As I look at our PT Cruiser, still filled with my stuff, a full two days after my move, I realize that soon I will be hittin' up Brooklyn. After I unpack of course, and then re-pack.
Although my sister lives in what appears to be a tree-lined, almost suburban part of Brooklyn, the borough still has a rough and tumble definition in my mind. While I have been to New York City many times, I really have only walked the streets of Mid Town Manhattan. That, I am sure, would make any New Yorker grimace, because, as everyone knows, New York City is much more than it's most famous square and way (Times and Broad). I am excited to explore not a only a new part of New York but a whole new borough, one that's history is filled with almost as much art, music, celebrity, movement, dazzle, and cultural fusion as that of the main Island borough (sorry, Bronx, but let's be honest now).
Brooklyn, as I do my research, offers everything that Manhattan does, world class museums, urban feel, cultural neighborhoods, stylish dwellers, music, art, and culinary adventures. See, at least to my outside perspective, Manhattan is still the modern America, refined to a T, the ideal American city of class and control. Brooklyn still seems more of a hearty stew rather than a sleek, temperature controlled melting pot. And I like me some stew.
See, the thing with Manhattan is that it is so refined now a days, so clean and really, simply so wealthy, that the average person is quite intimidated by the whole thing. Brooklyn, on the other hand, is still slightly (although price-wise VERY SLIGHTLY) more attainable. Maybe, at least in my mind, its just less pretentious, a little less haughty, a little less, well, clean. And I think there is something more exciting about that.
About Me
- liz.
- I'm trying to make it in Art Conservation. I intern and take classes. This is my blog.
4 comments:
Lisa you are talking about Manhattan as it is only Time square, Upper East site and Wall street. It is not only it. There are bunch of other neighborhoods which resemble hearty stew. There are nothing sleek, temperature controlled melting pot about Universety Square, Little Italy, Lower East side, SoHo, Washington Square or Harlem for that matter. But places as Brooklyn Heights or Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn would resemble “a temperature controlled meal”.
Manhattan has actually been subjected to big time gentification lately, especially in the nineties, even Harlem, which has never really been considered Manhattan by "real New Yorkers" - it has always been uptown (I think that's where the term "uptown" actually came from).
Little Italy shrank and doesn't really exist anymore, may be just as a restaurant street (sort of like in Chicago), SoHo is a big fashinable high-end designer shopping place, and Lower east side is turning increasingly into artsy/yuppie place (like Wicker park maybe). ....This is not to say that Brooklyn has not been gentrified.....a little behind though, a little cheaper too.
Harlem is not uptown, uptown is an area between Columbus circle and Harlem, ( Upper West and East site ( Area around Central park)) and all of them belong to New York borough, which is Manhattan. Agreed, most of neighborhoods went through massive gentrification but it is still far from “well temperature controlled meal” of the Upper East or West sides.
rock on!!
anuta
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