Brooklyn Bound

“Only The Dead Know Brooklyn” may have been an accurate observation in 1935, when Thomas Wolfe wrote the short story for the New Yorker magazine. But today, the people who know Brooklyn are very much alive and inhabit one of the most happening and with it sections of New York City.

Growing up in the Bronx, we learned to avoid Brooklyn, because of its remoteness and the strange dialect attributed to the people who lived there. Going to Brooklyn was like going to a foreign country and took almost as long on the subway system. As luck would have it, Brooklyn police headquarters was my first assignment as a reporter with the New York Post. That’s were they sent the try-outs to make their bones.

Every chilly morning at 5:00 am in the dead of winter, I would mount the train at 207th street in the Bronx for the monotonous hour-long ride to Borough Hall in Brooklyn. How many times did I doze off, miss my station and wind up in Coney Island? That’s when I realized that I needed to pick up a specialty and wangled my way onto the financial desk, where it was 9-to-5 in the more familiar environs of lower Manhattan.

That was almost 50 years ago and so now I return to Brooklyn with great anticipation and only slight apprehension about what my wife and I will find on this first leg of our golden wedding anniversary journey of renewal and discovery.

We start in Brooklyn because that is the summer berth of the Queen Mary 2, from whence it begins the “autumn escape” up the New England coast to Halifax and Quebec. Before boarding the Queen at Pier 12 we’ll take in the various sights of the area, such as the Brooklyn Museum, which is the second-largest art museum in the United States, after the Metropolitan in Manhattan.

We’re told that neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO are very chic now. DUMBO is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, an area that boosts high-priced condos, shops and galleries. The epitome of extravagance and cheek in Brooklyn, however, has to be the Peter Luger Steak House, a restaurant in the Williamsburg section that is more than 100 years old and serves very expensive melt-in-your-mouth beef, but does not take credit cards.

Think we’ll check out what DUMBO has to offer and leave Peter Luger to meat-eaters with bigger appetites and wallets.

And, That’s That… (for now)