The Commonwealth of Brooklyn

Dumbo (Pixabay)

"Brooklyn was like a commonwealth, a colony of peoples, yet at the same time it served as a gateway. "
Andrew Sarris, Song of Brooklyn

Boise

"Brooklyn really is just a quiet little town adjoining this massive city. It’s kind of like if Boise were attached to New York City."
Mike Birbiglia, The New York Post

Bright New York

"In the great darkness of bright Manhattan and Brooklyn, there is a rhythm. It catches your heartbeat, it captures the cacophony of the subway trains; it brings all the myriad phenomena into a steady thrum hum that becomes you."
David Marcus, The Federalist

Artistic Element

"The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone."
Julian Casablancas, The Wall Street Journal

Infinite Brooklyn

Greenpoint

"Brooklyn is walled with world-traveled wetness on west and south and on north and east is the young beaver-board frontier of Queens; Brooklyn comes to an end: but actually, that is, in the conviction of the body, there seems almost no conceivable end to Brooklyn; it seems, on land as flat and huge as Kansas, horizon beyond horizon forever unfolded, an immeasurable proliferation of house on house and street by street; or seems as China does, infinite in time, in patience, and in population as in space."
James Agee, Brooklyn Is

Mythical Dominion

"Terribly funny, yes, but Brooklyn is also sad brutal provincial lonesome human silent sprawling raucous lost passionate subtle bitter immature innocent perverse tender mysterious, a place where Crane and Whitman found poems, a mythical dominion against whose shores the Coney Island sea laps a wintry lament."
Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations

Neon Grunginess

"One minute New York was a juicy boil of lust, crime, and possibility, the next it was  just another innocuous American city. Thankfully, a lot of Brooklyn and all of Coney are intact. Lonesome and soulful in their faded neon grunginess."
Maggie Estep, Hex

Persecuted Minority

Dumbo

"As a group, Brooklynites form a persecuted minority; the uninventive persistence of not very urbane clowns has made any mention of their homeland a signal for compulsory guffaws; their dialect, appearance and manners have become, by way of such side-splitting propaganda, synonymous with the crudest, most vulgar aspects of contemporary life."
Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations

Serene and Somber

"Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York, especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better."
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Global Geography

"Brooklyn is Brooklyn. But Brooklyn is also more than its physical boundaries. Though contained physically within its municipal borders, Brooklyn's larger geography is global, embracing the people and ideas, the music and the mystique it launches out into the larger world."
Ilana Abramovitch, Jews of Brooklyn

Brooklyn Thug

"An old Brooklyn thug motto: 'Manhattan makes it and Brooklyn takes it.'"
C.J. Sullivan, Wild Tales from the Police Blotter

Brooklyn Smell

Kent Avenue

"Brooklyn smells like a combination of an ocean breeze, Calvin Klein Eternity, and weed. It might be my favorite smell ever."
Jillian Dodd, The Keatyn Chronicles

Sisters

"Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister."
Carson McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart

Brooklyn Patriot

"I am a patriot — of the 14th Ward in Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn't exist for me, except as idea, or history, or literature."
Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader

Happening

"Brooklyn is what's happening in New York City. And what's happening in New York City is happening in Brooklyn."
Harold Augenbraum, quoted in The Brooklyn Experience

Disneyland

Brooklyn (Photo: Pixabay)

"Manhattan is not real. It's like Disneyland. Brooklyn is more of a living kind of place. You have a neighborhood."
Abram Hall, In the Country of Brooklyn

Human Flesh

Kent Avenue

"A few American cities, Manhattan chief among them, have some mad magnetic energy which sucks all others into 'provincialism'; and Brooklyn of all great cities is nearest the magnet, and is indeed 'provincial': it is provincial as a land of rich earth and of this earth is an enormous farm, whose crop is far less 'industrial' or 'financial' or 'notable' or in any way 'distinguished' or 'definable' than it is of human flesh and being."
James Agee, Brooklyn Is

Kings County

Coney Island - Stillwell Avenue subway station

"This is the county of kings
You can tell by the size of the medallions and gold rings
Royalty dwells in sections we swing
Where the bush is flat, where the ville is brown
Where the heights is crowned, where the fort is greene
Where the stuy's in bed
Where New York is east and Coney is an island connected
Sometimes the bush is wicked and parks are sloped
The bay is ridged and Benson is a Hurst."
Ming + FS, Kings County

Grubby Brooklyn

"Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific.  Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self."
Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude

Spring Day in Brooklyn

East River State Park

"It happened every single spring day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin."
Kate Christensen, The Astral