborhood you’d want to visit“? Looks to us like someone cut something out, but forgot to cut the rest of the sentence. Our reader writes:

I wonder what the long-time residents of that not-neighborhood would say. So it’s only a neighborhood if trendy and often rich white people move in? As a long time resident (25 years) of Sunset Park (and, no, there really ISN’T a neighborhood called “Greenwood Heights” — it’s Sunset Park), I’m a little tired of the whole “I just DISCOVERED this precious little neighborhood” thing…I think Time Out owes the ‘hood a BIG apology.

Time Out actually ran an excellent story on Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen last year. For the record, Red Hook was settled in 1636 and was a village before being annexed to Brooklyn. (See image above, which is Red Hook in 1875.) It is, in point of fact, one of the oldest neighborhoods in all of New York City. Hey, we all make mistakes–there’s probably an idiotic typo in this item. But there are boo boos and, then, there are bigger ones and this is certainly an interesting one.