I grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, so a headline on The New Yorker’s homepage Monday, declaring “Park Slope is Dead,” piqued my interest. Alas, the story contained no new information, only inaccurate riffing on something I already knew about: that Southpaw—a live-music club around the corner from my parents’ house, where it replaced a 99 cent store in 2002—had just closed. In a development that is apparently too deliciously symbolic for any writer to ignore, Southpaw is being replaced by a firm called New York City Kids, a business offering academic tutoring and activities such as rock climbing for children.

The New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town-esque dispatch on Southpaw’s last night by a young staffer named Andrew Marantz. (I don’t know Marantz, but I’m friends with his cousin, a former colleague of mine.) Marantz is clearly a talented writer: his lead artfully ties this minor event to the sea changes that have swept neighborhoods across New York City: “CBGB gives rise, inexorably, to DBGB. Just as a red giant becomes a white dwarf, an edgy block must lose its edge.” But the story he tells is an inaccurate one. To read The New Yorker you’d think that Park Slope went straight from grimy to trendy, and it is only now settling into adulthood and having children. In fact, yuppies bearing children were in the Slope long before Southpaw, and it was the arrival of venues like Southpaw that removed the edge years ago.

At least Marantz has the defense that he is writing for a national publication and the precise details of the history of one neighborhood isn’t supposed to be his area of expertise. The Brooklyn Paper has no such excuse. The paper that seeks to be the borough’s weekly paper of record made the same errors, minus the entertaining references. “A long-standing Park Slope concert hall will close and become a tutoring school now that the hood caters more to kiddies than roadies,” read its lead. Give the writer, Natalie O’Neill, credit for trying to write a cute lead. Then deduct far more for the fact that what she says makes no sense if you know the neighborhood at all: The Slope has always catered more to kiddies than roadies. Park Slope was never the East Village. Nor does nine years make a business an especially long-standing one. There are stores across the street from Southpaw that have been there four times as long.

These articles get the neighborhood’s evolution precisely backwards. Park Slope was initially gentrified in the 1970s and ’80s by families like mine that moved there for more space than they could afford in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights, often to raise children. There were stores selling toys and books for children and babies long before there were trendy bars, clubs or restaurants.

Marantz quotes a banker lamenting to New York in 1985 that people such as himself moving to the Upper West Side were killing exactly what he liked about it. Marantz equates that to what is happening Park Slope today, without pausing to ask what exact quality he is writing about. The answer on the Upper West Side in 1985 was probably diversity. Diversity defined the Park Slope I grew up in. That’s been disappearing rapidly in the last ten years, since a bunch of recent college graduates from the suburbs started pouring in. They’ve displaced much of the Latino population, along with the original babies in strollers, like me. If “the Slope is dead,” it died around 2002 when places like Southpaw replaced the bodegas and it stopped being racially and socioeconomically diverse. In fact, Southpaw replacing the 99 cent store around that time is the far better encapsulation of Park Slope’s essential changes than one yuppie business closing to be replaced by another.

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Ben Adler is a contributing writer for The Nation. He previously covered politics, policy, and media as a staffer for Newsweek and Politico. His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, and New York, among other publications.