Adult Ed Lecture Series Tonight in Park Slope

It's been a while since we indulged in blatant self-promotion, so allow me to mention that I'll be speaking tonight as part of Adult Education, a "useless lectures series" that Charles and I do at Union Hall in Park Slope on the first Tuesday of every month, at 8pm. The theme this time: "Animal Minds, Animal Bodies."

Canine cognition expert Alexandra Horowitz will look at anthropomorphic assumptions we make about dogs, photographer Kate Kunath will discuss the surreal world of rabbit breeding, and Kriota Wilberg will analyze how human anatomy could be altered to make us more like Spiderman, and I'll be talking about why you want a monkey. Should be a fun show. Come on down!

(And if you are coming, try to get there by 7:30 when the doors open because the show was listed on Flavorpill and the seats fill up even without that.)

Park Slope: a victim of its own success?

The Brooklyn Paper reports that the Tea Lounge in South Slope will be closing in July, due to a major rent hike. I was never a big fan of the place, but it's sad to see a cafe beloved by so many people bite the dust. Ironically, what I didn't love about the place was that it was always packed; there were too many loungers.

Tea Lounge is but the latest in a string of eateries along 7th Avenue to succumb to unaffordable rent increases. The excellent Red Hot Szechuan, just across the street, has closed, and:

In the past year, Seventh Avenue has lost Inaka Sushi House, at Fourth Street... Tempo Presto, at Third Street; Laila at 15th Street; Little Village, between 10th and 11th streets; and the Second Street Cafe, a beloved brunch spot that made headlines when it closed.

It happened in the '90s in SoHo and it is happening in Park Slope right now: Park Slope is falling victim to the process Jane Jacobs' wrote about in her seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Local mom-and-pop businesses that helped make the neighborhood so inviting in the first place can no longer afford to stay. So 7th Avenue—once the place to be—is gradually transforming into a strip of real-estate offices, cell phone retailers, and banks. The street life is now moving to 5th Avenue, where restaurants can still stay afloat. Unfortunately, without any governing body to assure commercial diversity, chances are we'll start to see more of the same happening there: more chain stores and profit powerhouses.

In a way, it's parallel to the debate we've been having about residential housing in our own nabe. You can blame Chase and Starbucks all you want, but the real problem is a free market that does nothing to assure diversity.

No doubt some readers are giddy with schadenfreude about all this. If you read the New York Times story about Park Slope this weekend, you probably know what I'm talking about. The writer, Lynn Harris, pretty much hit the nail on the head. There seem to be a lot of Park Slope "haters" in PLG, which I find very curious... mainly because all of the annoying attitudes found by the Park Slope privileged are also very abundant here. And because the non-yuppies here can be equally annoying, albeit differently annoying. (I'm thinking of the alcoholic duo who came up our stoop a couple of weeks ago and demanded money for work we not only didn't ask them to do, but specifically asked them NOT to do.)