In the space of one week in March, I had two very different experiences of community, right here in Park Slope. The first was the Civic Council’s annual forum, this year focusing on “Growing a Business in Park Slope.” A capacity crowd of some 150 people came to the historic Montauk Club to listen to a wide range of prominent local businesspeople and then share knowledge and ideas with others at their tables.
There were a lot of new faces that evening and a high level of positive energy in the room. This was the building of community among people who were mostly strangers to one another. The Civic Council and the people who joined us at the forum are eager to harness that evening’s energy into lasting relationships and new initiatives. This is no small task, but it is a positive challenge well within our abilities and an investment in our community well worth making.
[pullquote]Do you own or rent? Where do you live in the Slope? Regardless of the answers, everyone has an equal stake in our community.[/pullquote]
The second incident was at Community Board 6’s town-hall meeting on the reconfiguration of Prospect Park West. For the moment, please let’s leave aside our opinions about the design itself. A reporter for The New York Times who covered the hearing overheard one resident opposed to the plan asking another who supported it whether she lived on Prospect Park West and owned her own home. The answer to both questions was “yes.” The real response, or at least a follow-up, should have been “What difference does it make?”
It’s disturbing that a question like that was asked at all. Regardless of whether one owns or rents, or where one happens to be on Park Slope’s diverse socioeconomic scale, everyone has an equal stake in our community. Period. But as unsettling as that question was, it was also unsurprising.
A resident just west of Fourth Avenue wrote me not long ago to register her opposition to the forthcoming reopening of a long-closed subway entrance on the east side of Fourth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. She said it would divide the community and she didn’t want “people in Park Slope telling us what to do.” I replied that the Civic Council had championed the restored entrance for the entire community, as it would reduce conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles at that busy intersection as well as bring new life to that part of Fourth Avenue.
What is it that makes a community when it is so diverse as to appear diffuse? People and businesses move here, stay here, and leave here for countless reasons. There’s a sense of Park Slope being a good place, something many people want to be part of. We can look out our windows and perhaps see Prospect Park or busy Fifth Avenue or the smiling facade of an old school built by the City of Brooklyn — and it is all part of this place. We can be in a civic organization, a church, or the Food Coop (or not), and it is all part of this place. We can be a newcomer and listen to long-timers tell how it was impossible to get a mortgage in Park Slope in the 1960s, or how parts of Fifth Avenue were an open-air drug market well into the 1990s. We can walk into the rebuilt Armory on Eighth Avenue and scratch our heads in amazement that it could have been derelict for so long. All this is continuity and change rolled into one. And we are all part of it.
The Park Slope Civic Council is working hard to build community. For years, the Civic Council was seen as an uphill–of–Seventh Avenue group. No more. We embrace all of Park Slope’s parts — and all of its voices.
Join with us — your neighbors — to build the community. Be part of a new generation organizing our annual House Tour, for instance. Join our energetic and effective drive to expand the Park Slope Historic District. Become part of one of our other initiatives, among them livable streets, sustainability, and Fourth Avenue’s future. Be part of the buzz. You’ll meet some great people, whether they’re “like you” or not, whom you probably never knew before. Help shape the change that occurs every day, in plain sight. Join the Park Slope Civic Council.
— Michael Cairl is the president of the Civic Council. Send ideas and comments to civicnews@parkslopeciviccouncil.org.
from the Spring 2011 Civic News