The last weekend we explored Brooklyn – another, completely different part of NYC, a city of about 2,6 mio. people, with many different neighborhoods. Every tourist knows Dumbo, Williamsburg or Brooklyn Heights in the meantime, but not many ever have heard about Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Fort Greene or Flatbush. Well, we got to know new parts of Brooklyn this time, starting on Saturday with the Brooklyn Bridge Park and Dumbo (with a great view towards Manhattan) and heading on to the Brooklyn Navy Yards in the Northern part of the borough for an interesting tour.
For over 150 years, starting in 1801 and being closed in 1966, the Brooklyn Navy Yard built America’s most famous fighting Naval ships. Today, the Yard is a model for a sustainable urban industrial park with a large rooftop farm and home to over 300 different businesses, among them the famous Steiner Studios (movies). By bus and walking we explored the vast, usually non accessible property along Brooklyn’s waterfront with drydocks, historic military buildings and a modern and highly instructive museum in Bldg. 92 (see pic).
Despite of the rain, we explored the partly creepy neighborhood (e.g. Vinegar Hill) and walked back to downtown Brooklyn and Fulton Street Mall, which was adecorated for X mas. One of our best culinary experiences ever, we then had in a hotel restaurant by name "Kimoto".
An elevator with a good-looking black guy brough us up to the rooftop, door opened to the restaurant and from there on we were treated like royality. Chef Brian himself - renowned and showered with awards - served us a ten-course tasting meal of creative japanese-inspired dishes, paired with cocktails and beers - it was pure heaven! In addition, the view of the city of Brooklyn from up there (see pic) was just fantastic.
Sunday we took the subway to Industry City, part of Sunset Park, another (former industrial) Brooklyn neighborhood, and in one of the huge warehouses a flea and gourmet market by name "Smorgasburg" took place. It has just moved to this new location this winter. Great vintage clothing, jewelry, knick-knack, porcellan, antiquities and such offered here besides local food producers and a pretty "hip" clientele.
In the afternoon we met our American-Italian friend Dom from Bensonhurst, who's living now in Gravesend (see pic), another interesting neighborhood of Brooklyn. After lunch in nearby Sheepshead Bay, with heaping amounts of unfamiliar uzbek food (part of former Russia) on the table in an hole-in-the-wall restaurant with servers barely speaking English, he showed us the "wild side" of Brooklyn.
Marine Park, a saltwater marsh with trails and a nature center, was our first stop, then on to Calvert Vaux Park, close to the famous entertainment district of Coney Island. This bay was off-limits for a long time and Dom told us, that even now many body parts regularly show up - besides ship wrecks and the famous "yellow submarine" (see pic). This was built by a wealthy guy who wanted to explore the famous Andrea Doria but never got around.
It was windy and ice-cold there at the beach, but it felt like being in another world. We concluded the evening with an NBA basketball game in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn before we arrived "home" in Harlem very late after a diverse and interesting day.
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