Travel+Leisure: Brooklyn as a Destination

A full-fledged article in this month’s Travel+Leisure magazine dedicated to Brooklyn secures our borough as a destination, not just a pitstop. While Dumbo’s Jacques Torres and Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory are featured in the guide to Brooklyn, Peter Jon Lindberg writes about the unique qualities of Brooklyn as a whole. “If someone told you Brooklyn is “the next Manhattan,” they got it dead wrong. Brooklyn is nothing like Manhattan. Brooklyn looks and feels and is like no place else.” Selected quotes:

“Brooklyn was a place people left (Woody Allen, Mr. Kotter, the Dodgers). Manhattan was where people hoped to arrive.

Finally, I was seeing Brooklyn for what it was, not just what it wasn’t. I still went to Manhattan—for work, Knicks games, dental appointments. But weekends I spent east of the river, uncovering the mysteries of Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and Brighton Beach.

“Well, surprise. In case you haven’t heard, Brooklyn has become a byword for cool, the epitomic local-boy-makes-good—and suddenly, Brooklyn belongs to everyone. When did the “new” Brooklyn emerge? Was it in the 1990’s, when artists transformed Williamsburg into the city’s creative hub? Was it in 2003, when Zagat named the Grocery—a tiny room in Carroll Gardens—the seventh-best restaurant in NYC? Or a year earlier, when Time Out New York ran a cover headlined “Manhattan: The New Brooklyn”?

Whenever and however it happened, the Borough of Kings is back. (Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.)


  Manhattan view as seen from Dumbo

Some of my favorite Brooklyn restaurants are featured in this guide to Brooklyn. Although I love Babbo in Manhattan, I prefer the pasta of Carroll Gardens at Frankies 457 or Park Slope’s Al di La as my everyday local Italian. Casual and not uptight, these restaurants offer the quality of the $40 entree minus $25.

Until recently, articles about Brooklyn (and the gentrification of the borough) mention that people move to Brooklyn because they are priced out of Manhattan or need more space, but I moved to Brooklyn because I like Brooklyn and chose to live in the borough of neighborhood communities.

{Brooklyn Bound, Travel+Leisure, November 2006}

8 Comment