Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Brooklyn - The New "Old School" Neighborhood

This Ain't Hipster Brooklyn
This is Windsor Terrace, not Williamsburg, nor Cobble Hill.  No beard-wearing, Converse-sneaker-donning, fixed-gear-bike-riding fools need apply.  Nope, you're not welcome.


Wedged between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery, the highest point in Brooklyn.  The Battle of Brooklyn was fought and won here.  Perfectly situated for global warming - our rain rolls off in all directions to flood the lower hoods.

If Robert Moses hadn't jammed a sunken expressway down the middle of it, it would've been nine uninterrupted blocks with greenery on two sides.  We live on Sherman St (where the arrow points.)
Sherman is a beautiful block of three-story lime stones.  Quiet, peaceful.  I didn't know NY living could be like this.

It's a low-slung hood, zoned 90% residential.  No tall condos, no new construction.

In the 1850's working class Irish, Italian and Polish bought up the small brick and limestone houses and never sold.  The houses here pass down from family to family, they're rarely put on the market.

In the southern section of the neighborhood you find wood-shingle and clapboard row houses.
A 1984 NY Times article described Windsor Terrace as a neighborhood that is not as "Archie Bunker-ish as it used to be."  I bet they'd win the award for the neighborhood with the most American flags.
Our local church sits on the main street and sports a large K through 12 behind it.

It was handsomely renovated recently.
My temple is down the block.  These guys do their own butchering from the half-carcass and charge 1980's prices.  They sell homemade pasta and cheeses as well.  A few blocks away in Park Slope you would pay double.


Across the street is the other bookend of quality.  They start baking the bagels at 4am and open an hour later.  We visit 2-3 times a week.

Equally good is our local Italian bakery.  Hand made and fresh, daily.  Invariably, when I go in the young daughters who don't want to work there are yelling at their dad, who yells back, unseen, from the adjacent kitchen.


The wine store occupies a former drug store, one of the few signs of gentrification.  There is also a Dunkin Donuts shop with few customers.  It used to be a funeral parlor, according to my landlady, so the locals give it wide berth.

There are a handful of bars but none as old and ornery as Farrell's, which has been open since 1950.

It's dark and elegantly worn down.
Less praise for our local cinema which had such a bad reputation for bed bugs that the management recently replaced the seats, drapes and carpeting.  I've yet to visit - I feel itchy just thinking about it.

We're just a few blocks from Prospect Park, whose western border now sports a bike lane.  We visit Saturdays for the farmer's market.  

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