BACK in April 2024, I walked 5th Avenue in Park Slope, since I haven’t done so in a few years. Recently, I’ve been more drawn to commercial strips because of their interesting store signage, which seems to get more imaginative every time I’m in an area I have not been for awhile. Sooner or later, a longform 5th Avenue page will appear, but here’s a preview to get you interested.
Here at #71 5th Avenue, between St. Mark’s Avenue and Prospect Place, there hasn’t been a plumber at this address for perhaps two decades or more, but a series of vintage clothing shops have elected to keep the white and cornflower blue sign for Conservation Plumbing & Heating in place, rendered in a square-serifed font that to me looks a good deal like Clarendon.
The Park Slope today is a far cry from the dicey Park Slope of the 1960s and into the 1970s, as it evolved into a family-oriented (because of its proximity to Prospect Park) yet expensive neighborhood, as a solid housing stock of attached brownstones, freestanding wood houses, and attached brick buildings were rehabbed and flipped for thousands more than what they cost. The word, sometimes a dirty one now, is gentrification. It’s bad because it makes neighborhoods unaffordable for all but the wealthy, and good because it chases out the crime. It’s all in your point of view. At one time I had three friends/families and a cousin and her husband in Park Slope, but they gradually drifted away to places like Huntington and West Windsor, NJ, and so I now know no one in Park Slope again.
I went to high school on the Bedford-Stuyvesant-Clinton Hill borderline in the early 1970s and I took the B63 bus through what was then the ‘belly of the beast” as 5th Avenue was full of burned-out storefronts and wrecked cars. The first ray of light was a gigantic Key Food that opened in 1982 at 5th Avenue and Park Place; it lasted about a quarter of a century, as its pedestrian fare no longer matched up with the varied tasstes of Park Slope’s new arrivals. {see comment below] This was long before I started aiming a camera everywhere.
Today’s residents would never believe what 5th Avenue used to be if I told them.
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6/9/24
8 comments
There used to be a lot of rooming houses in Park Slope.That neighborhood started undergoing
gentrification in the 1950s.My aunt had a rooming house there,and none of the locals liked the
new people who seemed to be buying up everything in sight.
If the situation was reversed, with Conservation Plumbing & Heating replacing Slope Vintage, the homeowners would be better off, especially for those household emergencies that occur at inconvenient times.
You may not know anyone from Park Slope, but you know OF people from Park Slope– the “domiciles” of Senator Schumer and former Mayor deBlasio are in the Slope. I have no idea if they actually reside there, but those are their residences for legal and tax purposes.
I saw Bill walking down his street a few years ago.
Back in the 50’s-60’s, Park Slope was better known as Dark Slope, and the “dicey” description was an understatement! The adjacent neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, etc. had yet to be “discovered”. They were all known as South Brooklyn. Today they have outdoor dining and music venues on streets I wouldn’t be caught dead on back then…
As a (sadly, now former) long-term resident of the northern Park Slope area, I just wanted to note that the large Key Food on 5th Ave. remained solidly in business until just about three years ago, in summer of 2021. Its demise had nothing at all to do with its “pedestrian fare” no longer synch’ing with the tastes of new arrivals, but was instead the result of a long-brewing mixed-use development deal which was actually held up for several years, in significant part due to community resistance to the closure of the large and relatively inexpensive supermarket.
Indeed, the final agreement between the community and the developers required the new building to include a 25,000 sq.ft. reasonably-discounted supermarket (e.g., not something upscale like Whole Foods), which will be close to three-fourths the size of the Key Food store, and a vast increase from the 7,000 sq.ft. food store in the initial plan.
And Neergaard Pharmacy,… the original 24 hour drug store
I went to St. Augustine HS at 64 Park Place from 66-69. It was a sketchy neighborhood. The principal closed the school for a few days after MLK was shot in the interests of our safety.