Park Slope
Park Slope is a neighborhood in South Brooklyn, New York City, within the area once known as South Brooklyn. Park Slope is roughly bounded by Prospect Park and Prospect Park West to the east, Fourth Avenue to the west, Flatbush Avenue to the north, and Prospect Expressway to the south. Generally, the neighborhood is divided into three sections from north to south: North Slope, Center Slope, and South Slope. The neighborhood takes its name from its location on the western slope of neighboring Prospect Park. Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue are its primary commercial streets, while its east–west side streets are lined with brownstones and apartment buildings.
Park Slope was settled by the Lenape before Europeans arrived in the 17th century. The area was mostly farms and woods until the early 19th century, when the land was subdivided into rectangular parcels. The western section of the neighborhood was occupied in the mid-19th century, being located near the industrial Gowanus Canal and ferries. After the completion of Prospect Park, numerous mansions and rowhouses were developed in Park Slope's eastern section in the 1880s. Park Slope faced social and infrastructural decline in the mid-20th century, but the building stock was renovated after the area became gentrified starting in the 1960s. Much of the neighborhood is overlaid by the Park Slope Historic District, which is composed of a National Historic District and a New York City landmark district.
Park Slope features historic buildings, top-rated restaurants, bars, and shops, as well as proximity to Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and the Central Library and Park Slope branches of the Brooklyn Public Library. The neighborhood had a population of about 62,200 as of the 2000 census. Park Slope is generally ranked as one of New York City's most desirable neighborhoods.
Park Slope is part of Brooklyn Community District 6, and its primary ZIP Codes are 11215 and 11217. It is patrolled by the 78th Precinct of the New York City Police Department. Politically, it is represented by the New York City Council's 33rd and 39th Districts.
History
Early settlement
Though modern-day Brooklyn is coextensive with Kings County, this was not always the case. South Brooklyn, an area in central Kings County extending to the former Brooklyn city line near Green-Wood Cemetery's southern border, was originally settled by the Canarsee Indians, one of several indigenous Lenape peoples who farmed and hunted on the land. The Lenape typically lived in wigwams, and had larger fishing and hunting communities near freshwater sites on higher land. Several Lenape roads crossed the landscape and were later widened into "ferry roads" by 17th-century Dutch settlers, since they were used to provide transport to the waterfront. One was the Flatbush Road, running roughly north–south to the east of the path of present-day Flatbush Avenue. Just north of modern-day Park Slope was the Jamaica Road, running east to Jamaica, Queens, on what is now the path of Fulton Street.The first European settlement occurred in 1637-1639 when Willem Kieft, the Dutch West India Company's director, purchased almost all land in what is now Brooklyn and Queens. The area was used as farmland over the next two centuries.
During the American Revolutionary War, on August 27, 1776, the Park Slope area served as the backdrop for the beginning of the Battle of Long Island. In this battle, over 10,000 British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries routed outnumbered American forces, which resulted in the British occupation of Long and Staten Islands. The Battle Pass site is now preserved in Prospect Park, while on Fifth Avenue, there is a reconstruction of the Old Stone House, a farmhouse where a countercharge covered the American retreat.
19th century
Early development
Transit from Park Slope improved in the early 19th century. The Brooklyn, Jamaica and Flatbush Turnpike Company was incorporated in 1809 to widen the Flatbush and Jamaica ferry roads, prior to the establishment of the Fulton Ferry to Manhattan in 1814. Afterward, stagecoaches started running on Flatbush Road in 1830, with omnibus service following four years later. The land comprising what is now Park Slope was still mostly undeveloped. There were a couple of houses on and around Prospect Hill, a tavern, and a resort; the section of Flatbush Road through present-day Prospect Park contained ponds of standing water, which caused fevers and other illnesses. Soon afterward, the land was split up into rectangular parcels, which were bought by numerous people and cultivated as farmland. As in the rest of Kings County, the farmland was likely dependent on slave labor.The farm parcels were further split in the 19th century, allowing for the development of smaller urban lots. After Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, the Commissioners Plan of 1839 was devised, a street plan that extended to South Brooklyn. Park Slope was originally located in the northern section of the Eighth Ward, which at the time was the city's least populous ward.
The Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad started running on Atlantic Avenue, north of Park Slope, in 1836. The railroad's presence did not hasten the slow rate of residential growth in South Brooklyn because the locomotives provided slow and inefficient service. Horse-drawn railcar companies provided competition to the railroad: the first, the Brooklyn City Railroad, was founded in 1853. Other streetcar routes were founded, including a line on Flatbush Avenue in 1875, as well as the Atlantic Avenue Company's Fifth Avenue and Ninth Avenue lines, the latter of which served the Eighth Ward directly.
Prospect Park and further development
The first plans to develop modern-day Park Slope arose in 1847 when Colonel Daniel Richards requested permission from the Brooklyn Common Council to develop the Eighth Ward's streets. Richards also proposed the renovation of the nearby Gowanus Creek into a canal, including draining the marshes in its watershed. Between 1849 and 1860, under a decree by the New York Legislature, the Gowanus Creek was deepened. Simultaneously, a local lawyer and railroad developer named Edwin Clarke Litchfield purchased large tracts of what was then farmland, erecting his Litchfield Villa on the east side of the neighborhood in 1857. Through the American Civil War era, Litchfield sold off much of his land to residential developers.Development increased with the planning and creation of Prospect Park, just east of modern-day Park Slope. In February 1860, a group of fifteen commissioners had submitted suggestions for locations of four large parks and three small parks in Brooklyn. The largest of these proposed parks was a plot east of Ninth and Tenth Avenue in the Eighth Ward. After work was stopped during the Civil War, the proposed park's boundaries were changed, shifting the boundaries slightly west and south. In 1868, the City of Brooklyn purchased his estate and adjoining property to complete the West Drive and the southern portion of the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, for the then-exorbitant price of $1.7 million. The modern-day Park Slope was split into the city's 22nd Ward the same year.
By the late 1870s, with horse-drawn rail cars running to the park and the ferry, bringing many rich New Yorkers in the process, urban sprawl dramatically changed the neighborhood into a streetcar suburb. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 led to further development in the city of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Union Elevated Railroad extended its Fifth Avenue elevated line to South Brooklyn six years later. During the 1890s, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company added electric trolley lines or converted old stagecoach lines to electric service.
Upscale residential neighborhood
Many of the large Victorian mansions on Prospect Park West, known as the Gold Coast, were built in the 1880s and 1890s to take advantage of the park views. Early colloquial names for the neighborhood included "Prospect Heights", "Prospect Hill", and "Park Hill Side", before residents settled on Park Slope. By 1883, with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope continued to boom and subsequent brick and brownstone structures pushed the neighborhood's borders farther. The 1890 census showed Park Slope to be the richest community in the United States. Realtors and community members saw a clear connection between Park Slope's bucolic setting and the comfort of living there. As the New York Tribune wrote in 1899, "Nature set the park down where it is, and man has embellished her work in laying out great lawns and artificial lakes, in bringing together menageries and creating conservatories, in making roads and driveways, and in doing everything in his power to make the place a pleasant pleasure ground and a charming resort."Baseball had also played a prominent role in the history of the Park Slope area. From 1879 to 1889, the Brooklyn Atlantics played at Washington Park on 5th Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets. When the park was destroyed by a fire, the team moved to two other sites. In 1898, the "New" Washington Park was built between Third and Fourth Avenues and between First and Third Streets near the Gowanus Canal. The team, by this point known as the Dodgers, played to an ever-growing fan base at this location, and team owner Charles Ebbets moved the team to his Ebbets Field stadium in Flatbush for the beginning of the 1913 season. The Federal League's Brooklyn Tip-Tops rebuilt much of the park in concrete and steel and played there for two years, in 1914 and 1915, before the league folded. A portion of the ballpark's wall still exists today on Fourth Avenue.
20th century to present
Following Brooklyn's subsumption into the City of Greater New York in 1898 and accelerating in the 1910s, many wealthy and upper middle-class families fled for the suburban life, initially to outlying Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods and thence to more distant locales in Westchester County, Nassau County and New Jersey amid the adoption of the automobile. Manhattan gained economic and cultural dominance in the consolidated city, helped by transportation improvements like the subway, which brought a more heterogeneous population to Brooklyn. Existing families adapted by relocating to exclusive districts in the other boroughs, most notably the Upper East Side. Accordingly, Park Slope gradually became a more working class neighborhood amid the subdivision of the expansive Victorian-era housing stock into apartment buildings and rooming houses.The socioeconomic changes were slowed by the ongoing development of upscale apartment houses on Prospect Park West and Plaza Street along with infill middle-class buildings throughout the neighborhood. Only a fraction of the area, centered in the traditional Gold Coast district and select adjoining blocks, retained wealthy and upper middle-class residents into the 1940s. The Emery Roth-designed 35 Prospect Park West, marketed as a competitor to the upscale apartment houses of Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue and Central Park West, opened right before the Great Depression in 1929, and contained a variety of luxury accommodations alongside "just plain apartments". While the building attracted such notable residents as pharmaceutical executive John L. Smith and remained a "solid fortress of wealth" for decades, it ultimately failed to anchor comparable development in the neighborhood.
By the 1950s, the working-class Italian-American and Irish-American populations predominated, though this changed by the 1970s as the black and Latino population of the area increased and the white ethnic population began to relocate amid the less exclusive, though effectively segregated, wave of postwar suburbanization. However, the area straddling Flatbush and Washington Avenues between Prospect Park and Atlantic Avenue began to attract a population that was mostly African-American and West Indian-American, similar to neighboring Crown Heights. This area was increasingly identified as the separate neighborhood of Prospect Heights, a moniker that had previously been used to identify areas of Park Slope outside the Gold Coast.
Some of those that remained reacted violently to the ethnic changes to the neighborhood; for example, white residents of Park Slope attempted to bar African-Americans from participating in after-school programs at William Alexander Middle School in 1966. After this failed, white teenagers engaged in firebomb attacks on African-American homes on Fourth Street. In 1968, a street fight between Italian and African-American gangs occurred at Fifth Avenue and President Street, using bricks and bottles as weapons; in the aftermath of the fight, fourteen African-Americans and three Italian-Americans were arrested.
On December 16, 1960, two airliners collided above Staten Island, killing 134 people in what was the worst U.S. aviation disaster at that time. One of the airplanes, a Douglas DC-8 operated by United Airlines, was able to stay airborne for a few miles before crashing near the corner of Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue. Everyone on board was instantly killed, except for one 11-year-old boy, Stephen Baltz, who died the following night at New York Methodist Hospital. Six people on the ground were also killed.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the renovation of a now-$4.8 million brownstone along Berkeley Place sparked a trend where the rest of the brownstones were cleaned up and the grittiness of the neighborhood began to fade. Young professionals began to buy and renovate brownstones, often converting them from rooming houses into single and two-family homes. Preservationists helped secure landmark status for many of the neighborhood's blocks of historic row houses, brownstone, and Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival, and Romanesque mansions. After the 1973 creation of the landmark district, primarily above 7th Avenue, the rate of gentrification was sped up, and throughout the 1970s, the area saw an influx of young professional couples.
By the early 1980s, however, even as the gentrification of the neighborhood was rapidly proceeding, crime was soaring, along with crime in the rest of New York City. The neighborhood was affected by daily armed muggings within the Prospect Park area especially at night primarily from the high crime neighboring area of UnderHill known as Prospect Heights. Gentrification accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, as working-class families were displaced and discriminated due to classism regardless of race, many of those displaced being Italian, Irish and Hispanic. These gentrifiers were generally Manhtattanites attracted by the neighborhood's low cost of living and historic, turn-of-the-century housing stock. Following decades of socioeconomic precarity, the influx of the upper middle class has returned Park Slope to its Gilded Age milieu as one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn—and the nation. Sociologist and urban theorist Sharon Zukin has written of the trend, "In Park Slope, the middle class found a sense of history and a picturesque quality that fit their sense of themselves." Since the mid-1990s, gentrification has increased: a 2001 report by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that from 1990 to 1999, rents in Park Slope increased by 3.5–4.4% per year, depending on what kind of building the apartment was in.