Brooklyn New York - A Great Old Town

North Amercia United States Northeast

Brooklyn is the kind of place where its reputation precedes it.

We know all about the stereotypes. The borough has its share of loud-mouthed, opinionated men wearing gold chains, and loud-mouthed, opinionated women cracking chewing gum. But there is more going on here than meets the eye. Brooklyn isn’t just the oft-joked-about cousin to Manhattan’s glitz and sophistication. We have enough sights, culture, history and eateries to make leaving the borough, dare I say it, completely unnecessary.

Brooklyn has become a hot commodity. The NBA’s New Jersey Nets are close to moving the team to town and Carnival Cruise Lines has proposed a new $100 million passenger terminal on the South Shore. Even Sex and the City’s Miranda fled her Manhattan digs to call the borough home. We’re not kidding when we say that Brooklyn should be the 51st state.

Novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn through and through and even then, you wouldn’t know it all.” True, but since visitors have to start somewhere, it makes sense to begin at the beginning - the Brooklyn Bridge.

There are few things left in this world that are free and the Brooklyn Bridge is one of them. An elevated walkway above the traffic makes for a pleasant stroll, jog or bike ride over the East River, especially at dusk, when the sun sets behind the Manhattan skyline. The opening of the bridge in 1883 was the impetus for thousands of Lower East Side immigrant workers to seek refuge in a more hospitable area with cleaner air and more living space.

Labeled as the new Greenwich Village, the area around the Manhattan Bridge has become home to burgeoning artists and musicians, giving new life to an area that had been long neglected.

The Art Under the Bridge festival, held annually in October, draws thousands of visitors from all over New York City. Brooklynites love to abbreviate names, so we affectionately call this area DUMBO, or Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Tucked between DUMBO and the Brooklyn Bridge is New York City’s best pizzeria. Tiny Grimaldi’s never fails to please. They don’t deliver and they don’t take credit cards, two sure-fire ways to kill a pizza business in other cities, but Grimaldi’s thrives. People will continue to come, no matter the inconvenience, as if the extra effort makes the pizza taste better.

As waves of immigrants pushed deeper into the borough throughout the Nineteenth Century, the city eventually gobbled up all of the surrounding towns: Williamsburg, Flatbush, Bushwick, New Utrecht, Gravesend and New Lots. These neighborhoods still exist as informal landmarks, and they retain the character of the immigrants who settled them first.

n fact, one out of every seven Americans can trace their family roots through Brooklyn. “You can go from neighborhood to neighborhood and run into the UN,” said Brooklyn historian Ron Schweiger. This is the essence of Brooklyn - neighborhoods and immigrants. It’s what brought Ken Wheaton to the borough four years ago. “It just seems easier to maintain your own self-made community in Brooklyn,” said Wheaton.

In 1898, Brooklyn was incorporated as one of the five boroughs of New York City, passing by a narrow margin of 277 votes. Kings, Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island and The Bronx make up New York City. Brooklyn is Kings County and we treat our town with a reverence reserved only for royalty. Many an argument has begun by locals eager to defend the most mundane aspect of Brooklyn life - alternate side of the street parking or why we aren’t permitted garbage disposals, for example.

And where do the intricacies of these arguments get aired? At a diner, of course. In some cities a diner is just a diner. In Brooklyn, diners are where locals meet to gossip, catch up on the news of the day and hold court on important topics. For more than 50 years, Junior’s on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and DeKalb Avenue, has been that place for Brooklynites. Be sure to leave room for an egg cream and one of the 18 different kinds of their world famous cheesecake.

Summer is the season when Brooklyn lets her hair down and Coney Island is the center of it all. Coney Island is a sliver of land, not really an island at all, on the southern shore of Brooklyn. In the late 1800s, it was America’s first playground for the wealthy and people came from around the tri-state area to live it up on the beach, at the horse tracks, in the Vaudeville theaters and on the boardwalk.

Coney Island’s golden era ended in 1964 when the last of three giant amusement parks closed, leaving the boardwalk in disrepair for many years. Now the area is revitalizing itself with help from the city. The Stillwell Avenue train station is getting a much needed face lift, while the shoddy buildings on Surf Avenue are being renovated or torn down. A huge boost came from the Brooklyn Cyclones, the borough’s first professional baseball team in more than 40 years.

We often refer to Manhattan as “the city,” but the worst mistake a visitor can make is to treat Brooklyn as a bedroom community to the glitz of Times Square and the drama of Broadway. “My original impression was that Brooklyn was one of those outlying districts,” said Wheaton. “But Brooklyn had a charm to it. It seemed older, wiser.”

When Ron Schweiger gives a lecture about Brooklyn, he finishes with an image of a postcard, circa 1915. On the postcard is a woman in a bathing suit at the beach, holding a sign that says, “Brooklyn”. Across the bottom it reads “…is a great old town.”

It surely is.

Author: Jacquelin Cangro