How The Slope Was Won — A Roof Somewhere In Park Slope, Nov. 10, 2002

It was an extraordinarily beautiful weekend, so there we all were on the roof after dinner. I was with a few friends, and a few more friends of friends, and even more friends of friends of friends, and invariably, more than a few were genuine Grade-A Park Slope hipsters. Slopesters are a laughable breed of hipster, none too threatening either with their salt and pepper hair, whining about working their three-hour shift at the Food Co-op in their North Face fleece zip-ups sidled by screaming toddlers in ballet tutus, their endless piles of sporting goods and big, clear Rubbermaid containers filled with sweaters and Christmas ornaments. They fawn over their expensive cheese and New Yorker subscriptions and wire wine racks. Any Williamsburg hipster can squint toward the Slope and see their future, assuming they're lucky. It's not a bad life out in the Slope. Another glass of Chilean red and I'm staring off the roof — flushed — down the crust into the steaming innards of the Slope with the buzz of comfort and the barbecue smoke behind me.

I picture the Park Slope neighborhood genesis like a giant New York City marathon, sort of a wagon run in which some think-fingered local City Councilman pops a cap gun at the starting line, and everybody who wants to live in the Slope has lined up along 3rd Avenue by the canal. The starting line is wide, expanding from Flatbush all the way to 20th street and the initial rush up the crust of the slope is intense. There are the Slopesters: spandexed young professionals towing camelback drinking packs, trailed by Haitian nannies and hairy Dad's pushing modified racing-style baby prams with three giant off-road tires; hippy-dippy post grads who work in publishing houses and play in lesbian softball leagues in Prospect Park Saturdays riding giant banana-style skateboards; bespectacled Literati hipsters and McSweeney's weenies clutching hardbound copies of A.H.W.O.S.G with barking medium-sized purebreds and They Might Be Giants T-shirts; bands of hooting gay men — identical, smiling, military looking — all clutching ring-fingered hands and waving flags; Grrrls with close-cropped hair and rings in their faces dragged behind giant drooling dogs with rainbow-colored hemp leashes and monstrous testicles wagging. And then there are the people who make up the true filling of the Park Slope pie: there are whole families of weezing sausage-lipped Italians and skinny ruthless bubble-gum smacking kids swishing around on Razor scooters; Dominicans in white shorts and bands of aproned El Salvadorians; whole families of Jews pulling lumpy sets of luggage, and do-ragged Puerto Ricans with blaring boomboxes propped on their shoulders and names tattooed on their necks. But the Slopesters have an advantage: They took the day off from the office and camped out for the night right at the starting line so they could beat everybody else, they roasted marshmallows and cobs of co-op sweetcorn over Coleman elements and talked about Bowling For Columbine. You see them over there? Right at the front of the line? Rolling up their space-efficient, ultra light tents? They eat whole grain and trail mix with exotic Brazilian nuts for breakfast, they drink only Fair Trade coffee, they shake the cramps from their legs and squirt anti-bacterial gel onto their hands. And by starting time there are crowds of competitors ten and twelve people deep behind the Slopesters, gearing up for the race. It's not that the Slopesters cheated, it's just that they have all the money.

And they're off! The whole crowd is headed up the Slope to claim the home of their choice. The avenue blocks in Park Slope are very long, even longer it seems than Manhattan's cross-town blocks, and as they cross 5th Avenue already many of the immigrant families who don't have nannies to carry the kids and the bags cut their losses and settle into the dingy clapboard houses with short chain-link front fences, along with many of the younger, less ambitious hipsters — many of them longtime smokers — who just moved to New York. Heading towards 6th Avenue, the crowd thins and we begin to see what they're really made of. Grandma unfolds the lawn chair and the whole family plops down there on the stoop, some groups zig-zag along the avenues, up a block, down a block, but the Slopesters carry on straight to the top with kids howling dogs growling, and Nannies grunting. On past 7th Avenue, stopping perhaps for an Italian ice, a berry Tazo tea, a Frappacino, refilling their Nalgene bottles with San Peligrino and Fiji water, chewing their Powerbars and jogging in place to keep their hearts-a-thump, their arteries clear and whistling, boiling with Midwestern blood, for the home stretch to the WASPY heights to stake their claim as the crust of the slice of the societal pie that is Park Slope, Brooklyn!

We talk about Brooklyn as a melting pot, but as far as Park Slope is concerned, it's a melting pot pie, a chicken pot pie, no, an organic soy-based chicken-flavored pot pie with twelve grain crust. Ha! The bottom of the pie, the real meaty heart of the pie, consists mostly of blue-collar families, working stiffs, brown people of every shade and persuasion, eking out a slice for themselves, roasting in the ethnic juices, and up the slope, ascending the avenues, toward the fine-featured crust, are the Sweater-belly hipsters, the Expensive hat-wearers, the Walk-in-the-parksters and the Treadmill yuppies. Then you hit the very edge of the crust — Prospect Park West — the Avenue skirted pleasantly by the greenery of the Park, it's graystone buildings vaulted against the trees, elegant, 'pre-war' buildings fronted by sidewalks scrubbed clean except for steaming mounds of firm, healthy, preservative-free dog shit — this is the true slope, the crust — where blonde people throw out working air conditioners and take Yoga classes and cook with wine and have assorted field greens instead of homefries for brunch, where they tote the Sunday Times and have laundry 'dropped off' and wear jogging shorts, and vote. This is how the Slope was won.