Bay Ridge/ Bensonhurst

Endless reshuffling of Brooklyn neighborhoods results in ‘Bay Ridge is the new South Slope’

bay ridge
It’s just like South Slope, except not really. via Flickr user Alex Flint

What is there to even be said about the incessant need for people to declare this neighborhood or that neighborhood the new whatever beyond “Jesus, just put an icepick in my brain already”? Today’s wish for an icepick come courtesy of New York Magazine, which decided that since Sarah Jessica Parker went to Tanoreen once, Bay Ridge is the new South Slope. What does that make South Slope though?

So why is Bay Ridge the new South Slope, or more accurately a neighborhood previously not talked about by media mucky mucks that they will now pay attention to it? Well let’s see:

  • Elizabeth Spiers, of Gawker fame, lives there
  • Sales are up!
  • There’s a bike path
  • There’s some new bars, like the Lock Yard (featured in the new Beer Book, which in no way endorses this lunacy, btw)
  • It’s being rediscovered

Are any of these things unique to South Slope? We have no fucking idea, although it’s good to see that in our colorblind society, “discovering” “new” neighborhoods isn’t relegated to just the ones that black people lived in historically. Why Bay Ridge can’t just be Bay Ridge and instead has to be branded as some other neighborhood is beyond us, but maybe that’s because we’ve taken a few too many icepicks to the brain.

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