Park Slope West?

Brooklyn neighborhood names are notoriously difficult to identify. Sometimes it's because they're rarely used (who wants to identify their neighborhood as Gravesend?) or rarely used anymore (Flatbush seems to have once been a popular term for a large swath of neighborhoods that now go by other names). Other times people knowingly identify themselves as a resident of a surrounding neighborhood that's more desirable than their own (Manhattan Beach creeps into Sheepshead Bay, Sheepshead Bay creeps into Brighton Beach). The best example of neighborhood creep is the insistence of people who live on 4th Ave to call it Park Slope. It's not. If you live further south on 4th Ave you're in Sunset Park; if you live around the Gowanus canal on 4th Ave then you're in Gowanus (or if you're a bit north you could get away with Boerum Hill, which is after all is a gentrified name for Gowanus). Real estate agents are notoriously bad when it comes to this, as Adam and I experienced back when we were looking for our current apartment.

Queens must be more strict about their neighborhood boundaries, since they actually use their neighborhood names in their postal addresses up there.

Comments

  1. jhrJune 16, 2006

    I can't speak for the other neighborhoods, but Sunset Park has had strict boundaries since the nineteenth century:

    Northern boundary: Prospect Ave (bet. 16th and 17th streets)

    Southern boundary: Bay Ridge Ave (bet. 65th and 66th streets)

    Eastern boundary: 8th Ave

    Western boundary: waterfront

    Greenwood Heights is not a neighborhood in any definition of the word. It is a construct of Real Estate Agents and nothing more.

    sunsetparker.blogspot.com

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