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Introduction

When Walking Brooklyn was first published in 2007, Brooklyn was on the brink of change. Yet nobody could have foreseen just how far-reaching and momentous that change would be. It’s a renaissance unprecedented in modern urban history, and it entails so much more than skyscraper construction, waterfront development, or gentrification spreading from one neighbor­hood to the next. Brooklyn has emerged as a worldwide locus of trendy, artisanal cool and a wellspring of artistic, culinary, and technological creativity. It has become, in the words of New York magazine, New York City’s “most dominant cultural export.” Brooklyn went into this a place and came out a brand name. And, occasionally, a punchline, as that amalgam of qualities now synonymous with the word Brooklyn—hip, highly educated, cross-cultural, environmentally responsible, haute rustic, retro-influenced—is parodied nearly as much as it’s imitated.

Yet while this renaissance has renewed hometown pride, it also has perpetuated a disconnect between today’s Brooklyn and the Brooklyn of so many cherished 20th-century memories, and between the “new” Brooklyn and the sizable swath of this 40-neighborhood, 2.6 million–person borough that hasn’t really changed. A lot of newer Brooklynites grew up far from Kings County. They may not even know they’re supposed to hate Walter O’Malley for banishing the Dodgers to California, or Robert Moses for bulldozing a highway through their streets. Earlier events—from the devastating assault by the King’s army during the Revolutionary War, to the high-bourgeois Victorian age, to the lurid decline of the 1970s—have left their mark on Brooklyn. So we have a place defined by both the past and the future, a personality both nostalgic and on the cutting edge.

Brooklyn has the unique history of having been an independent city, and before that was composed of several different cities and townships. It can also boast of the great outdoors, with parks and community gardens galore and a shoreline that stretches from river to bay to ocean. These walks aim to capture all this diversity in Brooklyn’s geography, history, and people. I hope you have fun exploring and are enlightened and excited along the way.