Brooklyn Rising
If you grow up by New York, you've got to get back whenever you can. The sweet thing about NYC is no matter how well you think you know it, there's always tons new to discover. Whenever I return, I look to explore what's new and happening, and these days in New York, that's Brooklyn, baby.
You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that Brooklyn is outright booming. With the cost of living in Manhattan mushrooming in the 1990s, Brooklyn began its transition from the biggest outer borough to nothing less than the new downtown.
An influx of artists, musicians, yuppies, families, students, immigrants and old-school New Yorkers took the leap across the East River, and aren't looking back. The NYC compass of cool points east to the borough that were it not a part of New York, would be America's fourth largest city.
Our first Brooklyn stop was Carroll Gardens, where my hombre Chris moved in 2006. We lived together in the East Village, on Second and B, ten years back. "Do you miss it?" we asked. "Hell, no" he replied.
Hanging in this old Italian enclave, shopping at delis, kicking by handball courts, drinking espresso on Court St and Brooklyn Lager on Smith St, we could see the attraction: We're talking straight-up day-to-day NYC neighborhood life. Unlike sanitized, overnoised Manhattan, Brooklyn nabes feel more real, more genuine; the sidewalks are wider, and less crowded with tourists; the trees are big and leafier. Pizza slices are cheaper. Brownstones have driveways, and more shocking, these New Yorkers actually own cars. (Some stuff's the same though: cops still double park, and the Red Sox still suck.)
Not like Brooklyn's all under-the-radar: far from it. Word's way out. Any doubt of that was erased by venturing into Williamsburg, the epicenter of young hipsters in NYC that's about four years past its tipping point. Flocks of nightflies were buzzing around these blocks of old light industrial warehouses and repair shops, a topography more Newark, NJ than the Lower East Side.
We convened for drinks at Barcade, the former garage-turned-nightspot renowned for its long row of vintage video games. Defender, Spyhunter and Berzerk beckoned and blinged in retro glory. We pounded Harpoons, then pounded pavement on our way to Spuyten Duyvel, a ramshackle beer joint housing yard sale furniture and an exquisite, freakin' expensive collection of gourmet global beers. "Have you had this before?" came the query to which we grunted yes. Not that I can tell you what we ordered - that's a mystery list lost with a coaster in the back of a yellow cab back to Carroll Gardens.
Too early the next morning, I traveled to DUMBO, or Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Galleries, new media companies, high-end organic markets and sushi bars populated the cobblestoned alleyways of renovated warehouses along the East River, on the northern tip of Brooklyn. Yellow and black water taxis bobbed across the water like drunken bumblebees, flitting from stop to stop. At the DUMBO ferry landing, markers noted where George Washington led his fleeing revolutionary army. Brooklyn then was mostly farmlands - amazing to think of an agrarian New York.
But I went to DUMBO for the future - namely, to explore the soon-to-be Brooklyn Bridge Park. In the next several years, a massive new parks-and-rec complex will rise next to tiny, tidy Empire Fulton State Park, as former warehouse piers get converted to pools, playing fields, grasslands, kayak marinas, bandshells, picnic grounds and more. Another sweetness about NYC: constant reinvention, continual evolution, inspired change.
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