I grew up in one of the coolest places on earth: brownstone Brooklyn. I lived there before everyone knew it was cool, which is, of course, the apex of coolness.
To be honest, I didn't know it was cool when I lived there and neither did my parents. They only bought a house in Park Slope because they couldn't afford the classic six in Manhattan that my mother really wanted. They couldn't even afford our house in Brooklyn at the time, actually.
Pretty much everyone in my social milieu wants to live there now, especially people with kids, which is weird for me because it wasn't really an amazing place to be a kid. (We moved when I was 11.)
My sister and I used to play in an empty parking lot across the street that was filled with broken glass and needles. I don't remember a single playground, though there must have been some. My dad slept with a baseball bat next to his bed because of the frequent break-ins. Sadly, one of my earliest memories is realizing that our next door neighbor, a young man, was dying of AIDS. My sister and I used to play a game called "homeless" in our living room — we would put on all the hats and scarves in the closet and ask our parents for loose change. (Not a joke.)
Looking back, the parts I really liked were the normie parts. I loved my neighborhood pizza parlor (shoutout to Gino's on 7th) and the local bookstore. The park was nice. And it was nice that we could walk there, but I was never allowed to leave the house without an adult so for me it was functionally the same as needing a ride. Mostly, I went to school and my parents went to work and then we all came home and ate spaghetti.
Now that I'm older, I'm not exactly sure what my parents got out of living in Brooklyn either. It wasn't work — my father's career was materially hurt by being in New York because his law firm was based in Philadelphia. My mother worked part-time for a state agency, nothing that couldn't have been replicated elsewhere. They played with us in a parking lot across the street and took us to get pizza, which is pretty much the exact same shit I do with my kids.
Some of my most vivid memories are about leaving the city. In the summers we used to spend many weekends in suburban New Jersey, close to where I live now. My parents would take us to a hotel with a pool and we would go shopping at a regular (but enormous to us) suburban grocery store. (We were trying to avoid the Park Slope Co-op, which was and is a perfect example of socialist hell.) I have so many memories of the Roy Rogers on Route 1 in New Jersey, which had a huge ball pit that we would play in for what felt like hours.
Brooklyn has improved over the years, I guess. There are better playgrounds and probably you can go to the public pool these days. I bet that parking lot is fenced now. But those improvements came with a 10x increase in prices, so unless you inherit the house your parents bought in 1987 it doesn't mean much. (My parents sold in 1998 and broke even.)
I don't know anyone who lives in Brooklyn, so I don't know if they are cool. My parents and sister live in Manhattan and they might be cool? (Does coolness look a lot like unhappiness?) I can't tell because I live in suburban New Jersey where there are lots of books and many pizza joints and I remain, despite my childhood, deeply uncool.
