From bagels and donuts to New York Italian and Chinese food, good food is plentiful in Brooklyn. Dozens of live music performances take place every night in Brooklyn. Named after the Dutch town of Breukelen, it is located on the western end of Long Island and shares a land border with the district of Queens. Brooklyn has several bridge and tunnel connections to the Manhattan district via the East River and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connects it to Staten Island.
With a land area of 70.82 square miles (183.4 km) and an aquatic area of 26 square miles (67 km), Kings County is the fourth smallest county in New York State by land area and the third smallest by total area. The history of European settlements in Brooklyn spans more than 350 years. The settlement began in the 17th century when the small town of Breuckelen, founded by the Dutch, on the bank of Long Island's East River, grew into a sizeable city in the 19th century and consolidated in 1898 with New York City (then confined to Manhattan and the Bronx), the remaining rural areas of the Kings County and the largely rural areas of Queens and Staten Island, to form modern New York City. What is now Brooklyn left Dutch hands after the English captured the colony of New Netherland in 1664, a prelude to the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
New Holland was taken in a naval action, and the English changed the name of the new capture to their naval commander, James, Duke of York, brother of the then monarch King Charles II and future king himself as King James II. Brooklyn became part of the West Riding of York County in the province of New York, one of the middle colonies of nascent British America. The British controlled the surrounding region during the war, as New York City was soon occupied and became their military and political base of operations in North America for the rest of the conflict. The British generally enjoyed a dominant loyal sentiment from residents in Kings County who did not evacuate, although the region was also the center of the fledgling and largely successful Patriot intelligence network, led by Washington itself.
As a seaport and manufacturing center, Brooklyn was well prepared to contribute to the Union's strengths in shipping and manufacturing. The two combined in shipbuilding; the armored monitor was built in Brooklyn. Economic growth continued, driven by immigration and industrialization, and Brooklyn established itself as the third most populous American city for much of the 19th century. The waterfront from Gowanus to Greenpoint was developed with docks and factories.
Industrial shoreline access improved with Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek Canal. USS Monitor was the most famous product of Williamsburg's large and growing shipbuilding industry. After the Civil War, streetcar lines and other modes of transportation brought urban expansion beyond Prospect Park (completed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1873 and widely heralded as an improvement over the previous Central Park) to the center of the county, as evidenced by the gradual settlement in a relatively rustic setting Windsor Terrace and Kensington. By the turn of the century, Dean Alvord's Prospect Park South development in nearby Flatbush would serve as a model for Flatbush's contemporary Victorian micro-neighborhoods and the post-consolidation emergence of outlying districts, such as Midwood and Marine Park.
Along with Oak Park, Illinois, it also heralded automobile and railroad-driven fashion for the most remote prewar suburban communities, such as Garden City, New York and Montclair, New Jersey. The rapidly growing population needed more water, so the city built centralized water works, including the Ridgewood Reservoir. However, the Municipal Police Department was abolished in 1854 in favor of a metropolitan force that would also cover New York and Westchester counties. In 1865, the Brooklyn Fire Department (BFD) also gave way to the new Metropolitan Fire District.
Sports became big business, and the Brooklyn Bridegrooms played professional baseball in Washington Park, in the convenient suburb of Park Slope, and elsewhere. At the beginning of the next century, under their new name Brooklyn Dodgers, they brought baseball to Ebbets Field, beyond Prospect Park. Racetracks, amusement parks and beach resorts opened in Brighton Beach, Coney Island and elsewhere in the southern part of the county. In 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, transportation to Manhattan was no longer just by water, and Brooklyn's ties to New York City were strengthened.
Brooklyn has an area of 97 square miles (250 km), of which 71 square miles (180 km) is land (73%) and 26 square miles (67 km is water) (27%); the district is the second largest district by land area among New York City districts. However, Kings County, bordering Brooklyn, is the fourth smallest county in New York State by land area and the third smallest by total area. Brooklyn is located on the southwestern tip of Long Island, and the western border of the municipality constitutes the western end of the island. Brooklyn's maritime boundaries are wide and varied, including Jamaica Bay; the Atlantic Ocean; The Narrows, which separates Brooklyn from the Staten Island district in New York City and crossed by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge; New York High Bay, which separates Brooklyn from Jersey City and Bayonne in the U.S.
UU. State of New Jersey; and the East River, which separates Brooklyn from the Manhattan district of New York City and crossed by the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge and numerous New York City subway routes. East of Brooklyn is the district of Queens, which contains John F. Kennedy in the Jamaica neighborhood of that district, approximately two miles from the border of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The predominantly Jewish Crown Heights-based (and later East Flatbush) Madison Democratic Club served as the district's main political clubhouse headquarters for decades until the rise of Meade Esposito's rival, the Canarsie-based Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, in the 1960s and 1970s, playing a role integral to the rise of figures such as New York State Assembly Speaker Irwin Steingut; his son, fellow President Stanley Steingut; New York City Mayor Abraham Beame; real estate developer Fred Trump; Democratic district leader Beadie Markowitz; and political fixer Abraham Bunny Lindenbaum. While not as large as the Native American population in Queens, younger professionals of Asian Indian origin are discovering that Brooklyn is a convenient alternative to Manhattan for finding housing. Nearly 30,000 Indian-Americans call Brooklyn home. Brooklyn's Greek-Americans Live Across the District.
A historic concentration has been maintained in Bay Ridge and adjacent areas, where there is a notable group of schools, businesses and cultural institutions focusing on Hellenic culture. Other businesses are located in downtown Brooklyn, near Atlantic Avenue. Like in much of the New York metropolitan area, Greek-owned diners are found throughout the district. Brooklyn is home to the world-famous Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the second largest public art collection in the United States, which is housed in the Brooklyn Museum.
The district is home to the monthly Brooklyn Rail for art and politics, as well as the quarterly Cabinet for Arts and Culture. Brooklyn also has a storied sports history. It has been home to many famous sports figures such as Joe Paterno, Vince Lombardi, Mike Tyson, Joe Torre, Sandy Koufax, Billy Cunningham and Vitas Gerulaitis. Basketball legend Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn, although he grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Since its consolidation with New York City in 1898, Brooklyn has been governed by the Charter of New York City, which establishes a strong system of mayors and councils. New York City's centralized government is responsible for public education, correctional institutions, public safety, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply and wellness services. On the other hand, the Brooklyn Public Library is an independent non-profit organization partially funded by the government of the City of New York, but also by the government of the State of New York, the U.S. Since 1990, the Borough President has served as an advocate for the county in the agencies of the Mayor's Office, the City Council, the New York State Government, and corporations.
The current president of Brooklyn Borough is Antonio Reynoso, who replaced Eric Adams when Adams took office as mayor of New York City. SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, founded as Long Island College Hospital in 1860, is the oldest school of hospital medicine in the United States. The Medical Center includes the School of Medicine, the College of Health Professions, the College of Nursing, the School of Public Health, the School of Graduate Studies and the University Hospital of Brooklyn. Nobel Prize winner Robert F.
Furchgott was a member of his faculty. Half of the students at the Medical Center are minorities or immigrants. The School of Medicine has the highest percentage of minority students of any medical school in New York State. Long Island University is a private university based in Brookville on Long Island, with a campus in downtown Brooklyn with 6,417 undergraduate students.
The Brooklyn campus has strong medical science and technology programs, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Kingsborough Community College is a college in the City University of New York system in Manhattan Beach. There are 58 library branches, placing one within half a mile of every Brooklyn resident. In addition to its specialized commercial library in Brooklyn Heights, the library is preparing to build its new Visual Performing Arts Library & (VPA) in the BAM Cultural District, which will focus on the link between new and emerging arts and technology and will house traditional and digital collections.
It will provide access and training to art applications and technologies that are not widely available to the public. The collections will include themes of art, theater, dance, music, cinema, photography and architecture. A special archive will house the records and history of Brooklyn's art communities. Much of Brooklyn has only named streets, but Park Slope, Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Bensonhurst and Borough Park and the other western sections have numbered streets that extend approximately northwest to southeast, and numbered avenues that run approximately northeast to southwest.
East of Dahill Road, lettered avenues (such as Avenue M) run east and west, and numbered streets have the prefix East. South of O Avenue, the related numbered streets west of Dahill Road use the West designation. This set of numbered streets runs from West 37th Street to East 108 Street, and the avenues run from A to Z with names that replace some of them in some neighborhoods (especially Albemarle, Beverley, Cortelyou, Dorchester, Ditmas, Foster, Farragut, Glenwood, Quentin). The streets numbered with the prefix North and South in Williamsburg, and Bay, Beach, Brighton, Plumb, Paerdegat or Flatlands along the South and Southwest coast are loosely based on the old grids of the original Kings County cities that eventually consolidated to form Brooklyn.
These names often reflect bodies of water or the beaches that surround them, such as Plumb Beach or Paerdegat Basin. Brooklyn is connected to Manhattan by three bridges, the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges; a vehicular tunnel, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (also known as Hugh L. Carey Tunnel); and several subway tunnels. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge links Brooklyn to Staten Island's most suburban district.
Although much of its border is on land, Brooklyn shares several water crossings with Queens, including the Pulaski Bridge, the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, the Kosciuszko Bridge (part of the Brooklyn-Queens Highway) and the Grand Street Bridge, all of which carry traffic over Newtown Creek and Marine Parkway Bridge that connects Brooklyn with the Rockaway Peninsula. Do you need ammo for trivia night? Do you want to be the envy of all your friends with your knowledge of Brooklyn? Then read on for some unique facts and great photos of the best place on Earth. Brooklyn (named after the Dutch city of Breukelen) is one of the five boroughs of New York City. Brooklyn, an independent city until its consolidation in New York in 1898, is the most populous district in New York City, with almost 2.5 million inhabitants.
Brooklyn is bordered by Kings County, which is the most populous county in the state of New York, and the second most densely populated county in the United States (after New York County, which is the district of Manhattan). In Brooklyn, although its prices have started to skyrocket in recent years due to its growing popularity, it is still relatively cheap compared to Manhattan. It's called Brooklyn's Chinatown and it was originally a small Chinese enclave with Cantonese speakers as the main Chinese population in the late eighties and nineties, but since the 2000s, the Chinese population in the area drastically changed most Fuzhounese Americans, which contributed immensely to expanding this Chinatown very dramatically making this Chinatown with the nicknames of Fuzhou Town (), Brooklyn or Little Fuzhou () by Brooklyn. Since 1990, Brooklyn has seen an increase in immigration to neighborhoods such as Sunset Park, home to burgeoning Mexican and Chinese-American communities.
The best-known regiment that was sent to war from the city was the 14th Brooklyn Red Legged Devils. Although Manhattan can boast that its skyline is far above the rest, Brooklyn can say that they are the ones who really enjoy it. Despite these civic milestones, the construction of John Roebling and Washington Roebling's Brooklyn to Manhattan Bridge (completed 188) effectively condemned Brooklyn's independent existence, as commercial interests craved closer ties to the metropolis. The Brooklyn Bridge was the first suspension bridge to be built across the East River to facilitate transportation to Lower Manhattan.
Brooklyn is connected to Manhattan by three bridges (one of which is the Brooklyn Bridge), a vehicular tunnel and several rapid transit tubes; to Queens and Long Island by the streets; and to Staten Island by the 4,260-foot (1,298 meter) Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Brooklyn gets a lot of pressure for being millennial paradise with all the skinny jeans, hipster beards, and coffee-loving crowd flocking to your area to settle down. . .