You are currently browsing the stories about the “Park Slope” neighborhood.
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 a new phenomenon for me: [...]
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 dog, my best friend and [...]
[The following is the second of two responses to "Confronting the Park Slope Food Coop", Fran Giuffre's blistering assault on the beloved Brooklyn institution, that has resulted in virtually nonstop Park Slope controversy for the last five years. In addition to Giuffre's historic polemic, another defense of the Coop, by the enigmatic "Dina", is also available on the Neighborhood. --Ed.] [...]
“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 just returned to his apartment [...]
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 tastes even better than chicken," [...]
“It’s not like I am going to die or anything.” My ten-year-old daughter Liza is begging me to let her walk alone to her school bus stop three streets from our Brooklyn apartment. She is as persistent as a lawyer in court, who, sensing that victory is at hand, refuses to let up on the line of questioning despite repeated [...]
There was once, just a few weeks ago, a tree outside of my bedroom window. I am not even sure what kind it was – maybe Oak, maybe Maple. (In New York you don’t really bother to know the names of trees, birds, and flowers, and it issomething you feel guilty about.) I liked this tree. It’s not that I [...]
[Here it is: The moment Fran Giuffre Fran Giuffre first realized that war was at hand. The first of countless responses to Giuffre's critical evisceration of the Park Slope Food Coop, it was followed, many long and difficult years later, by Erica Weitzman's similarly devastating counterattack. --Ed.] Dear Fran, I read your horror story about Park Slope Food Coop. I [...]
[Since its initial publication on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, this piece has unleashed a firestorm of debate so fierce, and so utterly acrimonious, that it is easily the most controversial piece in the history of this website. Of the many responses that we received, the two that we are legally permitted to publish are by Erica Weitzman and Dina. --Ed.] I [...]
My cat Pancho had been throwing up for two weeks and my dog Mack was still scratching his ears after the ear mite treatment, so, in search of a new brand of cat food and some anti-itch supplements, I ended up at the local pet store just across from Prospect Park on the Southwest side. I was rung up by [...]
The F train hurtles through the tunnel and suddenly we’re above ground. Lower Manhattan twinkles in the distance. I gaze at the view and for a second my anxiety has disappeared. As the skyline recedes, my stomach muscles return to the knotted state they’ve been in since this afternoon, when I made the appointment to look at the sublet. Even [...]
I grew up in Windsor Terrace, a fan-shaped neighborhood hinged on a verdant traffic circle near Prospect Park. The circle was a lowlife Mecca, a point of convergence for the neighborhood’s various derelicts, criminals, drunks, addicts, lunatics, loners, vagabonds, and weirdoes. In the summer of my sixteenth year I took a job that occasioned my getting to know a number [...]
"We're out of luck," Steve said one Saturday afternoon as I returned to our apartment from doing my weekend errands. "The dryer just died. I have a load of whites in the washer and now I can't dry them." We were one of the fortunate people who actually had a washer and dryer in their apartment. Steve and his ex-girlfriend [...]
Wednesday 28 August, 7:30pm I sit on a folding chair in a circle of would-be members, sneaking handfuls of free whole-wheat pretzels as I wait my turn to speak. The twenty-three other people at the orientation with me are fresh-faced and earnest, dressed in shades of Lands End and L.L. Bean. When asked their reasons for joining, they mention things [...]
First it was the remote control. Then it was a pill bottle, which jingled some before its contents spilled out, and last, a Yellow Delicious apple—boom! It is four o’clock in the morning and my cat, Alabama, has been knocking things around, dropping them to the floor from their perches, trying to jolt me out of sleep with every rattle [...]
From the desk of Dave Prager, a slight shift of the head is all that’s required to look out the bedroom window. Following such a shift, one’s view is then dominated by a picturesque cement wall — a sideways monolith, capped by chain link fence, five feet past the bedroom wall, separating Dave’s property from the wilds beyond: a sliver [...]
It had been a shitty summer. I left a miserable job for another, better one that paid me a lot less. To save money I moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio across the hall. The dead bolt on my new door was tricky, and so it slammed on my hand one day, leaving me with a broken middle [...]
When my husband Ted and I bought the parlor floor apartment in a 4-family co-op in Brooklyn, we developed an amicable relationship with Sharon, who lived with her cat in the basement apartment below us. We watched as she transformed herself from a 300 lb., caftan-wearing woman, to half that size in a matter of months. She was shrinking before [...]
She tells me that Mary has burned out. I look at the girl, at her tatooed cheek, and I'm a little confused. She nods at the "Immaculate Heart of Mary" prayer candle I'm holding. "Oh," I say. "Thanks." She leans forward and relights my wick with the flame from her own perfect, white taper. I'm suddenly embarrassed. "This was all [...]
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