Go Feedback: Brooklyn's identity is defined in relation to Manhattan, and something about that makes it feel like home to Yvonne Cassidy, who has just spent a writing sabbatical living in the borough
I AM IN Brooklyn two days before I notice it. The sky. It's 7pm in Park Slope and I'm sure it was bright 10 minutes ago when I went into the supermarket, but now the sky is dark grey with a fading pink stripe. After that I am aware of it all the time, this bowl of colour and cloud over brown rooftops and water towers. I am told that it is one of the reasons Europeans love Brooklyn, that it is one of the things that makes Brooklyn feel like a real place.
Brooklynites talk a lot about Brooklyn. They talk about the Williamsburg Savings Bank and how it used to be full of dentists' offices before it was converted into condos, with a penthouse owned by Michael Jordan. They point out that the dome over the clock tower is real gold, and the four-sided timepiece below is so reliable no house in South Brooklyn ever owned a clock.
They talk about Manhattan, too, but only to point out the many ways that Brooklyn is better. I am told about the art expos and the music events that come to Brooklyn first, and sometimes bypass Manhattan entirely. About the Central Park architects, who later designed Prospect Park, where they ironed out the mistakes they made first time around.
I quickly come to realise that Brooklyn's identity is defined in relation to its bigger smaller brother, and there is something about all this that makes me feel at home. Those who make their way from the Lower East Side via the Williamsburg Bridge are greeted with the sign "Welcome to Brooklyn: You name it, we got it!" On Bedford Street a fly poster declares that Manhattan was "so five minutes ago". Underneath someone has scrawled that it has to be at least 10.
If Brooklyn were a city in its own right it would be bigger than Boston or San Francisco. It takes me time to get my head around this, because it doesn't feel like a city. It feels like loads of neighbourhoods running into each other, organic bakeries and yoga studios bumping shoulders with laundromats and auto-repair shops and churches. Real life is all around: children racing from school gates to be first in line for the pizza slice and soda special; Julius, the homeless guy who sweeps the street outside Bagel Delight and tells anyone who'll listen about his previous life in Arizona; the man in a white cap watering the gardens of the new condos up the block who says "15 miles to go" every morning when I jog by and laughs at his own joke.
Fort Greene Park is five minutes from my apartment, and this hilly pocket of green becomes one of my favourite haunts. Jogging every morning is easy here. I am pulled outdoors by the energy of this place, of these people. No matter how early I get up they're all there, already walking dogs, pushing buggies, playing tennis. No one could stay in bed with this all going on.
Walt Whitman was the one who pushed for this park, the first in Brooklyn, because the city (it was its own city then) needed "a lung". Those were the days when Brooklyn was grey - full of factories and machinery and immigrants and poverty. Now Brooklyn is green, not just the parks, or the trees that heave up the paving slabs with their roots, but the windowboxes of ferns and creepers spilling down steps and over stone and on to sidewalks. If Manhattan had a colour it would be jet black or sleek silver, but Brooklyn's colour is green, or it would be, if it wasn't already brown.
Brownstones are everywhere - they're almost a symbol of Brooklyn, these four-storey houses with 12 steps up to the front door. In Clinton Hill, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Heights, Bed-Stuy, these brownstones line nearly every street, and at first I think they are all the same, until I start to understand the differences. Scaffolding outside means there's enough money to maintain the stone, or a house being converted back from apartments to a single family home. On the blocks near the only Blue Ribbon primary school in New York there is a lot of scaffolding. Farther east along Lafayette there is no scaffolding, and the square stone edging is worn into curves. I touch the banister and it is dust on my skin, the building shedding itself while it waits patiently for the march of gentrification from Manhattan.
Gentrification is a term that's used a lot in the guidebooks. I read how Dumbo, Bushwick, parts of downtown Brooklyn are becoming "gentrified". Even Coney Island isn't safe. Property developers have plans for Astroland, home of Brooklyn's beloved Cyclone. Brooklynites have seen this happen across their borough, but they don't call it gentrification. They call it city people moving in.
I ask them if this worries them, if they fear it will change Brooklyn, that in some way it will kill its spirit, its realness. It is change, and not everyone likes it, but no one seems to have the same worries I do. Brooklyn is part of New York, which is, after all, about change. The only thing that would kill the spirit of this place would be for it to stay the same.
The Brooklynites I meet are surprised and glad that I am staying here. It's unusual: most visitors venture across the Brooklyn Bridge only once, to enjoy the best views of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Heights promenade. But they don't resent these day trippers and at weekends can be found among them, relaxing on the waterside benches or taking a stroll and enjoying the view. Because Brooklyn wouldn't be Brooklyn if it wasn't in the shadow of Manhattan, and they know this. And they know, too, that in a city with its head in the clouds, somebody needs to have their feet on the ground.