33 Comments on "The Real Park Slope"


  1. Sometimes I think I’m the only Wesleyan alum who didn’t automatically move to Park Slope (or Williamsburg…) immediately after graduation. It’s like it was part of the degree-awarding process.


  2. Isn’t a college bumper sticker rather square for hip New York? It seems like a confession of insecurity and a desire to let the big people know one came in through the front entrance.


  3. Indiana University, Indiana State University, and University of Indianapolis all exist, but there’s no “University of Indiana”.


  4. Pretty tacky, those. And exactly in line with what I’d expect from Park Slope. Thanks for reminding me why there’s never a good reason to go there except to get to the Botanic Garden…


  5. how did you collect the school names for this project, dorothy? did you walk down a street and log each school sticker on a chart or take photos then refer to them later? your personal data illustrations are awesomely weird, thanks for sharing.


  6. This is impressive. My only question is HOW are there no Sarah Lawrence stickers there? Have they all migrated to Bushwick already?


  7. Such hating on Park Slope in the comments. Stay in Manhattan and keep those Long Island parents’ checks coming. Sheesh. Anyway, I think one thing to be careful of is that a lot of people who live in Park Slope are, well, old. And they’re advertising their kids’ colleges.


  8. I walked to Park Slope and walked down both sides of streets in Park Slope and took notes on my hand-drawn street grids and then I walked home. And that is why this took four months.

    I can’t speak to Sarah Lawrence, but there was a trashed van with one wheel up on the curb and a Brown sticker.


  9. >Isn’t a college bumper sticker rather square for hip New
    >York? It seems like a confession of insecurity and a desire
    >to let the big people know one came in through the front
    >entrance.
    >Animaminima 01.18.10

    Isn’t that what Park Slope is all about? Having made it? Being that person who came in through the front entrance. It’s not enough to live in that brownstone, you have to let people know you deserve it!

    Regarding the graphic as a whole, I am not really sure what it’s showing us. Is the arrangement of the colleges significant in some way? I don’t see a pattern. Does the size of the words indicate something about the proportion or number of cars with certain bumper stickers? Or is it that if there are more colleges, they have to written in small type to fit them all in?


  10. Not status conscious enough? Here’s the map with dots highlighting a concentration of Ivy League bumper stickers north of 1st Av and along the park:

    tinypic.com/r/a9s6yr/6


  11. The west coast is minimally represented here: I could only find Reed, SF State, and Pomona. (Go Beavers!)


  12. I wonder if there is a strong correlation between the douchey prestige of your school and the likelihood of putting a college sticker on your car. Just how much do the Harvard people feel the need to advertise, in order to assuage their shallowly-seated insecurities?

    [Full disclosure: Princeton ’05 grad here]


  13. “too hip for college bumper stickers” –> who is status-conscious here?

    I went to Michigan Tech, which you probably haven’t heard of since it is relatively small and in the midwest, but it is really pretty unique, and I’d say part of my identity. If you can’t relate, regardless of where you went (assuming you graduated recently) I’m sorry for you, I think you missed out. If you didn’t go to college, presumably you did something else that should be part of who you are.

    Anyway, “shallowly-seated” insecurities should be easy to assuage, yah?


  14. Couldn’t you all people please just appreciate the nice design and FULL STOP? Do you seriously HAVE TO question each single campus sticker? This has been made to be looked at, it looks nice, period. Nobody is challenging the relevance of one-t’d Paterson colleges, and no-one really cares if no University of Indiana actually exists. It. Is. Just. Supposed. To look GOOD. And it bloody does.
    CRIKEY!
    I know upper case means yelling and that’s exactly what I meant to do.


  15. Scott, you missed Cal Tech, UC Santa Cruz, and USC. West Coast represent rah rah rah.


  16. Who in Park Slope is lucky enough to find a parking space on the block where they actually live?

    In my time living there, I considered myself lucky if I found a spot four blocks away from my apartment.

    This map’s precision exceeds its accuracy.

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