Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesFinn Bergstrom-Glaser, 4, playing in the outdoor area of Greenwood Park, a new Brooklyn bar.Kids Draw the News
City Room invites children aged twelve and under to depict events in the news. The current assignment: children in the beer garden.
It seemed that every parent in Park Slope was talking about it. A new bar was opening on the edge of the neighborhood and its owner had put out the word to local families: strollers welcome.
This was big news among the stroller set in a Brooklyn neighborhood where relations between those with children and those without have often been testy.
But within days of the June 28 opening of the bar, Greenwood Park, vitriol erupted online.
Several patrons took to Yelp, the popular review Web site, to complain — loudly — about the influx of children.
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In Park Slope, a Brooklyn neighborhood renowned for its abundance of children, even the barrooms have been infiltrated by little people.
“I arrived around 6 PM with friends and showed my ID to the doorman. OH YEAH, time for a laid back and relaxing time with some frosty beverages and bar food! WRONG, welcome to Chuck-E-Cheese in South Slope,” a Yelp reviewer, John H., posted on July 3. “From infant to toddler to preteen, every age except adult seemed to be well represented. I’m not sure why they even put tables and chairs in. It would have been far more practical to just throw a jungle gym in there and call it a day.”
At 13,000 square feet, Greenwood Park, tucked between the Prospect Expressway and Green-Wood Cemetery, is much, much larger than bars on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, where they average about 1,000 square feet, according to the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District. Most of its space is outdoors, ringed by a high wall of wooden pallets and dotted with picnic tables and featuring a bar made out of a shipping container, bocce courts and 40 varieties of draft beer.
“Moms are encouraged to come by with their children,” the owner, Ted Mann, told Park Slope Patch last summer, long before the place opened. “It’s completely stroller friendly.”
But, as child-toting customers quickly found, it opened a new front in the stroller turf wars in Park Slope.
A few years ago several bars imposed curfews, barring children past a certain hour. Others, like the popular Union Hall, forbid strollers. But the high demand for child-friendly establishments in Park Slope means many businesses continue to cater to parents’ needs.
“As more bars open you’ll see it’s almost going to become a de facto situation where during the day it may not be surprising to see a baby or children in a bar,” said Dan Myers, who has been following local businesses on his blog, Here’s Park Slope, for nearly four years. “Bar owners will say, ‘you can’t kick them out, it’s bad for business.’” (Under state law, children under 16 are allowed in bars if accompanied by a guardian.)
Mr. Mann, himself the father of two children, reasoned that his establishment would start filling up with adults about the same time as the youngest guests would be put to bed. But many of the complaints center on warm weekend afternoons, when both childless locals and families gather at the bar.
“The whole appeal of the bar is to go there in the day and sit there in the sun and enjoy a beer,” Malcolm Kates, 31, who on Yelp called Greenwood Park “unbearable” for nonparents, said in an interview. “You almost feel like you’re the irresponsible one by showing up to drink around so many children.”
Mr. Kates said he had seen children jumping on other patrons’ tables and bumping into adults. On one occasion, he said, a child on a tricycle collided with his friend’s leg. And, echoing the complaints of many a Park Slope barfly, he said he had gotten dirty looks from parents who considered the other patrons’ language too, well, bar-like for children’s ears.
“If this was going on in Bed-Stuy, parents would be indicted, bars would be closed,” he said, “but because it’s Park Slope, it’s for some reason acceptable.”
At Greenwood Park on Tuesday night, several patrons said they, too, had grumbled about baby barflies — until they had babies themselves.
“The first time I walked in, I was like, ugh, oh God, I’m one of those parents,” said Latha Youngren, who was with her husband, Soren Youngren, and their 4-month-old daughter, Isabella. “But I love that there’s a place with enough room for a stroller, where you don’t feel like you’re tripping people up, where I can have lunch and a beer.”
If locals aren’t happy with all the strollers, Ms. Youngren added, “you’re in the wrong neighborhood.”
Most of the parents on Tuesday clustered near the bocce courts, where several young children frolicked and yelled. Most of the time, parents said, those with knee-high companions and those without segregated themselves in the outdoor area.
A mother who would give her name only as April C. said bar patrons needed to be more tolerant. “I get it when it’s in a dark bar or in a club, but this is an outdoor beer garden,” she said, sipping sangria. “There are plenty of places in New York for people to get wasted. So people need to get over themselves.”
She gestured at the frolicking, yelling children. “All they’re doing is having fun,” she said.
Mr. Mann, who owns several other bars and restaurants in Brooklyn, said he was surprised by the backlash. Another of his bars, Cebu in Bay Ridge, features a child-friendly lunch hour with a play area, but he said Greenwood Park’s spacious outdoor area seemed to call for an especially family-friendly atmosphere.
“This is kind of a work in progress,” Mr. Mann said. “We are figuring things out as we roll.”
Parents have not reported any confrontations with other patrons. The anti-stroller legions, apparently, have saved their wrath for Yelp.
Lisa J., a Yelp reviewer who would not give her full name, said she was not about to modify her tough stance on the children. “People go to bars to escape kids,” she said in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions. “Bars are for adults, not children.”
