New York: Eastside Theory
More than 8 million people live in New York City. Of that, nearly 2.5 million live in Brooklyn, the city’s largest borough. If Brooklyn were it’s own city, it would be America’s fourth largest. Where Manhattan is skyscrapers and glamour and The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island are still largely working class and family neighborhoods, Brooklyn is a little bit of it all. It’s neighborhoods are rich and poor, brownstones and housing projects, ethnic enclaves and bohemian communes. And it is artists, or at least those who aspire to be.
When New York cleaned up in the 1990s, the city’s creative class crossed the East River to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in search of cheaper rents and larger spaces. And they found them, flourishing so much that the nation and the world even has glommed onto the neighborhood as a symbol of hipster youth. The Gap once named a pair of it’s skinny jeans the Williamsburg cut.
But art thrives in all of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods. Jay-Z rapped about “Brooklyn’s Finest” in Bed-Stuy, and some of the best young authors in the world live in Park Slope. Though many of Williamsburg’s pioneers have stayed put through the influx of condos, organic produce and higher rents, even more have pushed further into the borough in search of cheap spaces, leading The New York Times to call Bushwick the next Williamsburg.
But wherever you look, Brooklyn is still the place for cheap drinks, cheap fun and untold neighborhood secrets.
