Park Slope Poised to Take Over All of South Brooklyn?

Call it manifest destiny. Or, at least, the slow creep of Park Slope into Gowanus (plus Sunset Park). We're used to Manhattan-based and out-of-town media calling parts of Gowanus "Park Slope." We have expressed our ire more than once that Holiday Inn Express insists on calling its new Gowanus lodging the "Park Slope" Holiday Inn Express. But, now, the "Park Slope" label is being applied by a publication based close to home: The Park Slope Courier.

We're not trying to pick a fight with the Courier. We read it every week (and some of Courier Life's other nabe pubs too...we stop at boxes in different spots to pick them up and go through their weekly emails and scour their website) and consider them a valuable source of the Brooklyn information we consume in massive quantities. But this week's headline and story hurt: "New Holiday Inn Express Checks Into the Slope." Specifically, "The world’s largest single 'value conscious' hotel brand has opened its first Brooklyn lodging in Park Slope."

The Holiday Inn Express, for those of you that don't know, is located at 625 Union Street, between Third and Fourth avenues. It is, in a word, in Gowanus, as Park Slope generally is considered to end at Fourth Avenue, by most definitions on the east side of Fourth Avenue. (Or, as our favorite definition of Park Slope goes, if you're not walking up or down a hill, you're not in Park Slope.)

The Marketwire/Holiday Inn Express press release about the official ribbon cutting at the hotel by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff and others read:

Holiday Inn Express Brooklyn, which is managed by Magna Hospitality Group under agreement with InterContinental Hotels Group, and owned by McSam Hospitality, is the first and only hotel currently in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood.

Park Slope has been experiencing a renaissance in recent years, with an increasing number of Zagat-rated restaurants, world-class boutiques, businesses and other developments adding to the popularity of the neighborhood. The Holiday Inn Express is ideally situated to service visitors coming to see the Nets play in their new home at the nearby Atlantic Yards development, which will include an arena designed by architect Frank Geary (sic), and travelers on the Crown Princess and Queen Mary 2, both of which will be docking in the new cruise terminal in the borough's Red Hook neighborhood.

No Land Grab, which knows this kind of thing when they see it, opined that "The only way you can consider Park Slope 'burgeoning' is if you include the Gowanus side of 4th Ave. in The Slope, but then again, these are some of the same guys who think that the Atlantic Yards proposal is in Downtown Brooklyn."

For the record, before you write us off as pedantic (which we may be, in any case), the real estate section profile of Park Slope in New York Magazine defines the Slope's nabe boundaries as "Stretching from Prospect Park West to 4th Avenue, Park Place to Prospect Expressway." (No, New York is not the be all and end all of what makes a nabe, but most definitions cut off the Slope at Fourth Avenue.) That, in and of itself, is considered an expansive definition by some, although we find it totally acceptable in the current day context. Meanwhile, Wikipedia defines Gowanus boundaries as such: "The northern boundary of the neighborhood is Butler street, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the south and west, and Fourth Avenue to the east." Again, although there are those that consider the entire concept of Gowanus a new creation, those sound like reasonable boundaries to us, although some people say the territory from Smith and Ninth to the BQE is actually Red Hook. Then again, Brooklyn isn't the only place where neighborhood boundaries change (the Bronx) or entire nabes vanish over time.

We thought the day when people say Park Slope stretches to the Gowanus Canal would occur when the Whole Foods on Third Avenue (eventually) opens, but it may be closer than we think. Looks like any day now, Park Slope's definition will stretch to Third Avenue.

We've said it before and we will say it again (and again and again): That new Holiday Inn Express is not in Park Slope. It is in Gowanus. (Close to the border, but still Gowanus.)

Gowanus. Gowanus. Gowanus.

Or, perhaps, we should give up and start calling ourselves The Park Slope Lounge.

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Gowanus Don't Get No Respect, At Least From Holiday Inn