The New York City neighbourhood where politically correct prejudices are born
Most people, when they hear the word Brooklyn, will think of big-bellied pizza-spinners, or men hunched over pints of the black stuff in Little Ireland, or black kids in hanging-down trousers ghetto-limping through the streets.
But there’s another side, a whiter, cleaner, more PC side, where the inhabitants probably don’t eat pizza at all, never mind drink Guinness, because they’re more than likely allergic to the gluten in the pizza base and probably disapprove of booze. And this leafy bit of Brooklyn, home to some of the most influential people in American arts and letters, is where much of the wacky outlook that passes for contemporary liberalism (but which smells more like snobbery to me) is born.
It’s called Park Slope, being on the western slope of the gorgeous Prospect Park. It has a population of 65,000, whose median age is 35 and whose median income is $79,000. Walking towards Park Slope from Carroll Gardens, an Italian part of Brooklyn named after Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, you immediately know you’re arriving somewhere More Respectable — there are fewer black faces, more stay-at-home dads with kids in slings, adverts for ‘Self-Defence: A Holistic Approach For Youth, Women and LGBT Individuals’.
Think of Bloomsbury (for writers), mashed with Islington (for political types), squeezed into Hampstead (for luvvies), and you’ll have an idea of what Park Slope is like. Steve Buscemi from Reservoir Dogs lives here. So does Maggie Gyllenhaal, darling of the arthouse movie scene.
In most normal bookshops the ‘Local Authors’ section will feature one or two self-published tracts about King Arthur or the sex lives of otters. In the Park Slope branch of Barnes & Noble it reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary American literature: Paul Auster, Douglas Rushkoff, Rick Moody, Jonathan Safran Foer.
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