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Brooklyn, New York
Population: 2,465,326
Located in Kings County
Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn is the most populous of the five boroughs of New York City with about 2.5 million inhabitants. An independent city prior to 1898, Brooklyn developed out of the small Dutch-founded town of "Breuckelen" on the East River shore of Long Island, named after Breukelen in the Netherlands. Were it still a city, and not a borough, it would be the fourth-largest city in the United States after New York City itself, Los Angeles and Chicago. Despite being part of the City of New York, Brooklyn in character is its own city, as opposed to the Bronx which historically and characteristically could be better described as a northern extension of Manhattan.
Kings County, coterminous with Brooklyn, is also the most populous county in New York. It was named in honor of King Charles II of England.
Variously called the "City of Trees," "City of Homes," or the "City of Churches" in the 19th century, Brooklyn is now often styled the "Borough of Homes and Churches" or even sometimes called "The Planet", popularized by Guru from the rap duo Gangstarr, for its large diversity, population, and size.
As a promotional gesture by the current 2006 borough administration, distinctive traffic signage is posted along major traffic arteries at Brooklyn?s border crossings. They incorporate colorful expressions associated with Brooklyn, including: "Fugheddaboudit," "Oy Vey!," and "How Sweet It Is." One sign identifies the borough as: "Home to Everyone From Everywhere!"
Brooklyn is located in the westernmost part of Long Island. It shares its only land boundary with Queens to the northeast. The westernmost section of this boundary is defined by Newtown Creek, (crossed by the Kosciuszko Bridge, the Pulaski Bridge, the Grand Street Bridge, and the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge) which flows into the East River.
Brooklyn, the 'Borough of Homes', can be understood as a collection of neighborhoods, many historically descended from the old towns and villages of Dutch times. The borough's striking diversity plays host to a bustle of ethnic and multi-ethnic neighborhoods that both preserve a flavor of 'the old country', of whatever latitude, and create spaces for interaction between individuals and communities. So for illustration, Borough Park is largely Orthodox Jewish, Bedford-Stuyvesant: African American, Bensonhurst: Italian American, and Sunset Park: Hispanic and Chinese American.
Most sections of Brooklyn are indeed decidedly residential, fulfilling the borough's historic role as 'bedroom of New York'. Its residential character may seem strange to many not familiar with the borough, who tend to associate it with brownstones; however, brownstones are predominantly located in the northwestern neighborhoods between the Brooklyn Bridge and Prospect Park. Some have noted that the parts of Brooklyn more distant from Manhattan are actually less recognizably New York City than many parts of Queens, a borough often incorrectly associated with suburbia.
This symbiotic mating of the residential city with the business center of Manhattan has profoundly shaped Brooklyn from its beginning. It only accelerated with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and other connections, to the near-death of Brooklyn industries and a winnowing of commerce to a basic consumer level in the years following World War II. It is only at the start of the 21st century that business and industry have begun to revive around the borough amid something of a general renaissance.
Many Brooklyn ethnic neighborhoods established in the first half of the 20th century developed to accommodate second-generation Americans escaping the slums of Manhattan. Today, however, new immigrants are just as likely to set down their first American roots in Brooklyn. The constant inward movement of new immigrant groups, as well as the expanding horizons of long-established groups, brought a dynamism to Brooklyn's neighborhoods.
In recent years a series of artists' colonies have developed along the East River across from Manhattan as a refuge for artists fleeing the sky-high rents of SoHo. Such was the development of the artistic community in Williamsburg, with consequent recent rent hikes there spurring a further exodus, to DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and even to Red Hook.
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