park slope, brooklyn

Park Slope is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, roughly bounded by Fourth Avenue, Prospect Park West (9th Ave), Flatbush Avenue, and 16th Street. It takes its name from being founded on the western slope of neighboring Prospect Park.

History

Early history

The property that today comprises the neighborhood of Park Slope was first inhabited by the Canarsee Indians. The Dutch colonized the area by the 1600s and farmed the region for more than 200 years. 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, when 4,000 British Redcoats defeated outnumbered American forces at Battle Pass. That historical site is now preserved in Prospect Park.

19th century development

In 1814 ferry service from the nearby Brooklyn Terminal linked the Park Slope and South Brooklyn region to Manhattan, a thriving business center at the time. In the 1850s, a local lawyer and railroad developer named Edwin Clarke Litchfield (1815-1885) purchased large tracts of what was then farmland. Through the American Civil War era, he sold off much of his land to residential developers. During the 1860s, the City of Brooklyn purchased his estate and adjoining property to create the famous 526 acre (2 km) park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Park Slopes bucolic period ended soon after, by the late 1870s, when horse-drawn rail carts began running to the park, bringing many rich New Yorkers to the area in the process that substantially contributed to the neighborhood's development. 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 beautiful park views. Today, many of these buildings are preserved within the 24-block Park Slope Historic District, one of New York's largest landmarked neighborhoods. 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. In the Southern Slope, by the Gowanus Canal for example, there was a flourishing Italian and Irish community. These immigrants built many modest rowhouses along the waterfront where they worked. In 1892, President Grover Cleveland presided over the unveiling of The Soldiers and Saliors Arch at Grand Army Plaza, a notable Park Slope landmark.

Blight and gentrification

The 1960s marked the start a notable revitalization movement to preserve the neighborhood's historic row houses, stately brownstones, and Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival, and Romanesque mansions. In the late 1970s, the area around Fifth Avenue in Park Slope was suffering from widespread abandonment and blight, with more than 200 vacant buildings and 150 vacant lots within one mile. Regardless, as a result of the neighborhood's close proximity to Prospect Park, and many well-built apartment houses and brownstones in the Historic District, surrounding areas became ripe for gentrification. Through the 1980s, there was a significant influx of immigrant families into the neighborhood, who occupied many of the one and two-bedroom apartments available. By the 1990s, partly as a result of inflated Manhattan rents along with an inflated (dot-com) economy, people who might otherwise have lived in Manhattan began moving to Brooklyn in large numbers. Hipsters tended to move to Williamsburg; yuppies tended to move to Park Slope. During the second major boom for the neighborhood, Park Slope evolved into a racially and economically mixed neighborhood, a place where stockbrokers live alongside poor and middle-class working families. A 2001 report by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that from 1990 to 1999, rents in New York City jumped anywhere from 37 percent to 48 percent, depending on what kind of building the apartment was in. http://www.fordfound.org/publications/ff_report/view_ff_report_detail.cfm?report_index=394 The explosion of property values inspired real estate agents to be increasingly generous about the borders of Park Slope, not unlike the expansion of Williamsburg into Greenpoint or that of Fort Greene into Bedford-Stuyvesant. South Slope, Prospect Heights, Windsor Terrace, and Boerum Hill all became to some extent part of greater Park Slope.

Notable residents

Famous residents of Park Slope include U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, actors Steve Buscemi, John Ventimiglia, and John Turturro, as well as authors Jon Scieszka, and Paul Auster.