‘You couldn’t live with me, so you moved to Brooklyn”, the New York troubadour Jesse Malin bleats plaintively on his song Brooklyn. It’s the jealous lament of the once-cool Lower East Side for the fresh cachet of Brooklyn, a borough that has risen effortlessly to the challenge of filling the counterculture gap left by the sanitisation of Manhattan. That island, the self-styled capital of the world, has been neutered by one too many Sex and the City/Friends/post-Giuliani grins. In Lower Manhattan’s St Mark’s Place they are still flogging the profane T-shirts, but they know that the edge has moved across the bridge over the East River.
In 1861 Walt Whitman, one of Brooklyn’s most famous residents, claimed it was “destined to be among the most famed and choice of the half dozen cities of the world”. Brooklyn might not feel the need to try that hard anymore, but it can’t help but be one of America’s most compelling multicultural communities.
If it wasn’t for that municipal bond with greater New York, Brooklyn would be the fourth largest city in the country, and arguably the most interesting. If America is the world’s melting pot, this is where the raw material meets the flame. You will still find ethnic concentrations here, from the West Indies vibe of Flatbush, Little Odessa out at Brighton Beach and the Polish enclaves at Greenpoint to the Hasidic clusters on the edges of Williamsburg, but Brooklyn has been mixing it all up for the last 150 years and the borders are blurring.
The affluent are moving across the river from Manhattan, a decade or so after the hip and happening made the initial exodus. If you need a European confirmation of Brooklyn’s desirability, those arbiters of taste David and Victoria Beckham, as well as naming their first-born after the borough, have bought a deceptively unassuming town house here.
For the first-timer, the best approach is to take the breezy and beautiful walk across Brooklyn Bridge from Lower Manhattan. For the visitor it can be a confusing borough, with grand 19th-century buildings abutting grim blocks of scary tenements and broad parks neighbouring high-rise projects. The best guide is a cultural one, in the sumptuous Brooklyn Museum on the corner of Washington Avenue and Eastern Parkway.
The regular collection here belies any notion of Brooklyn as an outlying suburb, including works by Monet and Degas and a substantial Rodin sculpture court. The cultural highlight this summer is a celebration of Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of Brooklyn’s own meteoric talents. Born of a Puerto-Rican mother and Haitian father, the artist’s origins were typically Brooklynese.
By the early 1980s he had moved on from spraying cryptic, vaguely minatory graffiti on the walls of Brooklyn to become the coveted gilded youth of Manhattan galleries, a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol. He died at 27 of a drugs overdose, but this comprehensive overview of his career identifies Basquiat as the most articulate chronicler of Brooklyn’s multicultural identity.
Here the seeds of hip-hop’s identity mix up with references to classical civilisation, echoes of Picasso or Matisse intersecting with the African griot tradition, French and Spanish phrases counterpointing street English. The exhibition is overwhelming, but offers the most potent and persuasive introduction to the area that you could possibly hope for.
Typical of Brookyln, Basquiat was a few swift steps ahead of the metropolitan crowd. Around the same time, the borough was picking up and developing the hip-hop music emanating from the Bronx and turning it into a global phenomenon. Now it is nurturing a new wave of New York guitar bands, writers and artists. The author Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress Of Solitude celebrated and half-lamented the gentrification of his Brooklyn neighbourhood between Park Slope and Cobble Hill, but take a walk around many of the old residential districts and you will stumble across countless little coffee bars, independent galleries, second-hand bookstores and music shops.
The economy drove the cutting edge here. Manhattan rents forced the left-field artists and musicians over the river in the early 1990s, and they settled in Williamsburg, an old Polish neighbourhood with a nostalgic view of the Lower East Side and plenty of disused warehouses to convert into squats, galleries, rehearsal studios, and eventually chi-chi restaurants.
The iPod generation has flocked to the tenements and town houses, dragging their obscure British indie music collections from the 1980s with them, replicating the scratchy guitar riffs and nasal vocals of their heroes from Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow.
It has been fashionable for more than a decade now, but Williamsburg has managed to retain enough vestiges of its old status as an easy-going residential neighbourhood to preserve it from the cooler-than-thou condescension that chilled the Lower East Side. At the Brooklyn Ale House on Berry Street, locals look out with generous amusement at the artists and trend-hoppers strolling by. Balto, the last of the great Brooklyn pub-dogs, noses around the peanut shells on the floor and befriends a cluster of musician hopefuls who will probably be on the cover of NME by August.
Williamsburg’s nexus is where North 6th Street meets Bedford Avenue, a Haight-Ashbury for the 21st century. Visitors browse around the Future Perfect gallery and shop by day, then head for the Northsix club to see a local band or cool out-of-town combos, where the atmosphere is still of a little neighbourhood hang out which can’t quite believe that powerful talent scouts for the big record labels lurk at the bar. A decade ago Manhattanites used to sneer at the “bridge and tunnel” crowd flocking into their clubs. Now the traffic is flowing in the opposite direction.
When the relentless buzz of hipness begins to pall, old Brooklyn has more serene and established neighbourhoods to explore. Brooklyn Heights, overlooking the south of Manhattan, is a pretty area of beautifully restored (and frighteningly expensive) 19th-century brownstone town houses on streets called Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple, punctuated by tastefully discreet ethnic restaurants and delicatessens. It’s the Upper West Side transposed to the borough, still speaking in accents of old Europe.
South of Downtown Brooklyn, Smith Street is a seemingly endless row of restaurants and small shops offering cuisine from every corner of the globe, alongside established places such as the venerable Italian restaurant the Red Rose. It’s a fascinating walk that lacks the frantic rush of downtown Manhattan, turning the frenzied consumerism down a few notches.
The sense of sweet separation from Manhattan even stretches as far as the beer. Over here they prefer their own stuff, superior fare from the Brooklyn Brewery, a painstaking company that would cringe with shame if put in the same category as Budweiser. There were obviously enough German, Polish and Czech immigrants to these parts to make the brewing of acceptable beer in hop-benighted America something of a priority.
It’s a sprawling borough, but one best seen from the sidewalk, even if that means stumbling through a few areas of urban blight. That way you will encounter neighbourhoods such as Fort Greene, the hip hang out of creative types (Spike Lee made it fashionable a decade or so ago, and people are still flocking there), or the pleasant acres of Prospect Park. This is Central Park without the profusion of joggers and roller skaters; Brooklyn folk tend to be a little more relaxed, a little less obsesssed with the body beautiful.
If the modernists adore Williamsburg, the nostalgists might feel obliged to head out to Coney Island to look at the rusting hulk of the old Cyclone roller coaster. Jerry Seinfeld suggested that the subway ride out there was scarier than the Cyclone ever was, but visitors still make the trip for the raw Atlantic breeze, a Nathan’s hot dog and a sense of going back in time about 40 years. Here you can appreciate Lethem’s description of Brooklyn as “an open-face sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls”.
Details: Tom Lappin travelled to New York as part of the Archers Direct two-centre trip to New York and Orlando, Florida. An eight-night stay, based on two sharing, including direct flights from Edinburgh or Glasgow, accommodation, transfers and a local representative in each city, starts from £699. Call 0870 460 3898 or visit www.archersdirect.co.uk.
Travel around Brooklyn using the subway. Rides cost about £1 per trip. A Metrocard, also valid on buses, offers six trips for £5.25
