But a funny thing happened in a generation. The Upper West Side, where I lived, is now considered the boondocks to many young New Yorkers, who won’t venture above Midtown. My niece Katy is one of them. She is 28, my age when I lived in New York, and she loves Brooklyn.
“I rarely go north of the Village,’’ says Katy, who works in SoHo as the entertainment editor for the Huffington Post. “It’s convenient to meet friends in Manhattan after work, but usually I’d just rather come back here and do something in the neighborhood.’’
I asked Katy to be my guide on a recent trip to her ’hood and she agreed, with one condition: I wouldn’t use the words “hipsters’’ or “BroBos’’ to describe Brooklyn’s young, new inhabitants. The latter is a snarky term coined by the New York Observer to describe “Brooklyn bourgeois bohemians.’’
I promised.
Katy lives in Boerum Hill, so my husband and I booked a room at the nearby Nu Hotel on Smith Street, one of the neighborhood’s main drags. Already, things were looking good: At $160 (an online special), the hotel was cheaper than any we had booked in Manhattan — and the room twice as big — and continental breakfast was included. An added bonus in this parking-poor city: There was a lot next door and for a relatively cheap $25, we could leave the car there for 24 hours.
It was lunchtime when we arrived, and Katy steered us to Building on Bond, a laid-back cafe on Bond Street with exposed brick walls, a small bar, friendly waitstaff, some sidewalk tables — and pulled pork eggs Benedict. Sounds weird, but it worked.
Katy moved to Brooklyn three years ago, after living in Tribeca and the West Village. She wanted her own place, and here, she could afford it. She loves the leafy streets, the youthful demographic, and the absence of tourists (“although I did see one of those double-decker buses going down Flatbush Avenue the other day,’’ she notes).
