New York Guide
Brooklyn
"The Great Mistake." So ran local newspaper headlines when Brooklyn became a borough of New York in 1898. Then the fourth-largest city in the US, it has long since labored in the shadow of its taller but smaller brother across the East River. Over the past few decades, though, Brooklyn has come into its own, its signature brownstone townhouses and tree-lined streets complemented by top-rated restaurants, trendy bars, world-class museums, and galleries and performance spaces that present more daring work than you'll generally find in Manhattan.
The most accessible district in the borough is pristine, elite Brooklyn Heights, a clutch of old mansions and townhouses abutting the East River directly opposite Lower Manhattan. A little north of here, the once-derelict warehouses of the area known as DUMBO have been converted to expensive condos, art galleries, and theaters overlooking two popular waterfront parks. West of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Red Hook's half-exposed stone-block streets are lined with an oddball mix of hulking warehouses (some transformed into galleries and artists' studios), vacant lots, garden centers, and detached three-story houses.
Prospect Park, designed by Central Park creators Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, contains the usual ballfields and trails, along with the first-rate Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Brooklyn Museum, while to the west is the leafy and brownstone-laden, cultured and kid-saturated neighborhood of Park Slope. North of the park, increasingly trendy Prospect Heights leads into Fort Greene, where you'll find some of the most pristine residential blocks in the city along with the famous Brooklyn Academy of Music performance complex.
Then there's coastal Brooklyn, where Coney Island, home to the venerable seaside amusement district known for its rattletrap roller-coaster, the Cyclone, and the New York Aquarium, is the longtime object of New Yorker pilgrimages. Grab some borscht at nearby Brighton Beach, where the Russian-born population tops 320,000.
Finally, anyone visiting New York for contemporary art should head to gallery-dotted Williamsburg, just one stop on the #L train from Manhattan's East Village and also a top choice for eating and drinking among the young and trendy.