Brooklyn is Huge!
I have been on my farewell tour for almost a month now and have spent most days exploring Brooklyn, and i feel like i could spend the next 5 months doing the same without seeing the same thing twice. At 2.5 million people, BK is our most populated borough. And if tomorrow, NYC split into 5 separate cities, BK would be the 3rd largest city in the U.S.
Brooklyn is, in my opinion, the most diverse and unique of all 5 boroughs. Before it was incorporated into NY in 1898, Brooklyn was a county of very individual small towns that still make up the very individual great neighborhoods. Each hood with its own flavor and signature sites. While biking back from Bay Ridge 2 days ago and again for a few hours yesterday i went riding through some of the less famous areas in my favorite borough.
There is Gowanus, known mosty for its dirty shipping canal and equally infamous section of highway.
Sunset Park, a very residential neighborhood with a strong Mexican and Chinese communities and a great elevated park with...you guessed it...great sunsets.
Windsor Terrace, a kind of crossroads of Western Brooklyn. Its adjacent to Prospect Park and Park Slope, but much more of a family neighborhood than those closer to Manhattan.
Ditmars Park/Kennsington. There is no actual Park in Ditmars Park, at least none that I could find. In a city and a borough that is known for its diversity, this area is probably the most actually diverse anywhere in NYC. Its newly renovated makeup includes a lot of young new homeowners and with it, new business and a new identity.
Dyker Heights. Not known just for its Golf Course, although the links and adjacent park take up most of the community. It is a very Italian Neighborhood closely linked to Bay Ridge.
Bath Beach-Gravesend. There is not much to say about a lot of these old neighborhoods. They are some of the oldest in new york and hold the feeling somewhat of a waterside town in Long Island, but much more close knit. There are a lot of houses in a small amount of space. These neighborhoods are ones that most New Yorkers will never see unless you know someone who lives there. Unlike the neighborhoods in the north-west side, there is no sense of Manhattan here. This is Brooklyn!!!
One very large spot of note in Western Brooklyn is Green-wood cemetery. 478 acres of rolling hills and a baroque style chapel, Green-wood is with Vesey Church and the African Burial Sites in Manhattan, one of the most significant cemeteries in New York. It holds the remains of great Brooklynites and New Yorkers like Leonard Bernstein, Basquiat, F.A.O Shwartz, Boss Tweed, Edward R Murrow and Brooklyn mobster Albert Anastasia.
There is so much to see in these neighborhoods, it is really hard to focus on any of them. I've set out to see all of new york, and when there aren't any obvious landmarks as such...its gets somewhat overwhelming.
I didn't really have any destinations in any of these spots. I just kind of aimlessly rode around. I've heard people say that you can't know a neighborhood without eating a meal there...or possible spending a few hours in a local bar, but i didn't know where to go, so just biking through will have to be enough for now. I don't want to do these area any injustice. I do kind of feel like I'm making sweeping judgements on the communities of probably over a half million people, but i hope I'm not. I'm just trying to see as much as I can. I am trying not to make any kind of judgements on people in this quest, just get a visual and sometimes historic sense of what makes up New York.
pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82369865@N00/
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