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