Some of this sentiment, to be sure, springs from the area’s transformation in recent years: Trendy boutiques and bars have replaced bodegas on Fifth Avenue; and the neighborhood’s nickname has gone from nice, crunchy “Dyke Slope” to crowded, congested “No Park Slope.” According to a recent study, nearly half the drivers cruising at any given time are searching for a parking spot.

At least to non-locals (such as Brooks, who doesn’t realize that Williamsburg is actually where the “hipsters” are), the Slope seems to represent all that is reprehensible about gentrified New York and modern urban parenting. “Non–New Yorkers think of it disparagingly as a hipster alterna-playground, and Manhattanites think of it as a sanctimonious PC stroller derby, like one big suburban PTA meeting stuck in a food co-op,” says novelist Steven Johnson, a longtime Sloper who jokes on his blog that “all writers with young children in NYC are legally required to live” there. “To the outside world, it’s too cool for its own good, and inside New York, it’s not cool enough.”

Even many residents maintain a love-hate relationship with their nabe. Graphic designer and community organizer Aaron Brashear says that his family shops everywhere but jam-packed Seventh Avenue. “We will not walk there because of the stroller brigades,” he says. Slope psychotherapist Peter Loffredo has sworn off the kid-crammed Barnes & Noble, Starbucks and both Tea Lounges, and not because he doesn’t like the coffee. “They’re overrun pseudo Romper Rooms,” he says.

Loffredo adds that Brooks’s assessment of the Slope provided a rare instance in which he agreed with the conservative columnist. “What I hate about Park Slope,” he says, “are the adults walking around with tense, frozen smiles while their eyes plead for reassurance that they have succeeded in capturing the American Dream.” And, he adds, “They’re usually seen with a narcissistic, whiny kid in tow on one side and a high-strung Jack Russell on the other, while simultaneously pushing Cleopatra in a thousand-dollar chariot.”

You know what else is problematic? A certain smugness. Even as they roll their eyes at the rents, people there adore the park, the food, the local activism, the can-do community spirit. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of the messages on Park Slope Parents are supportive and helpful, but that’s not what makes the news,” says the group’s founder, Susan Fox. And Catherine Bohne, owner of the beloved 36-year-old Community Bookstore, recalls proudly how the shop became a clearinghouse for information and donations in the weeks following September 11, serving as a kind of refuge. “All I did was open the door,” she says. “That’s Park Slope for you.”

That kind of reverence can be off-putting. “The Slope has always seemed like a bit of a cult,” says Louise Crawford, of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. “Even before we moved here 15 years ago, Slopers loved the place, and that was when you couldn’t find a decent restaurant. We were easier to love when we were schleppier, scrappier Legal Aid lawyers and social workers. Now, it seems very established and wealthy, as if we’ve got it all: great public school, that small-town feeling. So now,” she says, “we’re easy to hate.”