Leaving Your Heart in Ditmas Park

Earlier this year author Joel Kotkin said in so many words that New York should be looking to San Francisco as a role model. Now NYMag names Ditmas Park one of their many reasons to love our fair city. Why? Because it's our own tiny version of the City by the Bay. The mag says, "What New Yorker with a repressed slacker-hippie side hasn’t fantasized about ditching Gotham for calmer, quainter San Francisco? Some locals have been satisfying that yen by simply moving to Ditmas Park, the Victorian-packed enclave south of Prospect Park. It isn’t just that the West Coast metropolis and the west-of-Flatbush hamlet share an abundance of turn-of-the-century painted ladies." And those painted ladies will cost you just about as much as the ones on the West Coast, now well over a million bucks. But that's the price you pay to live near bookstores, drum circles, and a laid-back SF vibe, man. One local told them: “It’s a bunch of communists hanging out and drinking Fair Trade coffee while reading conspiracy books."