There’s a version of Brooklyn that exists today only in the movies. It’s the one where kids play stickball in the street, grannies in housedresses rest their elbows on pillow-padded windowsills, and people sit on their stoops for hours, occasionally getting up to go chat with a neighbor on another. Visit Brooklyn these days and this scene is next to impossible to find, but that Brooklyn was real once. I know, because I lived there most of my life.
Whenever I go back, I’m amazed at how the borough’s transformation doesn’t seem to let up. There’s a lot of really good, fun stuff there that wasn’t before, but it often feels too much the same: the same huge beer gardens popping up in former industrial lots, the crop of awesome but nearly indistinguishable third-wave coffee shops, the same cocktail bars executing the same twist-garnished Old Fashioneds, the same farm-to-table-restaurants-with-craft-beers-on-tap (though, if we could get just one of those in Jackson Heights, I’d be stoked).
