Has New York gone ga-ga for goo-goos?

"When every restaurant and coffee bar doubles as a playroom, is there such a thing as adult space anymore?"

This is the provocative question posed in an essay published in this week's New York Magazine.

Enlightened parent Amy Sohn writes:
All over the city these days, not just in supermarkets but also in fancy restaurants, Chelsea galleries, French cafés, and even dive bars, families with children have taken over. Manhattan’s 26 percent increase in children under 5 from 2001 to 2004 is unthinkable to people like my parents, who had me in 1973, after moving to a middle-income apartment complex in Brooklyn built to keep people like them from fleeing. Today, New York has become so livable that families are the dominant culture. Bloomberg’s smoking ban and the boom in restaurant culture have led parents to take their kids out at night in such droves that few places are child-free. You can’t walk two blocks in Manhattan without hitting a Bugaboo Frog or a Subaru Forester with a roller shade. Creative Visions on Hudson Street is now Belly Dance Maternity. The Tunnel? Chelsea Mini-Storage. Childless adults in New York have become a persecuted minority. As Fran Lebowitz complained, “Of all the places in the world that should never have embraced this idea of safety and family values, it is New York. I mean, they have the whole rest of the country.”

Amen to that! Sohn goes on to talk about the smokefree bars and $100-per-night nannies that have contributed to the growing trend of parents taking their kids here, there, and everywhere in the Big Apple -- and ends on a nice note on the pleasures of leaving the sprogs at home.
[LINK]