Notable Locals: Carey Jones, SeriousEats.com New York Editor

If you have even a passing interest in food and aren't familiar with Serious Eats, the foodie website founded by food writer Ed Levine a few years ago, I'd strongly recommend doing yourself a big favor and checking it out. It's one of my favorite sites to spend some time drooling over, and it was a pleasant surprise to learn that its New York editor, Carey Jones, happens to live just north of the Slope. She published a great guide to all her favorite restaurants in the area a couple weeks ago, and was kind enough to answer some questions about her thoughts on the Slope's current foodie scene.

HPS: First of all, how cool is it to work for Serious Eats?

Carey: I can't lie, it's pretty awesome. I just got back from a ten-day taco tour of Texas, I'm forced to eat chocolate chip cookies for a living, and I can spend days making sushi out of Peeps or dry ice volcanos and call it work. It's not all fun, games, and sandwiches, but a lot of it is.

HPS: When did you first move to Prospect Heights?

Carey: About two and a half years ago, and have loved every minute of it. Except when the Q's not running on weekends. 

HPS: What drew you to the neighborhood?

Carey: I was sick of paying [redacted absurd sum] for my closet in the West Village run by a degenerate landlord. One of my best friends moved here and after one dinner in the neighborhood--Miriam, actually--I was hooked. I feel like it's a small city attached to a bigger city. That's true of a lot of Brooklyn and other parts of the city, I'm sure, but it feels especially homey here.

HPS: Why do you think so much great food has come to the area in the past couple years? Most of the places on your guide are relatively new.

Carey: Every time a great new restaurant pops up around here, I feel like there's an immediate swarm of Park Slopers (recently, Ample Hills, Chuko, before that Bark...), and I mean that in a good way; people here appreciate good food, I think, and probably are willing to travel for it but get really excited when it's right in their neighborhood. I don't necessarily think Bkyln Larder is the best food shopping in the city, but it's damn close, and I love that it's just a few blocks away.

HPS: What is your single favorite restaurant in Park Slope?

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Then and Now Thursday: Pete Hamill's Park Slope

A Drinking Life, the memoir written by legendary journalist and author Pete Hamill about coming of age in Park Slope and establishing himself as a newspaperman, is by far the best book I've read all year. In it, he paints a picture of the Park Slope of his childhood, choked with trolleys, blue-collar workers, street fights, pails of beer, and stickball. Hamill was born in 1935 in what's today called the South Slope, and lived here until the late 1950s. For anyone who's curious about what this neighborhood was like during this time, I would strongly recommend picking up a copy. 

Earlier today I set out to track down the houses Hamill grew up in, the schools he went to, and his old stomping grounds. 

Hamill spent the first six years of his life living in the top floor of the above house, at 471 14th Street, between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West. "I remember sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door," he writes. 

He attended kindergarten at PS 107, "down on the corner" of Eighth Avenue and 14th Street.

"In the fall of 1941, I entered First Grade at Holy Name of Jesus elementary school.... A white brick school building rose like a fortress before me, three severe stories off the ground." The school is located at 245 Prospect Park West.

In 1941 the Hamill family moved to the ground floor of this building, 435 13th Street, between Seventh and Eighth. 

"The colors of the world instantly changed. The new house was only one block away but it butted up against the dirty redbrick bulk of the old Ansonia Clock Factory... The dark blue shadow of the Factory (as everyone called it) fell upon the stoop and across the backyard... The rooms were larger and wider... and the rent was twenty-six dollars a month, including steam heat."

Hamill would play in the street with his brother and friends, and

"would wander down the street to look at the Alley, a wide noisy cobblestoned warren of ancient trucks and escaping steam and iron-barred windows. The Alley ran from Thirteenth Street to Twelfth Street, splitting The Factory into two unequal sections, and in the years of the war, it always seemed jammed with men at work."

 Today it's a part of the Ansonia Court apartment complex.

Seventh Avenue, north from Tenth Street, 1945.

At age 8 Hamill and family moved into a railroad flat at the top floor of the above building, at 378 7th Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets, 

"a tenement rising four ominous stories above the street. It was in the middle of the block,... with a butcher's shop on one side of the doorway and a fruit and vegetable store called Teddy's to the right... Poles and lines and the steel tracks gave the avenue the look of an artists' exercise in perspective, with diminishing lines flowing away into infinity, or its equal: Flatbush Avenue at one end of the avenue, Greenwood Cemetery at the other." 

At around this time Hamill started his first paper route, which took him down to Fourth and Fifth streets, "tree-lined streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment houses... There were no fire escapes on these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a back yard." 

As street gangs like the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys took over the streets in the postwar years, Hamill found refuge here, 

"in the glorious palace of books called the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, known to us simply as the Library. I went there every Saturday morning... following the familiar route along Seventh Avenue, my blood quickening as I crossed the trolley tracks on Ninth Street and passed the stately brownstones and the small synagogue and saw up ahead the wild gloomy garden of the Library.... The majestic mock Corinthian columns of the main entrance always made me feel puny but inside, behind walls as thick as any fortress, I always felt safe." 

The library, on Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue, is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.  

Ninth Street, looking west from Seventh Avenue, 1949.

In 1949, Hamill and his friends started hanging out around Bartel-Pritchard Square, at the foot of Prospect Park West.

"Off the square on one side there were two tall Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings... I would walk up from Seventh Avenue and see the others, and we'd gather around the bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking, making jokes, and drinking beer." 

Bartel-Pritchard Square, 1950.

Looking south towards Bartel-Pritchard Square, past the Sanders Theater, 1950.

Pete Hamill's Park Slope is at once familiar and yet completely changed. The vast majority of the buildings he mentions (including many more not described here) still exist, but the storefronts have been transformed so many times over the years that it's next to impossible to record their entire history. Reading a book like A Drinking Life makes you realize that in a neighborhood as diverse and historic as Park Slope, every building and street corner has lots of stories to tell. 

Historic Photos from Brooklyn's Park Slope, Merlis and Rosenzweig, 1999.

Morgan Spurlock, Filmmaker

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking 2004 film Super Size Me, in which he ate nothing but McDonalds for 30 days and ended up 24 lbs. heavier, with the liver of a chronic alcoholic. Born in West Virginia, he recently moved back to Park Slope after living in Fort Greene for the past couple years, and is glad to be back. We met up this morning at Cafe Martin and discussed his background, his love of Park Slope, and his newest project, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a documentary about finding product placement and sponsors for that documentary, in theaters April 22nd.

HPS: I was going to suggest we meet up in the McDonald's on Ninth Street, but I assume you've been banned for life. 

Morgan: You mean like there's my face on the door with a big "X" through it? Not likely. Although maybe they'd send Grimace after me.

HPS: What was your path from where you were born in West Virginia to Park Slope?

Morgan: All I ever wanted to do was make movies. I wanted to go to film school and study filmmaking, so I ended up going to NYU and graduated there in 1993. I lived in Manhattan until around 2000, when a bunch of friends and I got a loft in Dumbo. And up until then, going to Brooklyn was the last thing you would ever do. Once you went to Brooklyn no one would ever come visit you, you might as well live in China! People were so upset. Even when I lived in Dumbo, I'd say, "It's one more stop! It's York Street! It's the first stop!" And they're like "Ahh, I don't know, it's Brooklyn!"

Once Alex, my son's mom, got pregnant, we decided that we wanted more space, we wanted a little peace of mind, and we moved to Park Slope. And it was pretty great. We lived on Ninth Street for about 2 1/2 years and then she and I split up, and I moved to Fort Greene and she moved to Tenth Street, and now after 2 years there I moved back so I can be closer to her and his school, so it would be easier for us while we split time with him. 

HPS: What were you looking for that you found in Park Slope? 

Morgan: Quiet. A back yard. Access to good grocery stores. And it's a real kid-friendly neighborhood. Where I was in Fort Greene, it was nice but it's not Park Slope. Park Slope is the most kid-friendly neighborhood. Come on, I live around the corner from a puppet show! It's a ten minute walk to the carousel in the park! It's great. 

HPS: What are some of your favorite hangout spots and restaurants?

Morgan: I'm a Smiling Pizza fan. I seem to eat a lot of Smiling Pizza. I was walking around the area when I was moving back in and I found this bar on Sixth Avenue and Fifth, the Park Slope Ale House, and it's a pretty great pub. They got great food, a good pint, I was like, "Alright, this is going to work out great!" That's probably my new favorite hangout. I like the Chip Shop too. Applewood is probably my favorite restaurant in the neighborhood, though. I gotta go back there now that I'm back in the 'hood.

Right now I'm just so excited to be back in the neighborhood. It feels like this little village, and there's even little parts to it. South Slope, North Slope, you start heading down towards Gowanus, there's all these little pockets that are all independently-minded and have their own personalities.

HPS: Can you briefly summarize The Greatest Movie Ever Sold?

Morgan: It's a movie that looks at the world of product placement, marketing, and advertising, and the whole film is actually paid for and made possible by product placement, marketing, and advertising. 

HPS: What inspired you to make this film?

Morgan: Well, I was a big fan of Heroes, the TV show, when it first came on. I thought it was brilliant, even though I've never seen a show take a downward spiral faster than that show. But in the second or third season, the cheerleader comes out of school, and the dad says, "Honey, we're really proud of you," and the camera pans to a car, and she says, "Oh wow, it's the Rogue! The Nissan Rogue! I can't believe it's the Nissan Rogue!" And I'm watching at home going, "Really? This is really happening right now?" It was terrible. 

HPS: Does product placement inherently imply subterfuge?

Morgan: Not all the time. You watch any independent film, and there's somebody drinking Coke, Coke didn't pay to be in that movie. The bigger the movie gets, the more you start to realize there was probably something going on there. JJ Abrams says in the film that he wants his characters to be real, and part of what's in the real world are Levi's Jeans and Coke. It's when things don't ring true that they really stand out. Like a can that just says "BEER." 

HPS: As people become more aware of the fact that they're constantly being shilled to, do you think there's a point where they disconnect, though?

Morgan: Maybe. I think people will react if they feel like there's a hard sell. A lot of people don't even realize how much marketing and advertising goes on in our daily lives. We've become blind to it. In the film I go to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they've banned outdoor advertising. There's not one billboard, poster, or flier on the street. There's no advertising on public transportation. And it's a remarkable place. You can actually see architecture and buildings and nature. 

HPS: Why do you think some product placement works and some doesn't?

Morgan: I think what works isn't necessarily product placement but person placement. It's the people that are associated with a product. If Brad Pitt puts my sunglasses on in the middle of a scene and rides off on a motorcycle, then suddenly every guy who wants to be cool and ride off on a motorcycle will want those sunglasses. Clark Gable didn't wear an undershirt in It Happened One Night, the first film to sweep the Oscars, in 1934, and suddenly everybody stopped buying undershirts. 

How many people will want to be emulating a documentary filmmaker after seeing this film remains to be seen, but my prediction is that sales of Mane 'n Tail Shampoo will go through the roof!

HPS: What's your ultimate goal with this film?

Morgan: What I would love to see happen is for people to become so incredibly aware of the amount of marketing happening in their lives that we start to question how much sponsorship we want in our daily lives. Does everything need to be brought to you by some sponsor? The City Council just passed a law, they're going to start selling off parks and things in New York City to corporate interests. Giving them the naming rights, much like Barclays Station instead of Atlantic/ Pacific. Is that where we are as a society, that literally the only people we can turn to are corporations to come in and underwrite things? If that's the case, I can't wait to go skiing in Pepsi, Colorado! 

HPS: The other side of the coin, though, is that if the MTA is losing money, having Coca-Cola sponsor a station seems like an easy solution. 

Morgan: Well that's the question. Is there any other way, or do we all want to live in a world where it's "Next stop, Coca-Cola"?

HPS: So what are you working on next?

Morgan: We're editing a movie right now about Comic-Con. I'm a huge comic book geek. I grew up loving comics and genre movies, horror films, action movies, everything Comic-Con embodies now. We went and filmed there last summer, followed seven people, and it's a film about their stories, with Comic-Con as a backdrop. It's called Comic-Con, Episode 4: A Fan's Hope, and that'll be done this summer.

Louise Crawford, Brooklyn Blogger

NY Times

When Louise Crawford started up Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn in 2004, she unknowingly sparked a revolution, inspiring others to follow suit and helping to make Brooklyn the blogging capital of the world through her Brooklyn Blogfests, which gather all of Brooklyn's bloggers in one place to share ideas (it hasn't been officially announced yet, but this year's Blogfest will be on May 12th at the Bell House).

Tonight at 8, she'll be presenting the Memoirathon along with Brooklyn Reading Works (a monthly thematic reading series) at the Old Stone House. It'll bring together many local writers (who will be reading diary-style prose) along with photos taken by her husband, Hugh (one of which appears every day on her blog), as well as Jamie Livingston, a friend of theirs who has recently found posthumous fame with the publishing of his incredible Polaroids, which he took one of every day from 1979 until the day he died in 1997.

HPS: Are you from Brooklyn originally?

Louise: No, I'm from Manhattan. I lived my first year in Brooklyn, though, because my parents were looking for apartments. I'm a twin, actually, and we lived on Avenue J. I grew up on the Upper West Side.

HPS: What brought you to Park Slope?

Louise: They had to drag me here kicking and screaming, in 1991, when my son was little. We looked at Park Slope and finally succumbed. We'd been living in the East Village. 

HPS: What do you love about Park Slope?

Louise: I love the look and feel of it. I love the scale. I love the colors of the buildings and the trees. I love that there's small buildings and a couple of main streets, Seventh Avenue and Fifth Avenue. I love the community. I love that you know your neighbors. I really like it here.

HPS: If you could change one thing about Park Slope, what would it be?

Louise: I'd make it less expensive to own a house. 

HPS: Why did you decide to start OTBKB?

Louise: I discovered blogging, and it was such an exciting outlet for me. Within minutes of setting up that first Blogger account I came up with the name, and then I had to figure out what that was going to be. At first, what I was really doing, unknowingly, was Smartmom, for a few months, and then in January of 2005 I met someone that was doing something like a hyperlocal blog in Montclair, and I literally ran home and said, "I have do this, now."

HPS: The Brooklyn blogosphere is really booming right now. 

Louise: It is. I like to think that I helped to facilitate the recognition of it as a community, with the Blogfest. I'm proud of that. The face time and the connecting that we did is what made it possible for other people to want to do it. We realized that it was pretty limited and not very diverse when we first did it in 2006, and we didn't want that. We wanted to spread the gospel. I felt like everybody started grabbing their little postage stamp of turf, and we were collectively creating a real hyperlocal network. 

Everything is a blog now. It went from being "What is a blog?" to "What isn't a blog?" People in Brooklyn are really a part of their community, because we feel like stakeholders in this culture and community that we've created. Be it education, livable streets, garbage, food, recycling, whatever. That's what the blogs are about, and it's a real positive thing.

HPS: Can you talk a little bit about what's going on tonight at the Memoirathon?

Louise: This is the fifth year. It's a celebration of the memoir, that form. It's about personal expression and experience, and in the past it's had themes. Last year it was about the recession, so it was all about tough times. This year, it's a combination of poets, non-fiction writers, it'll be a very interesting expression of memoir. And on top of that, the visual art element is new. The Jamie Livingston stuff is a fascinating record of one person's life. Hugh is going to be showing his work, too, and he created the Jamie website, which involved re-photographing and digitizing six thousand Polaroids. 

Hugh and Jamie were very good friends. In the 70s and 80s Hugh created this other expression of memoir and memory, which is a photo address book. There's a photo of one on my blog with Keith Haring, with his address and phone number under it. This is what Hugh would do, because he has a very bad memory, and this is how he kept track of people. He'll be showing those tonight as well. 

OTBKB

HPS: Were you two a part of the downtown art scene back then?

Louise: I met Hugh at the Collective for Living Cinema in 1986, which was an experimental film space. Hugh is an artist--he want to graduate school for photography--and had shows in New York in the East Village, and we had a lot of friends in the arts, particularly in film and photography. He's a great photographer. There's all sorts of subtextual stuff going on.

Amy Sohn, Author

Amy Sohn has been contributing editor at New York Magazine, a columnist for the New York Post, and a New York Times bestselling author for a Sex and the City companion guide, but in the past year her celebrity (and notoriety) has increased exponentially with the publishing of Prospect Park West. Chronicling the intertwining paths of four Park Slope "bohemian bourgeois breeders," the novel helped cement the Slope's reputation as a hotbed of mommy angst. Recently we sat down to discuss her thoughts on Park Slope and some of the stigma surrounding it. 

HPS: What was your path from where you grew up in Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope?

Amy: I've lived in Brooklyn my whole life, except for college, which was Brown. So as a single person I lived in Brooklyn Heights (both with my parents and not with my parents), Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and then when I got married in 2003 we thought about buying an apartment. That was when the Slope came into the picture.

HPS: What specific things were you looking for that you found in Park Slope?

Amy: I wanted the good public school district, I liked the idea of being close to the park, I think I was aware of the Co-op. But really, to be honest, it had more to do with inventory. In other words, it seemed like there were more apartments available in the Slope. If you were looking for a two-bedroom apartment there weren't as many you could buy in Cobble Hill or Carrol Gardens. And proximity to the city, of course.

HPS: What do you love about Park Slope?

Amy: I love the open sky, I love how quiet it is when you get off the train, I love the Montauk Club, I love the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I could say the park, but given how close I live to it it's really embarrassing how little I take advantage of it. And then as a mother, I've really enjoyed things like the wide variety of preschools to choose from, and the library, Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Museum are all things I re-discovered through being a mom. 

HPS: What are some of your favorite restaurants in the neighborhood?

Amy: Al Di La is definitely my favorite restaurant. I really like Thistle Hill Tavern on 15th Street, and Istanbul Park on Seventh is really good. Lately we've been eating a lot at Fornino. 

HPS: What would you like to change, or see more of, in Park Slope?

Amy: I think the people in our neighborhood need to be more honest with each other about their resentment. We have all these blogs where people, particularly without children, go off on the people with kids. But I don't see a lot of actual face to face engagement. Something like, "Excuse me, I'm trying to walk here, are you aware that your stroller is taking up the whole street?"

The good thing about our neighborhood is that we have all these different types of people. The bad thing about our neighborhood is that they don't really engage each other. This is New York City! This is a city built on telling other people what you think of them. On people not being afraid to speak their minds. 

First, when you tell someone that what they're doing is bothering you, you get it off your chest, which is a much healthier way than writing about it on an anonymous blog, and second, and more important, you teach them something they didn't know. Because all those ladies taking up the whole sidewalk, I would venture to say are not aware of the effect their behavior is having on other people. They need to be told. The Co-op is the only place I can think of where people are forced to have it out. I love when I get yelled at! It's just a more honest form of engagement.

HPS: How do you respond to people who mock Park Slope? 

Amy: Did you see that article about the people with babies moving to Wiliamsburg? That's a good example. If you go in and flag the article, I believe there are either three or four direct quotes knocking Park Slope, and then one or two paraphrases in the journalist's voice knocking Park Slope. Park Slope has become a kind of shorthand for a gentrified, bourgeois neighborhood with affluent families in it. That's certainly true, but look around Cobble Hill, Carrol Gardens, and Fort Greene! It's not all that different in a lot of other neighborhoods. 

It goes back to my earlier point. Stop stereotyping. Find distinctions between people, don't lump everyone together. Be more honest about your feelings and also try to be more understanding. I'm not saying people should let others walk all over them, but again the mom taking over the whole street with the toddler is completely overwhelmed by her own life. She's not just a mean, self-satisfied person who doesn't care about others. She's just in some hormonal haze, and she just doesn't know.

HPS: Why do you think Park Slope has become almost a punchline?

Amy: Well, part of it is my novel. I think it put it on the map for the people out there in the rest of the country that weren't quite aware of it. My novel, The Squid and the Whale, Paul Auster being known as this longtime Park Slope author, all those things have helped put it on the map. Certainly the New York Times granting an extraordinary amount of coverage to Park Slope as a kind of quintessential New York neighborhood of this type, over the last five years or so, put it on the map. 

HPS: What do you think the most misunderstood or misrepresented thing about Park Slope is? 

Amy: I feel like people think Park Slope has always been like this. I don't think people realize how much more diverse it was only 30 years ago, in terms of political orientation, class, and race. A lot of the coverage ignores that. For example, look at Greenwich Village. Most people know that the Village is very affluent now, and that it wasn't always like that.

Park Slope is a victim of its own success. Because the very people that renovated these houses so that the standard of living gradually went up for everyone, some of these people still live here! Nobody pays any attention to them. I feel like certain groups are invisible, and it's really a shame. People don't realize that the older woman walking down the street in front of you is the reason that there's ten kindergartens in PS 321. So don't be obnoxious to her. 

Now we only hear about the negative consequences of this being such a successful neighborhood. Such as overcrowding in schools, real estate values being too high, people not doing renovations that are respectful of the history of the building, crowded streets, or high prices in cafes. All of this has to do with an extremely successful transformation. 

HPS: What specifically inspired you to take a snapshot of this place and time and write Prospect Park West?

Amy: It was this feeling like Park Slope was sort of popping or exploding an a certain way, like it has reached a critical mass in terms of the affluence, the mini baby boom, the presence of all these mothers. It's a novel about the mid-2000s boom even though it came out in 2009. And also my personal motivation was feeling different from other mothers, struggling to make new friends, not sure why it was hard. Even just little things like having a hard time finding the perfect apartment; I had a character obsessed with real estate the way that so many people are. 

So I just felt like the moment was right and that the book needed to be written, and I was the person to do it. It wasn't something I was going to sit on for five years.

HPS: So what's next?

Amy: I have the sequel coming out in 2012. I don't want to say the title, but it works as a companion to Prospect Park West. It takes some of the characters into the next couple years of their life, and also introduces some new characters. Prospect Park West ended with a cliffhanger, with a couple questions that needed to be answered. I'm excited to let readers catch up with these characters a couple years down the line.