Quasi-legal hotel tax dodger AirBnB put together neighborhood guides for people visiting New York. Sure they said they “worked closely” with their community, but that’s still no excuse for Bed-Stuy winding up getting tagged as “unnerving” or Crown Heights being called “rundown.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Have you people learned nothing from Vogue?
That description definitely helps you finish a passive-aggressive Crown Heights Bingo card, if you’ve got the right one. Also not to be missed are tags like “rundown” and “insular.”
Not all of the wrong things are bad, per se. Come on though, Williamsburg is “Loved by New Yorkers”? Maybe…liked? Tolerated? Half the people you bump into on the street in Williamsburg now are frogs in Brook Lopez jerseys. People love Williamsburg, but it’s tough to say that New Yorkers do.
Yeah, we get it, “Oooooh, Bed-Stuy, scary scary.” Look at those fucking tags though. “Abandoned lots.” “Chain-link fencing.” “Unnerving.” It’s not offensive so much as it is lazy to say that about Bed-Stuy. You can get unnerved near chain-link fences anywhere in this city, we promise, and there are so many vacant lots in the five boroughs that the government is stepping in to get rid of them.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever described Prospect Heights as “Park Slope’s pretention-less” neighbor
“Unwashed”? Man, fuck you.
We know Ridgewood is just over the border, but it has to be said: whenever anyone says a neighborhood has lots of subway lines, they don’t mean two, which is what Ridgewood has. That’s if you’d even like to count the M train as a full subway line, considering it doesn’t go past Myrtle-Broadway on nights and weekends.
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I don’t think the airbnb writeups are that bad. I think they account for travelers’ preconceptions, but on balance are pretty fair. I mean, you can quibble with a line or two here or there, but they’re not that far off. And they have to say things like “less-than-glamorous” and “seedy” so travelers know what to expect. It’s not good for anyone if they turn up in Bushwick expecting Brooklyn Heights.
Bushwick is unwashed. The truth shouldn’t hurt you so bad.
If you want to think of Bushwick as only that small part by the Morgan stop where all the garbage lives, then that’s on you. Otherwise, none of it is any dirtier than the rest of this dirt pile we live in.
kind of hypocritical coming from a website that considers the gentrifier-created “east williamsburg” a neighborhood
Whether or not it’s a neighborhood is actually a subject up for debate among the writers of this website, because we contain multitudes. I don’t much care for it myself, but 10 seconds of research will also show that East Williamsburg has a more complicated history than we give it credit for.
Pretty bad section on my neighborhood, Prospect Lefferts Gardens too. They left out “Prospect” (often done) and the plural “s” out of our name. Worse, they said our neighborhood has “it’s own” subway stop, naming “Sterling Street”, which is true enough, but they left out the other three: “Prospect Park,” “Parkside Avenue,” and “Winthrop Street.” Also, while we DO probably have “NYC’s finest Caribbean cuisine” none of the establishments serving it are actually “on the ground floors of…[our] brownstones and townhouses,” but in commercial buildings, mostly on Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues.
Airbnb bought out the community-run neighborhood site Nabewise, and their writeups follow a similar model; I’m sure the content is edited and directed but those tags could be community-generated, in other words, just one or two people’s opinion.
Also, Prospect Heights is exactly Park Slope’s pretentionless neighbor.