The Old Park Slope Fifth Avenue Versus the New

Among the hundreds of pages that make up the sprawling Forgotten New York website maintained by the inimitable Keven Walsh is a fascinating look at Park Slope's Fifth Avenue called 5 Alive. It's got some great shots of Fifth Avenue in the old days and an interesting discussion of whether Fifth Avenue is really a better place now that it's been almost completely gentrified. Here's what Mr. Walsh writes:

It is tempting to say of Fifth Avenue that it is better now than it was. For many years Fifth Avenue was mired in poverty, even as the rest of Park Slope south of it began a slow comeback in the 1980s. Entire blocks were razed and there were empty lots, just as there were in the South Bronx of the same era. Hundred-year-old brick and brownstone housing was deteriorating. It was not until the 1990s that there was any momentum and the trickle of "urban homesteaders" who bought along 6th and 7th Avenues and the side streets in between began to invest in Fifth.

Gentrification has its benefits, but also its drawbacks. As property values and rents increase, the people who got in early are reaping great rewards. But people with incomes like your webmaster, who had earlier avoided streets like Fifth because of the former forbidding-appearing conditions, are now priced out with no hope of ever affording it, and some longstanding residents are being forced out by the changes. In microcosm it is the story of New York City itself. One extreme or the other, nothing in between.

So can you get me to say Fifth is better than it was from 1971 to 1980? The buildings have been spiffed up, there is an active local business scene (though the new ones are the cutesy, precious type that spring up when neighborhoods are first being gentrified). In the old days, people lived, worked and went to school here, not thinking they were merely scene-setters for a new group of urban professionals, and had to make way for their betters. Class envy?

Check out the entire page here.