Our attitudes on babies and toddlers in bars have softened a tad with age, but a new generation of New Yorkers (and the same old Times editors) are pulling pints of outrage all over again. Since “5-foot-4, dark-haired Jewish girl in her early 20s” Risa Chubinsky recently moved to Park Slope, she probably doesn’t know about the uproar stirred in Brooklyn when Union Hall put up a “No Strollers” sign in 2008. And let us not forget the temper tantrum over a “boy’s hat” that careened all over the Park Slope Parents listserv in 2006. Ms. Chubinsky, we salute your bravery, though it is likely borne out of naïveté about your neighborhood. “No matter what breeders might think, bars are not family-friendly,” Chubinsky writes. Her examples aren’t great: a Sunday-afternoon food event at the Bell House and a dad changing his baby on a picnic table at Bohemian Hall. (That cannot be any grosser than the actual bathrooms at Bohemian Hall.) But even an old whine is still a goodie, as we can attest from the intensity of the comments. Our favorites are below.
“Bars may not be traditionally family-friendly spots, but increasingly, specially on Sundays, it is common knowledge, and a welcome practice, for parents to go to a bar with their children and engage in conversation while the toddlers walk and run around the place. As a new parent I understand and even support the practice.”
“Until you have a child, you remain a child, and complain complain complain!”
“[I don’t have] much sympathy for the author who doesn’t want to have to compete with a baby in the bathroom or with a crying baby while she cries - what if another adult was crying next to her? What if another patron was doing coke in the bathroom, something I’ve seen more than once?”
“I wonder if the writer is aware that this entire complaint reads as if written by a toddler. “I want … ” / “I don’t want” again and again … even one instance of “I refuse to share”
“Riva, honey, as a gay man, i have to give you the 411: Using the term “breeders” does not make you down with the homies. Now go back to your food co-op.”
”The Gate is a dumb bar to drink at anyway, isn’t it?”
