Brooklyn: hipster hell or New York's greatest borough?

When I began visiting New York nearly 40 years ago, it meant Manhattan. Now, my son travels often to what he calls “New York”, but he means Brooklyn. Plenty of times he gets off the plane and goes straight to an apartment in Greenpoint or an office in Williamsburg and stays for two months without ever bothering Manhattan. The island, to him, is old New York, overfull with bankers, tourists and international luxury shops. Manhattan is corporate and Brooklyn is not. What map of New York would Saul Steinberg draw today?

The first tribe to live here was the Canarsee American Indians, displaced in the later 17th century by Dutch economic migrants from Breuckelen, a town near Utrecht. There’s lots of Dutch residue in the local names: Bushwick, for example, was once Boswijck, Flatbush was Vlacht bosch. In 1664, the British conquered the New Netherlands and Nieuw Amsterdam became New York and Breuckelen was anglicised. 

Brooklyn is exceptional, not excluding the accent that is known to linguisticians as Brooklynese. It was first noted in the 1890s, a cocktail, perhaps, of Yiddish and Gaelic influences. Most notably, the voiced “th” comes out as “d”. Thus 33rd Street is toidy-toid and your male sibling or business associate is a brudda. You can still do fieldwork into brudda microculture at Bamonte’s, since 1900 an amazing red-sauce restaurant where men in dark suits meet over killer veal Parmigiana and reminisce about the day Sinatra, in fact a New Joisey boy, drank the bar dry.

The current dominant Brooklyn tribe is the infamous hipster of caricature sipping sencha tea through a statement beard, described by one American writer as “unemployed city-dwelling narcissists with a penchant for bad clothes”. But there is a more positive view. In his 2014 book, Hipster Business Models, Zachary Crockett explains that the tribe is not unemployed, but busy developing non-corporate entrepreneurial practices: “They bring their typewriters to the park to write stories, they make action yoga figures, they sew pockets on their underwear – and they’re our future.”

My recent reconnaissance of this future began with some prep in old New York. A couple of nights at the River Club where I swear the ghost of Edith Wharton is on patrol. Then on to a meeting at the Colony Club, a gloriously posh midtown zenana with interiors by the pioneer decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who believed in “plenty of optimism and white paint”. Then across the East River frontier to Brooklyn to savour some contrasts. 

In 1977, New York cabbies were old wisecrackers, Irish, Jewish or Italian. Now they represent successive waves of your tired, your poor, your huddled masses aiming to be free. A thoughtful Algerian youth took us to Brooklyn, not in a creaking V8 Checker Yellow Cab with bulletholes in the yellowing Plexiglas divider, but in the ubiquitous Toyota Prius with its reputation for ecological sensitivity. In Brooklyn, cabs are even painted green. 

Wythe Avenue is the fashionable spine. Two ambitious new-build hotels indicate the neighbourhood’s social promotion: The William Vale and The Williamsburg, the former a vista-blocking landmark in expressionistic concrete by Aldo Lamberis, suggestive, perhaps, of a Slovakian ski resort in the Communist era. By contrast, the high-rise Williamsburg is in more locally correct red-brick. But HQ for a Brooklyn adventure must be the epicentral Wythe, an industrial building of 1901. And the period haircuts have returned. 

Here, the man who first creatively reused lumber for ceilings made his mark. Bedrooms have Bestlites, concrete floors and repro Henry Dreyfuss telephones from the Fifties, while Thonet chairs cluster around a tiny marble table. Despite the heavy-duty industrial semantics, the walls are surprisingly thin. One night, low, erotically sourced groans against a background of classics-for-dummies were notably intrusive from next door.

Hipster hoteliers are careful with their money. This is the first hotel at this price I have ever been to where room water is charged for. Nor will they lend you an AC adapter, but sell you one for $20 (£16). We paid more than $400 for a view of a local brewery with improving signs, including “Fermentation and civilisation are inseparable”, next to a bowling facility advertised by blinking neon that 

Ed Ruscha would have admired. River views are more expensive. In one solitary moment, I fell to musing that The Wythe might be charging 10 cents a sheet for the loo roll. Still, the room had its own cocktail set-up, which was surely “curated”. What about a King’s Country Bourbon from Brooklyn with a Cocchi vermut from Torino? To be sure, Brooklyn is eclectic.

It was here in The Wythe’s sixth- floor Ides Bar – Stygian, but with glorious views – that I spent the first part of the Trump election night. The hotel was throwing a party and there was security on the door. As I sipped a glass of so-so imported wine, which memory tells me was a wince-making $25, a barstool neighbour confided: “My sister’s church has been praying for a week.” In the dark, no one can tell what you think, but it’s safe to say this was Hillary’s territory. All day, media had been gathering at the junction of local streets called Clinton and President, as if a portent. I sipped my wine and watched helicopters circling Trump Tower. 

We moved on to Walter Foods for dinner, where “endless shrimp” was served to a crowd half my age and there was lots of roaring as the big television screen declared “Hillary is projected winner”. The noise cauterised the nerve endings. This was good as my “French Dip”, a sourdough baguette with filet mignon and a dunking bowl of bouillon, was unpleasant. But it came with a Kilimanjaro of excellent fries. The television began to say that Maine and New Joisey were “too close to call”, the political stuff being interrupted by ads for IBS and systemic high blood pressure. I made a note of the time and it was 20:47. The noise was getting worse and the crowd neo-hysterical.

I woke the next day at 4.30am and my wife was already on her iPad. She simply said “Trump won” and Brooklyn felt like Pompeii the day after the eruption. The East River Ferry, a vital sign in this locality, stopped running. So a little later we went to a popular coffee shop called Bakeri to reconfirm our vows over scalding Americanos and elaborately crafted pastries. Bakeri is in a little row of clapboard houses, ancient by local norms, nearly opposite a store called The Heatonist specialising in chilli sauces alone, thus very Brooklyn. People were crying and some seemed unable to breathe. However, very great care, nudging fanaticism, was spent in the preparation of consoling drinks. 

It is appropriate that Vice, one of the defining media businesses of our age, is headquartered in Brooklyn. Its founder, Shane Smith, uses the Delmano Hotel, at Berry and 19th, as his out-of-office office. This being Brooklyn, it is not a true hotel, but a wine bar with a list whose sophistication boggles Waitrose-infused Londoners still coming to terms with exotic albarino. 

Here, in ramshackle circumstances that speak of sophistication not neglect, is a drinks list of a preciousness never found in London. A Georgian qvevri? And this is Georgia as in Caucasus, not Southern States. A cocktail called “3 Amigos” is composed of Tecate (a beer from Baja California), tequila and sangria. Or “Dr Aleksa’s Recipe”, which is bourbon, ancho reyes liqueur, apple cider shrub and lemon. Apparently, you shake it, then serve it up. Possibly with the Delmano Platter of 12 oysters, four New Orleans shrimp, eight crab legs and six clams for $78 (£62).

If you want, in Brooklyn you can eat Guyanese or Ecuadorean: the food and drink culture is very busy and very competitive. Indeed, for the past few years, almost all The New Yorker’s restaurant reviews have concerned Brooklyn establishments. Dive bars, speakeasies, bodegas, beer halls, pubs, wine bars; every single block has diverse opportunities presented with compulsory, laid-back enthusiasm, as if officially mandated. 

Typical is St Mazie on Grand Street, a bar-and-supper club with proper jazz. The name connects us to Mazie Phillips, a local hero in Joseph Mitchell’s classic collection of wry stories about New York’s social marginalia, Up in the Old Hotel (1992). Mitchell is a good spiritual companion on a walkabout, but so, too, is the “Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator”, which you can find on the web and I think is ironic, but cannot be certain. Dishes include “Home-made pepper” and “Sprouted Kale Pie and locally sourced Sungold”.

And to demonstrate that life imitates art, go to Roberta’s Pizza, a much-loved fixed point in a swirling chaos of new restaurant activity. All the determinants of Brooklyn food and style are here: a dodgy-looking location near chicken-wired lots selling evil used trucks, a nameless facade covered with graffiti, a menacing aspect withal, but within a vast, howling room of middle-class people making very merry, indeed. 

Out back, there are army tents to accommodate the overflow. I ate a “Nun on the Run” pizza with mozzarella, alp blossom, brussels sprouts, caramelised onions, capers and Calabrian oil ($19). I could have ordered a side of Coal Roasted Beets ($21). You follow this with an Ice Cream Sandwich, which is a sticky bun stuffed with a Trump-sized portion of cocoa nib gelato ($9).

Design and food are inseparable, especially here. Brooklyn’s dominant interior style has its roots in Joan Kron and Suzy Slesin’s High-Tech, the style bible of 1978. Edison bulbs with orange-glowing filaments, recovered timber for ceilings, polished concrete, metal cabinets, randomised furniture, idiosyncratic bricolage: all nearing parody status now. It has been said that once design savvy was expressed in series of new things: 12 Wegner chairs, a whole apartment by Dieter Rams or a canteen of David Mellor “Provencal” cutlery, for example. Here, it’s more random, more opportunistic. I found a marvellous business called Brooklyn Fabrication, which could furnish your entire loft in urban flotsam, retrieved lumber and bespoke metal furniture during a single weekend. Architectural salvage is Brooklyn’s second language.

When travelling, our European urban instinct is to search for historic centres. Good luck in Brooklyn. It is low-rise and sprawling, both intimidating and intimate. Just as Charles Dickens observed of America as a whole, Brooklyn looks temporary. It is not the Manhattan Henry James described as an “inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition”. It’s a continuous start-up: I asked an educated resident of the professional classes where the oldest building was and she looked blank. 

The sightseeing is, thus, not of the monumental sort, although the skyline across the East River is perpetually epic in a way that will forever defeat cynicism. But there are the bridges. John A Roebling’s 1883 Brooklyn Bridge – with its then unprecedented span of 1,596ft – was the inspiration of Hart Crane’s great poem with his “chained bay waters Liberty”. Its cables are still breathing the North Atlantic. Alternatively, a walk across Henry Hornbostel and Leffert L Buck’s Williamsburg Bridge of 1903, direct to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is sublime: the queasily giddying height above the water reminds you that the entirety of New York is built on a scale very different from London.

Insider’s Brooklyn is not compact, but very simple. Running north east to south west from Manhattan Avenue and McCarren Park, parallel to the East River, there is a sequence of streets called Havemeyer, Roebling, Driggs, Bedford, Berry, Wythe and Kent. If you want an edit, concentrate on Bedford-Berry-Driggs. 

We know that the Brooklyn of London is Shoreditch; of Paris, Oberkampf or Pantin. It’s a metaphor, both fascinating and maddening. Of course, overused metaphors eventually become clichés. My son told me that J. Crew had recently arrived in the trident of Bedford-Berry-Driggs. So hurry. It may soon be all over.

Essentials

Getting there

British Airways (0844 493 0787; ba.com) operates 16 flights a day from London to New York through its joint business with American Airlines. Return fares from £369 per person. 

Staying there

The Wythe (80 Wythe Avenue). Double rooms from £175 a night. Read a full review here.