Park Slope Research Articles

North American Gentrification? Revanchist and Emancipatory Perspectives Explored

By offering a response to recent calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’, the author attempts to move on from the intractable theoretical divisions and overgeneralizations that continue to pervade the gentrification literature. The research described in this paper takes the form of a comparative assessment of the gentrifying neighbourhoods of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. A central part of this research has been an engagement with two contrasting academic discourses on gentrification, the ‘emancipatory city’ (a Canadian construct) and the ‘revanchist city’ (a US construct), to examine how gentrification may or may not have changed since these discourses were produced and articulated. The author combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on displaced tenants) with supplementary data from secondary sources and demonstrates that gentrification is neither emancipatory nor revanchist in either case. This has important implications for how gentrification is understood and evaluated in Canada and the USA. Although one can see crucial broad similarities both in the causes and in the effects of gentrification in each neighbourhood (which would appear to endorse casual references to ‘North American gentrification’), the process is also differentiated according to contextual factors, and the nuances of the gentrification process are illuminated and clarified by international comparison. In sum, the author points to the need to exercise caution in referring to ‘North American gentrification’, especially as a geography of gentrification is only in its infancy.

Edible Activism: Food, Commerce, and the Moral Order at the Park Slope Food Coop

Edible Activism: Food, Commerce, and the Moral Order at the Park Slope Food Coop

Gentrification in London and New York: An Atlantic gap?

Abstract This paper is concerned with differences and similarities between gentrification in England and the United States. The central argument is that processes of gentrification are context specific. Three aspects of local contexts that are crucial to gentrification are explored: (1) the institutionalisation of property transfer; (2) the capitalisation of property, and (3) urban conservation practices. These are illustrated with reference to two examples of gentrification: in Barnsbury, part of the inner London borough of Islington and in Park Slope, part of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The analysis demonstrates that differences between the English and the US land and housing markets and urban conservation practices have important effects on the gentrification process, and that concepts which are relevant in one national setting are not necessarily appropriate in another national setting.

Center Stage: Helen Gahagan Douglas, A Life.

Best remembered today as the victim of Richard Nixon's smear campaign in their 1950 senatorial race in California, Helen Gahagan Douglas had a truly remarkable double career, in entertainment and in politics. A tall, stunning woman, dignified and fashionable, Douglas dropped out of Barnard College in her sophomore year to star in Dreams for Sale, a Broadway play written by Owen Davis, who would win a Pulitzer Prize that year. With nothing more than sheer talent and little training, she was soon the peer of Helen Hayes and Katherine Cornell--Heywood Broun called her ten of the twelve most beautiful women in the world--and she played the lead in a string of hits. Then she changed course, and after two years of intensive training in a tiny Manhattan apartment, she debuted in Europe as an opera singer, and sang there for several seasons. And in the late '30s and early '40s, as she and her husband (actor Melvyn Douglas) became deeply involved in FDR's Democratic Party, she once again rose rapidly to the top, serving as a Democratic National Committeewoman after only five months in politics, and winning a seat in Congress in 1944, 1946, and 1948. In Center Stage, Ingrid Winther Scobie presents a sweeping biography of an unusual and talented woman, set against the background of the Great White Way in the 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and California and national politics in the 1940s. We see young Helen Gahagan growing up in posh, turn-of-the-century Park Slope (really the Park Avenue area of Brooklyn, as she described it), developing an intense passion for acting. We witness her first meeting with Melvyn Douglas, in famed producer David Belasco's office (Belasco asked Helen for her opinion of Melvyn as a possible leading man and she answered simply, he will do). And we follow their life together, moving from coast to coast, trying to raise a family and maintain two careers, and gradually becoming more involved in politics--Helen especially with the plight of California's migrant workers. Scobie describes Douglas's long, close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, traces her political rise as one of the most outspoken liberals in Washington, examines in detail her three terms in Congress, and sheds considerable light on the most notorious event in Douglas's political career: her defeat in the 1950 senatorial race at the hands of Richard Nixon, long considered the quintessential red-smear campaign. Indeed, this is the first book to examine the 1950 campaign from Douglas's side, and its conclusions are revelatory. Based on extensive archival research, on exclusive access to Douglas's private papers including letters to and from Melvyn spanning fifty years, and on interviews with Douglas's colleagues, friends, and family, this absorbing biography skillfully interweaves the private and public life of a woman who was both a glamorous celebrity and a charismatic political figure.

Construction of second order slope rotatable designs through balanced incomplete block designs

In this paper a new method of construction of second order slope rotatable designs (SOSRDs) through balanced incomplete block designs is suggested. In this method the number of design points required is in some cases less than the number required in Hader and Park slope rotatable central composite design (SRCCD)

Racial resegregation in a gentrified neighbourhood

Abstract Park Slope, Brooklyn is a gentrifying enclave of Brooklyn from which the minority enclave is being squeezed. It is an example of that curious phenomenon associated with gentrification in many U.S. cities, white reinvasion of a minority or an integrated neighbourhood.