The Well-Read Jam Box And Brown-Bagged Imported Beer

The affluent have co-opted the stoop party, leading some compatriots to sneer, “How ghetto.” The Sunday Styles section treads carefully:

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. “This is fabulous,” she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, “That’s my song.”

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

Seriously, crank up your “jam box” and pop open an imported beer — it’s time to let loose:

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

“In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene,” said Mr. Hughes, the author of “Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists,” scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. “But that’s a part of the statement we’re making, that we’re not above it.”

As for the “ghetto” slur — it’s not a question of “whether” but “how”:

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is “ghetto.”

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. “Growing up in the outer boroughs,” Mr. Robinson said, “this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring.”

“I miss it,” he added.

So it’s ghetto in a self-hating kind of way — I like it!