Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs — home to about 2.6 million people on the western end of Long Island, across the East River from Manhattan. If Brooklyn were an independent city, as it was until 1898, it would be the fourth-largest in the United States. For most of the 20th century it was famously blue-collar and immigrant — Jewish, Italian, Polish, Irish, African American, Puerto Rican, Caribbean — and the accent, the attitude and the food all reflected it. Since about 2000 the western waterfront neighbourhoods have been transformed by an extraordinary wave of gentrification, and Williamsburg, DUMBO, Park Slope, Bushwick and Greenpoint are now international bywords for creative-class urbanism. The rest of Brooklyn, further east and south, is still largely the working immigrant city it always was.
The obvious sight is the Brooklyn Bridge itself — still one of the most beautiful bridges in the world, built between 1869 and 1883, and best walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn at dawn or sunset. On the Brooklyn side the bridge lands in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a compact neighbourhood of cobbled streets, cast-iron warehouses and the restored Empire Stores, with the famous view down Washington Street of the Manhattan Bridge framing the Empire State Building. The surrounding Brooklyn Bridge Park has reclaimed the waterfront from industrial decay and is one of the best open spaces in the city.
Further inland, Brooklyn Heights is the city's most elegant old residential neighbourhood — a grid of 19th-century brownstone townhouses with a clifftop Promenade offering the best view of the Manhattan skyline. Williamsburg, across the East River from Midtown, is the heart of hipster Brooklyn and has some of the best restaurants, bars, live-music venues and vintage shops in New York. Park Slope, around the vast Prospect Park (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the same team that did Central Park), is a leafy neighbourhood of families and brownstones. The Brooklyn Museum next to Prospect Park has one of the finest Egyptian collections in the United States and a genuinely radical contemporary programme.
No visit is complete without eating: Brooklyn is one of the great food places in America. Peter Luger in Williamsburg for the best steak in the country (now over 135 years old and still famously rude to its regulars); Di Fara Pizza in Midwood for the best slice in New York; the Saturday Smorgasburg food market on the Williamsburg waterfront; Russian food in Brighton Beach; and the amusement parks, hot dogs and boardwalk of Coney Island on the southern edge of the borough.