Explore Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue on a sunny weekend day and you’ll see mothers with children tucked in strollers, a packed Barnes & Noble and busy restaurants. Turn off the main drag and the tree-lined cross streets are full of tidy brownstones. Fifth Avenue, once shunned as less desirable, is now a strip of trendy restaurants, bars and shops.
Today’s Park Slope, a neighborhood enclave for families and upscale ex-hipsters, began to take visible shape in the 1970s and 1980s, around the same time as the transformation of the Upper West Side and Soho. Manhattan refugees began to discover its brownstones and moved to the neighborhood in search of great deals on more space. Read the full story from the May 2005 issue after the jump.