Featured Apartment:
New York- One bedroom and luxury studio loft apartments. Great value, fully furnished rooms, dishwashers, new appliances and kitchens. Manhattan's exceptional single occupancy residences, studio units contain new cabinets, granite counter tops, All Stainless Steel appliances. Browse Brooklyn Apartments -->
About Brooklyn
Neighborhoods
Brooklyn has many well-defined neighborhoods, many of which developed from
distinct towns and villages that date back to its founding in the Dutch colonial
era in the early 1600s.
Today, Downtown Brooklyn is the third-largest central business district in New
York City, after Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan. It has many commercial
towers and a rapidly increasing number of residential buildings.
The northwestern neighborhoods between the Brooklyn Bridge and Prospect Park,
including Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Clinton
Hill, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO (an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge
Overpass"), Fort Greene, Gowanus, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Red Hook,
are characterized by many nineteenth century brick townhouses and brownstones.
These neighborhoods include some of the most gentrified and affluent
neighborhoods in Brooklyn, along with ample subway lines, cultural institutions,
and high-end restaurants.
Further North along the East River lie Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
Traditionally working class communities with a vibrant cultural mix, many
artists and hipsters have moved into the area since the late 1990s. Further
changing the area, the city completed an extensive rezoning of the Brooklyn
waterfront in 2005 which will allow for many new residential condominiums. As
prices have risen, redevelopment has moved eastward away from the waterfront
into Bushwick along the L subway line.
Central and southern Brooklyn contains many more architecturally and culturally
distinct neighborhoods, some of which grew rapidly in the late 19th and early
20th century as upwardly-mobile immigrants moved out of tenement buildings in
Manhattan neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. Borough Park is largely
Orthodox Jewish; Bedford-Stuyvesant is the largest black neighborhood in the
country; Bensonhurst is historically Italian. Dyker Heights is an Italian
neighborhood. East Flatbush and Fort Greene is home to a large number of
middle-class black professionals. Brighton Beach is home to many Russians. Since
1990, Brooklyn has seen a rise in new immigration to neighborhoods like Sunset
Park, home to flourishing Mexican and Chinese American communities.
Adjacent counties
* Richmond County - west
* New York County - north
* Queens County - east
Education
Education in Brooklyn is provided by a vast number of public and private
institutions. Public schools in the borough are managed by the New York City
Department of Education, the largest public school system in the United States.
Private schools range from the elite Berkeley Carroll School to religious
schools run by Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Jewish organizations. The
Satmar Jewish community of Brooklyn operates its own network of schools, which
is the fourth largest school system in New York state.
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, and was
the first public co-ed liberal arts college in New York City. The College ranked
in the top 10 nationally for the second consecutive year in Princeton Review’s
2006 guidebook, America’s Best Value Colleges. Many of its students are first
and second generation immigrants. Emblematic of its students’ potential is
Eugene Shenderov, the son of Russian immigrants who received a 2005 Rhodes
Scholarship before graduating from the College's B.A.-M.D. program in June 2005.
The Brooklyn College campus serves as home to the Brooklyn Center for the
Performing Arts complex and its four theaters, including the George Gershwin.
Brooklyn Law School was founded in 1901 and is notable for its diverse student
body. Women and African Americans were enrolled in 1909. According to the Leiter
Report, a compendium of law school rankings published by Brian Leiter, Brooklyn
Law School places 31st nationally for quality of students.
Kingsborough Community College is a junior college in the City University of New
York system, located in Manhattan Beach.
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, originally founded as the Long Island College
Hospital in 1860, is the oldest hospital-based medical school in the United
States. The Medical Center comprises the College of Medicine, College of Health
Related Professions, College of Nursing, University Hospital of Brooklyn, and
the School of Graduate Studies, where Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Robert F. Furchgott
is a member of the faculty. Half of the Medical Center's students are minorities
or immigrants. The College of Medicine has the highest percentage of minority
students of any medical school in New York State.
Long Island University is a private university in Downtown Brooklyn with 6,417
undergraduate students. In Clinton Hill, the Pratt Institute is one of the
leading art schools in the United States and offers programs in art,
architecture, fashion design, design, creative writing, library science, and
other area disciplines.
As an independent system, separate from the New York City and Queens libraries,
the Brooklyn Public Library offers thousands of public programs, millions of
books, and use of more than 850 free Internet-accessible computers. It also has
books and periodicals in all the major languages spoken in Brooklyn, including
Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Haitian Kreyol, as well as French,
Yiddish, Hindi, Bengali, Polish, Italian, and Arabic. The Central Library is a
landmarked building facing Grand Army Plaza and is undergoing extensive
renovations and an underground expansion. There are 58 library branches, placing
one within a half mile of each Brooklyn resident. There's a significant business
library in Brooklyn Heights. The Library is preparing to construct the new
Visual and Performing Arts Library, which will focus on the link between new and
emerging arts and technology and house traditional and digital collections. It
will provide access and training to arts applications and technologies not
widely available to the public. The collections will include the subjects of
art, theater, dance, music, film, photography and architecture. A special
archive will house the records and history of Brooklyn's arts communities.
Transportation
Brooklyn's transportation infrastructure provides the means to efficiently move
goods and people throughout the borough.
Brooklyn is well served by public transit. Because 18 New York City Subway
lines, including the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, traverse the borough, it is not
surprising that 92.8% of Brooklyn residents traveling to Manhattan use the
subway. Major stations include, Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street, Broadway
Junction, DeKalb Avenue, Jay Street-Borough Hall, and Coney Island-Stillwell
Avenue.
The public bus network covers the entire borough. There is daily express bus
service into Manhattan. New York's famous yellow cabs also provide
transportation in Brooklyn, although they are less numerous in Brooklyn than in
Manhattan. There are three commuter rail stations in Brooklyn, including East
New York station, Nostrand Avenue station, and Atlantic Terminal, the terminus
station of the Atlantic Branch of the Long Island Rail Road. Atlantic Terminal
is a major intermodal transit hub with several connecting subway lines.
The grand majority of limited-access expressways and parkways are located in the
western and southern sections of Brooklyn. These include, the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway, the Gowanus Expressway, which is part of the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, New York State Route 27, the Belt Parkway,
and the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Major thoroughfares include, Atlantic Avenue,
4th Avenue, 86th Street, Kings Highway, Ocean Parkway, Eastern Parkway, Linden
Boulevard, McGuiness Boulevard, Flatbush Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, and
Bedford Avenue.
Brooklyn is extensively connected to Manhattan by three bridges, the Brooklyn,
Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, and a tunnel, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
The Verrazano Narrows Bridge links Brooklyn with the more suburban borough of
Staten Island. Though its border is mostly made up of land, Brooklyn shares
three water crossings with Queens, the Kosciuszko Bridge (part of the
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), the Pulaski Bridge, and the JJ Byrne Memorial
Bridge all carry traffic over Newtown Creek.
Historically Brooklyn's waterfront was a major shipping port, especially at the
Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park. Most container ship cargo operations have
shifted to the New Jersey side of New York Harbor, while the city has recently
built a new cruise ship terminal in Red Hook that is to become a focal point for
New York's growing cruise industry. The Queen Mary 2, the world's largest ocean
liner, was designed specifically to fit under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the
longest suspension bridge in the United States. The Queen Mary 2 makes regular
ports of call at the Red Hook terminal on her transatlantic runs from
Southampton, England.