You are currently browsing the stories about the Park Slope neighborhood

The Searchers

by 08/09/2009
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

We weren’t exactly seasoned foragers. I had only been foraging in the city a few months before I met Neil, who lucked into it the Saturday he rode his bicycle in Prospect Park and found our group picking field greens. But we had come into it in the same way—we were both dealing with break-ups [...]

The German Expressionistic Life of My Roommate, With Swastika Table

by 07/19/2009
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

The second time I met Michele she wore a similar get-up as the first. She showed up at my office to pick up her set of apartment keys wearing a pink and blue Indian floral tank dress layered over green army pants with the fly held together by safety pins and bright orange clogs. Her [...]

Air Disaster 1960

by 10/04/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

Numerous fissures and cracks can be observed on many buildings along the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. This quiet, upscale neighborhood, less than a half-mile north of Prospect Park, goes about its daily business with little notice for defects in a city so rife with fissures, [...]

Out with the Old

by 08/21/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

“I probably should have done this ten years ago.” This was the theme that ran through my mind when I replayed the decision to leave my profession and take up teaching at the age of 49. But then getting out of the garment business was no easy feat. I felt like The Godfather’s Michael Corleone [...]

At the Prospect Park Zoo, 1965

by 05/25/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

Billy Hederman and Eddie Babicke started the migration. So I applied and with their tepid references, “He’s OK, Bob,” I was hired. I was now an official busboy in the Prospect Park zoo cafeteria. Others from my working class Catholic parish adjacent to the park signed up as well. Mo Maloney was assigned to the [...]

You Look Nice Tonight, That’s All

by 05/25/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

A friend told me recently, at a small dinner party at her and her husband’s brownstone, that she’d once been throttled on the subway. The train car, she said, was packed. For balance, she raised both arms into the air and held onto the metal bar above. A man stood behind her, she said, and [...]

The Ghost of Fred Revisited

by 03/02/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

Somehow through life’s twists and turns, I’ve come to live in vegan-shoe-wearing Park Slope and own a miniature wirehaired dachshund named, well, er, Pixie. Her full AKC designation is Tiny Tails Pixie Dust. Abridged or unabridged, her name is pure embarrassment, though it’s not my invention. At least I can say she came with her [...]

How I Met My Match With Bedbugs

by 02/23/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

There is nothing more terrifying than finding a well-fed bedbug in your bed at 1 a.m. It’s even more of a rude awakening if the source of this bedbug can be traced back to a one-week stand you met through an online dating site. It all began last spring when I turned my attention to [...]

Off-Leash: Heaven in Brooklyn

by 02/17/2008
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

We had already lived in New York for a year when we discovered the park. A year since my husband and I moved from New Jersey to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, a year since the most awfully timed disaster of the loss of a family member to brain cancer. That the family member was a [...]

The Iguana Incident

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

In Park Slope, Brooklyn, on a week-day afternoon a woman was trying to sell her iguana for twenty-five dollars. She was giving it up for a more traditional pet, like a cat who didn’t need to be constantly put out in the sun to digest its meal but could do so underneath the bed. “It [...]

Locust Horde

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

“Those Goddamn kids! I swear to God I can’t take it anymore. I can’t even get coffee without running into a giant mass of those little bastards at the Starbucks. It’s like a fucking daycare center in there during the mornings.” I looked up from the book I was reading at my brother, who had [...]

Mouse: A Wave of Plague & Death

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

If you’ve known me for six months you will learn two things; I show off my tits and have an addiction to Orbits Wintermint gum. If we pass the six-month mark you will see I am something of a hypochondriac and I am always trying to lose ten pounds. My roommate has known me for [...]