All about Brooklyn
If Brooklyn was a city on its own, it would be the fourth largest city in the U.S. With over 2.6 million residents, Brooklyn would rank behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. As it is, Brooklyn is the most populous of the five boroughs of New York City.
Brooklyn is located at the western edge of Long Island where it shares a boundary with Queens. The Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel connect Brooklyn to Manhattan. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge connects Brooklyn to Staten Island.
Like much of New York City, the earliest settlers of Breuckelen were Dutch. The Dutch kept control over the area until 1664 when the English conquored the New Netherlands colony. With the change in ownership came the change in name to Brooklyn.
The first major battle of the American Revolution took place around Brooklyn. When Washington was forced to retreat from New York, the Loyalist residents of Brooklyn supported the British troops for the remainder of the war.
Throughout most of the 19th century, Brooklyn was the third largest city in the county. It was during this time that the urbanization of the Brooklyn region came to the surrounding towns such as Williamsburgh, Bushwick, Flatbush and Brighton Beach.
By the late 19th century Brooklyn had reached its natural boundaries and the residents narrowly approved joining the other four boroughs of New York to form what we now know as New York City. This vote led to the popular Brooklyn phase, “The great mistake of 1898”, to describe their reaction to the rest of New York City.
Most sections of Brooklyn are residential, fulfilling the borough's historic role as 'bedroom of New York'. This identification of the residential city with the business center of Manhattan has shaped Brooklyn from its beginning. It only accelerated with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and other connections. In only the most recent years has the development of industry and business within Brooklyn begun to make up for lost ground after World War II.
Of course, no discussion of Brooklyn can take place without mentioning Brooklyn's most famous baseball team, the Dodgers. In the years prior to 1932, they were also known as the Superbas and the Robins, the last an informal name taken from their manager, Wilbert Robinson. In 1955, the Dodgers won their first and only World Series in Brooklyn, beating their longtime rival, the New York Yankees, resulting in mass euphoria and celebrations all over Brooklyn. Just two years later, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, California, after the 1957 season, causing widespread resentment and sorrow. Brooklyn's most beloved and cherished institution had left, and the move is cited by some historians as one of the catalysts for the decline of Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s.
Betty Smith's 1943 book A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and the 1945 film based on it, are among the best-known early works about life in Brooklyn. In the late 1980s Brooklyn achieved a new cultural prominence with the films of Spike Lee, whose She's Gotta Have It and Do The Right Thing were visibly set and filmed in Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Brooklyn is a great community and worth the visit when you are coming to New York. Look for the signs entering Brooklyn that say "Welcome to Brooklyn: 'How sweet it is,'" a reference to Jackie Gleason’s famous line. The signs leaving the borough have a different type of famous Brooklyn line, "Fugheddaboudit." We would never recommend "Fugheddaboudit." when talking about beautiful Brooklyn.