Park Slope Resident Sir Patrick Stewart Hates Strollers, Maybe Doesn’t Know Where Red Hook Is
Perhaps Park Slope’s most beloved resident, Sir Patrick Stewart has some things that he doesn’t love so much about Park Slope. Is it the neighborhood restaurants’ propensity for putting kale on their menus? No! Sir Pat loves kale. But for what else is this part of brownstone Brooklyn known? Parents pushing supersize strollers? Could Sir Pat possibly hate those? Why, yes. Yes, he can. And he does!
Vanity Fair reports that the British actor loves many things about his Brooklyn neighborhood, but the breeder culture isn’t one of them. Last night at an event for the Tribeca Film Festival, Stewart spoke of the four-wheeled beasts that have taken over the streets, saying that he and his wife have come to love a lot of the things Brooklyn’s known for, (“We do eat a lot of kale”) they haven’t embraced everything. Stewart said, “[W]e don’t have a stroller. I think we are probably the only residents of Park Slope who don’t have a stroller. I’m actually beginning a campaign—well, I began it with Mayor Bloomberg—about banning strollers from sidewalks.”
Stewart doesn’t hate everything about Brooklyn, though, and reminisced about all the Brooklyn-set films he watched as a child, including On the Waterfront. Stewart said, “We were just very poor. And I saw every movie that I was old enough to get into, and even some that I wasn’t old enough to get into. And I loved movies about American life. I was growing up in a working-class neighborhood in a very small house, and I loved movies about American homes with green lawns and beautiful, big kitchens, and so it was the glamour of American life as it was portrayed in the movies. Until, one night, I went to my local cinema to see a film I didn’t know anything much about, or much about the people who were in it, or the director. I do now, because the film was called On the Waterfront, and I found—although set in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which I now live a block away from Red Hook—that it was actually about the kind of people that I was growing up with, and the world that I was growing up with. And I saw that movies could be about something other than pure escapism and fantasy.”
Lovely, right? Except, well, we love hate to be quibbling jerks, but no matter where you live in Park Slope (and rumor has it that Stewart lives close to 5th Avenue), you are definitely not one block away from Red Hook. Gowanus, maybe, but not Red Hook. Anyone looking to buy Stewart a birthday present might want to get him one of these. He can carry his kale in it AND never get lost. Perfect.
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