Should A Bar Secede From Park Slope? One Bartender (Sort Of) Makes The Case
Last Friday, Park Slope’s last, shitty-dive-bar bastion, Jackie’s 5th Amendment, posted an official petition to the White House to secede from its increasingly upscale, easily mocked home and “become our own neighborhood, to be tentatively known as ‘Brooklyn.'”
What is the meaning of this, besides providing us with lots of good excuses to make “War of Brooklyn Aggression” jokes, and inciting yuppie backlash against perceived yuppie backlash? We talked to the bartender behind the petition to find out, and really, it’s pretty straightforward.
“Someone told me about East Williamsburg trying to secede from Williamsburg proper and I thought we had a considerably better case for secession,” said Becky McCarthy, 23, who’s been working behind the bar at Jackie’s for the past year or so. “I thought it might be a good publicity stunt but I had no idea it was going to get this much attention. It’s pretty clearly a joke, but now it’s got all these people yelling about how we’re just a bar and we can’t secede. Obviously we’re not actually seceding. It’s a joke. Everyone just calm down.”
There is one obvious potential perk, however: “There are bars [and competition] everywhere in Park Slope. I guess we’ll be the only one in the neighborhood if we secede.”
