For those too young to remember Saturday Night Fever, and even those who do, a more recent cultural touch stone for Bay Ridge comes from Peggy Olson in the second-ever Mad Men episode, when she declares, “I’m from Bay Ridge. We have manners.” That is the attitude the neighborhood likes to cultivate, so a sudden influx of massage parlors, some open late and advertising “erotic” services, does not sit well with local leaders such as City Councilman Vincent Gentile. He told the New York Times he’d asked the Brooklyn District Attorney’s sex-trafficking unit to investigate. “Bay Ridge is a bedroom community with traditional family values and a place we like to think of as a small town in a big city. This is not something that would comport with what normally goes on in Bay Ridge,” Gentile said. All he lacks now is evidence.
