muscle1313
May 1st, 2005, 07:52 PM
Chicago Tribune -
I'll skip Manhattan ...
Brooklyn
A city that isn't stands on its own
By Alan Solomon
Tribune staff reporter
Published May 1, 2005
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Where else can you ride one of the world's most famous roller coasters, then take a few wobbly steps and settle your stomach with a knish?
This is Brooklyn. It's been Brooklyn, actually, for a lot of years—the Cyclone has been rattling on Coney Island since 1927, and knishes have been peddled there for at least that long—but it's a while since tourists stormed the borough's beaches, and its neighborhoods, and everything else wonderful here.
If ever.
(From "My Favorite Year," a favorite movie, 1982):
Benjy Stone: "Bring Alan Swann to Brooklyn?"
Belle Carroca, his mother: "Well, why not? What are you ashamed of?"
Stone: "Everything!"
Look, I love Manhattan. The Bronx and Staten Island, too, even if I've never been to Staten Island, except for the ferry. Queens. Been to Queens a lot, and Queens is cool.
But Brooklyn!
When I was a kid, there were two real places whose mere mention would light my face.
Texas. Texas meant cowboys. (This was before I learned Roy Rogers was actually Leonard Slye of Cincinnati.)
And Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was funny. People from Brooklyn had this outrageous, hilarious accent. Sgt. Bilko came from Brooklyn. The Kramdens lived in Brooklyn.
The Dodgers—everyone's other favorite team, because they weren't the Yankees, who mashed them annually in the World Series brought to you by Gillette and Mel Allen—were from Brooklyn.
Turns out Brooklyn, maybe, was only slightly more imaginary than the Magic Kingdom.
"The lingering sense of Brooklyn as a land of boundless mirth with baseball obbligato was the creation of certain screen writers and comedians," Roger Kahn wrote in his classic on those old Dodgers, "The Boys of Summer." "Working for a living, they synthesized that Brooklyn."
On the other hand, maybe Roger, a child of Brooklyn, was too close to appreciate the fascinating cultural mosiac that—albeit with a few different tiles—it remains today.
There are tourist-friendly "attractions," to be sure.
Prospect Park sprawls nicely—it's two-thirds the size of Manhattan's Central Park and designed by the same team—and it has a zoo, band shell, botanic garden, trees that bloom in the spring and people who play in it without fear.
"This is truly a neighborhood place," says Eliot Niles, a Brooklyn-born guide (Brooklyn Attitude Tours) and historian. "And when I say 'neighborhood,' I'm talking the greater neighborhood of Brooklyn."
It's anchored by Grand Army Plaza and a monument that rivals Paris' Arc de Triomphe in splendor, if not size.
"This," says Alex, a driver, in a Russian accent that's still thick after 30 years here, "reminds like in the Roman Empire."
On the park's edge is the Brooklyn Museum, devoted to art, intended in the beginning to be the world's largest museum before Manhattan took control of the budget (we'll get to that) and channeled funds toward its own Metropolitan. Its Egyptian collection is especially strong, but represented here, too, are such Americans as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent and Georgia O'Keeffe (including her rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge).
There used to be a ballpark right here. Forgive us, briefly, while we shamelessly wallow in nostalgia.
"My dad," says Niles, "was an avid, avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan."
The team moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Before that, and especially after, a major chuck of Brooklyn's middle class spun off to their own private Los Angeleses.
"It left a hole in his heart, and it left a hole in the heart of Brooklyn—both metaphorically and geographically, because Ebbets Field was in the heart of Brooklyn. You remove the center, you've got a vaccuum that took decades to fill. Some say it was never filled."
"The Dodgers were following a trend," says Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, who at 61 is old enough to remember. "It was very sad. But that was then."
Back to now.
The amusements of Coney Island are humming again, fewer than in their prime last century but certainly with a lively carny buzz, complete with freak show. Coaster buffs adore the Cyclone, and they should. The ever-dwindling number of Chicagoans who still miss Riverview's Bobs will find the Cyclone familiarly terrifying (as well as, at $5 a ride, a refreshing bargain in a time of $48 theme-park admissions).
The Promenade, in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood just off downtown, was built in the 1950s as a salve to property-owners distressed by construction of the highway that rumbles beneath it. Today, it provides the best possible view of Lower Manhattan.
(One of the delightful ironies, given the long rivalry between the boroughs: Manhattan looks best from Brooklyn. Manhattan, on the other hand, is forced to look at Brooklyn from its side of the East River. No contest.)
Brooklyn has always has a strong cultural presence, nourished by waves of immigrants who brought that sensibility from the old country. This is the city that nurtured Gershwin and Copland, along with the author of such elegant lyrics as: "Goosestep's the new step today . . . "
Mel Brooks.
Speaking of comics: Woody Allen. Henny Youngman. Buddy Hackett.
Rodney Dangerfield got his act together at a pioneer comedy club in Sheepshead Bay (another Brooklyn neighborhood, down the water from Coney Island and memoir-filled Brighton Beach) called Pips. Adam Sandler played there. A very young George Carlin. Billy Crystal. Seinfeld. Just about everybody.
It's still there. You can catch a party fishing boat at the harbor across the street (full day: about $35), land a mess of bass or flounder or porgies or whatever they're bringing in today (even tuna, sometimes), clean up, have some fried calamari at Randazzo's Clam Bar (if you don't mind a little wait) and then catch a comedy show a few steps away, all for less than a middling seat on Broadway.
Or, if you're not up for clams: a bowl of borscht at the Sarai Café or a kebab at the Turkish Yali Restaurant, or go Italian at Marie's or something fancier and fishier at Lundy's, all right there.
Lundy's. The Lundy brothers are long gone (there's an interesting story there; you won't read it here), and it's had a ride bumpier than the Cyclone's—but the restaurant, its raw bar and its pure Brooklynism have survived.
Neil Diamond, I'm told, was a regular here. Woody Allen's picture with the owners is on the wall.
At the bar, you might meet Charlie, a frequenter, who knew the guy ("He's a neighborhood guy—he's a nut case. He was a shucker here.") whose arrest for harassing dwarfs (I'm not making this up) inspired that day's New York Post Page 1 headline: "Hi ho, hi ho . . . it's off to court he goes."
Or Cari-Ann, a tattoo artist with a Rosie Perez (yes, Brooklynite Rosie Perez) delivery who works next door: "Not only you gotta pay millions of dollahs to buy these brownstones . . . there's no place to stick youah cah . . . "
Which brings us to the boom:
When Manhattan's own revival left well-paid but not filthy-rich professionals out in the residential cold, some began to look across the river. So did real estate people who can spot the beginning of a trend better than you and I.
Brooklyn had the buildings—primarily historic, structurally sound if sometimes neglected and often subdivided, brownstones. It also had a subway system that could carry commuters to Manhattan jobs lots faster than, say, highways from Connecticut and New Jersey, even Queens.
Boom.
"It's become so popular, so chic to live in Brooklyn," says Markowitz, "that it really has caused a lot of upheaval in neighborhoods that wish to preserve their unique residential character."
There are 600 pre-Civil War buildings in Brooklyn Heights. Almost all, today, are out of your price range.
"You're sitting in the first suburb of Manhattan," says Eric Wakin, co-author of "The Big Onion Guide to Brooklyn," just off the presses. We were sitting on a bench on Montague Street, in the shadow of a mansion worth millions. "It's gotten phenomenally expensive here in the last 20 years."
Al Capone used to work and tend bar in Park Slope. Unless he changed professions (which, of course, he eventually did), he couldn't afford to live here anymore. Actor John Turturro, native, lives there now. A neighborhood video store, I'm told, has an entire shelf permanently devoted to Turturro films.
Ft. Greene, beyond shabby not long ago, today has, among other things, a French restaurant and other conveniences consistent with its new residents, attracted by renewal and proximity to another of Brooklyn's points of pride. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is longtime home of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and core of an expanding cultural center that includes the new Mark Morris Dance Center and more to come.
Bedford Stuyvesant (given humanity by Brooklynite Spike Lee in "Do the Right Thing") was notorious.
Sara, an eye technician and friend to Cari-Ann, the tattoo artist: "Ten yeahs ago, they would say, 'Take this house. I'll give it to you.' You would say, 'Get the hell outta heah.' Now youah not gonna be able to touch it, because theahs no brownstones left to buy.
"Pawk Slope. Gawbbled up. They go fuh 2, 3 million dollahs . . . "
But while Pawk . . . Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights and Ft. Greene and others are being gentrified (DUMBO, a once-derelict former commercial district Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, now has lofts for sale, new construction next to the lofts and, of course, a new Starbucks), other neighborhoods are preserving their residential character.
Crown Heights. No stranger to strife—something approaching civil war between resident African-Americans and Hassidic Jews in 1991 helped bring down Mayor David Dinkins and elevate an enforcer named Rudy Giuliani—it is now a stable, bicultural, fascinating place to explore. On Nostrand Avenue, shops braid hair and sell barbecue; on Kingston Avenue, three blocks east, you can buy hand-crafted matzos (in season) for $16 a box and hats of any color, as long as they're black.
Behind Peter Luger restaurant—Brooklyn's most famous steak house, justifiably, which opened in 1887—other Hassidic Jews (and pioneering artists, including a blond from Kenosha) have converted a crumbling Williamsburg neighborhood, once a haunt of crack whores and drug peddlers, into 1887 Jewish Eastern Europe (with kids on Big Wheels).
Brighton Beach, for at least a generation almost solidly Jewish (Brooks grew up next door to drummer Buddy Rich), is still almost solid, but now with a mix of Russians. "They come from all nationalities," says Alex, the driver, "then their families come and they reunite." The Golden Key grocery on Brighton Beach Avenue intoxicates with a blend of aromas—sausages, smoked fish, pastries, trays of stuffed cabbage and blintzes—before I'm thrown out (in Russian) for taking unauthorized photos of the sausages, smoked fish, pastries . . .
The old timers still come to Court Street in Carroll Gardens to buy fresh ravioli or to enjoy the homemade fettucine at a ristorante named for Marco Polo—even if the waiter, like mine, is from Montenegro, once part of Yugoslavia; trendy newcomers cut over to Smith Street in Cobble Hill, parallel to Court Street, to graze its stream of restaurant consciousness; seekers of the rhythms and flavors of the islands head over to East Flatbush, which is next to Canarsie. (The Kramdens lived in Bensonhurst, but for unknown reasons their address was in Canarsie. The moon in the opening of "The Honeymooners" rises over Brooklyn. Jackie Gleason's birthplace? You have to ask?)
To lovers of cities, old American cities—fashioned as much by world events, and international social and political upheavals, and by the promise of a better life, as by subdivision developers—who feared those cities had been homogenized into an urban Wal-Mart, Brooklyn is a revelation.
"Brooklyn," says Markowitz, "is unlike anywhere in America. It is home to everyone from everywhere. It represents New York at its finest."
With a bridge for the ages.
Until the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, Brooklyn was an independent city, linked to Manhattan only by a navy of weather-sensitive ferries and a vague sense of shared destiny. That's why Brooklyn has a downtown and Queens, always an outpost, has bungalows. In 1880, Brooklyn was America's third-largest city, behind New York and Philadelphia; 10 years later, Chicago had climbed into the No. 2 spot, but No. 4 Brooklyn's population had soared nearly 40 percent, to more than 800,000.
With the opening of what then was easily the world's longest suspension bridge, Brooklyn and Manhattan were now fused by a granite and steel umbilical. In 1898, after a referendum with hints of impropriety, the merger was made official, and Brooklyn went from city to borough.
(Today, Brooklyn's population—about 2.6 million—would still make it the country's fourth largest city; Manhattan's 1.7 million, taken alone, would put it sixth, between Houston and Philly.)
Visitors can walk across that bridge, leisurely, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or from Manhattan to Brooklyn, in about a half hour. It's a broad wooden boardwalk, mostly, with cars on either side quickly becoming irrelevant as the journey continues over the East River.
It's free.
They take the walk from Manhattan, sometimes, to get a view, and a picture, of where the World Trade Center used to be.
The smart ones keep on going and discover a treasure most didn't realize was here.
Once more, from "My Favorite Year":
Alan Swann: "But now, I must take leave of you, for Stone and I journey to dine in some far-off land called . . . Brooklyn."
Of that plan, even the real Kathryn Grayson (discovered by former Coney Island singing waiter Eddie Cantor) would no doubt concur:
Nothing to be ashamed of at all.
I'll skip Manhattan ...
Brooklyn
A city that isn't stands on its own
By Alan Solomon
Tribune staff reporter
Published May 1, 2005
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Where else can you ride one of the world's most famous roller coasters, then take a few wobbly steps and settle your stomach with a knish?
This is Brooklyn. It's been Brooklyn, actually, for a lot of years—the Cyclone has been rattling on Coney Island since 1927, and knishes have been peddled there for at least that long—but it's a while since tourists stormed the borough's beaches, and its neighborhoods, and everything else wonderful here.
If ever.
(From "My Favorite Year," a favorite movie, 1982):
Benjy Stone: "Bring Alan Swann to Brooklyn?"
Belle Carroca, his mother: "Well, why not? What are you ashamed of?"
Stone: "Everything!"
Look, I love Manhattan. The Bronx and Staten Island, too, even if I've never been to Staten Island, except for the ferry. Queens. Been to Queens a lot, and Queens is cool.
But Brooklyn!
When I was a kid, there were two real places whose mere mention would light my face.
Texas. Texas meant cowboys. (This was before I learned Roy Rogers was actually Leonard Slye of Cincinnati.)
And Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was funny. People from Brooklyn had this outrageous, hilarious accent. Sgt. Bilko came from Brooklyn. The Kramdens lived in Brooklyn.
The Dodgers—everyone's other favorite team, because they weren't the Yankees, who mashed them annually in the World Series brought to you by Gillette and Mel Allen—were from Brooklyn.
Turns out Brooklyn, maybe, was only slightly more imaginary than the Magic Kingdom.
"The lingering sense of Brooklyn as a land of boundless mirth with baseball obbligato was the creation of certain screen writers and comedians," Roger Kahn wrote in his classic on those old Dodgers, "The Boys of Summer." "Working for a living, they synthesized that Brooklyn."
On the other hand, maybe Roger, a child of Brooklyn, was too close to appreciate the fascinating cultural mosiac that—albeit with a few different tiles—it remains today.
There are tourist-friendly "attractions," to be sure.
Prospect Park sprawls nicely—it's two-thirds the size of Manhattan's Central Park and designed by the same team—and it has a zoo, band shell, botanic garden, trees that bloom in the spring and people who play in it without fear.
"This is truly a neighborhood place," says Eliot Niles, a Brooklyn-born guide (Brooklyn Attitude Tours) and historian. "And when I say 'neighborhood,' I'm talking the greater neighborhood of Brooklyn."
It's anchored by Grand Army Plaza and a monument that rivals Paris' Arc de Triomphe in splendor, if not size.
"This," says Alex, a driver, in a Russian accent that's still thick after 30 years here, "reminds like in the Roman Empire."
On the park's edge is the Brooklyn Museum, devoted to art, intended in the beginning to be the world's largest museum before Manhattan took control of the budget (we'll get to that) and channeled funds toward its own Metropolitan. Its Egyptian collection is especially strong, but represented here, too, are such Americans as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent and Georgia O'Keeffe (including her rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge).
There used to be a ballpark right here. Forgive us, briefly, while we shamelessly wallow in nostalgia.
"My dad," says Niles, "was an avid, avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan."
The team moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Before that, and especially after, a major chuck of Brooklyn's middle class spun off to their own private Los Angeleses.
"It left a hole in his heart, and it left a hole in the heart of Brooklyn—both metaphorically and geographically, because Ebbets Field was in the heart of Brooklyn. You remove the center, you've got a vaccuum that took decades to fill. Some say it was never filled."
"The Dodgers were following a trend," says Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, who at 61 is old enough to remember. "It was very sad. But that was then."
Back to now.
The amusements of Coney Island are humming again, fewer than in their prime last century but certainly with a lively carny buzz, complete with freak show. Coaster buffs adore the Cyclone, and they should. The ever-dwindling number of Chicagoans who still miss Riverview's Bobs will find the Cyclone familiarly terrifying (as well as, at $5 a ride, a refreshing bargain in a time of $48 theme-park admissions).
The Promenade, in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood just off downtown, was built in the 1950s as a salve to property-owners distressed by construction of the highway that rumbles beneath it. Today, it provides the best possible view of Lower Manhattan.
(One of the delightful ironies, given the long rivalry between the boroughs: Manhattan looks best from Brooklyn. Manhattan, on the other hand, is forced to look at Brooklyn from its side of the East River. No contest.)
Brooklyn has always has a strong cultural presence, nourished by waves of immigrants who brought that sensibility from the old country. This is the city that nurtured Gershwin and Copland, along with the author of such elegant lyrics as: "Goosestep's the new step today . . . "
Mel Brooks.
Speaking of comics: Woody Allen. Henny Youngman. Buddy Hackett.
Rodney Dangerfield got his act together at a pioneer comedy club in Sheepshead Bay (another Brooklyn neighborhood, down the water from Coney Island and memoir-filled Brighton Beach) called Pips. Adam Sandler played there. A very young George Carlin. Billy Crystal. Seinfeld. Just about everybody.
It's still there. You can catch a party fishing boat at the harbor across the street (full day: about $35), land a mess of bass or flounder or porgies or whatever they're bringing in today (even tuna, sometimes), clean up, have some fried calamari at Randazzo's Clam Bar (if you don't mind a little wait) and then catch a comedy show a few steps away, all for less than a middling seat on Broadway.
Or, if you're not up for clams: a bowl of borscht at the Sarai Café or a kebab at the Turkish Yali Restaurant, or go Italian at Marie's or something fancier and fishier at Lundy's, all right there.
Lundy's. The Lundy brothers are long gone (there's an interesting story there; you won't read it here), and it's had a ride bumpier than the Cyclone's—but the restaurant, its raw bar and its pure Brooklynism have survived.
Neil Diamond, I'm told, was a regular here. Woody Allen's picture with the owners is on the wall.
At the bar, you might meet Charlie, a frequenter, who knew the guy ("He's a neighborhood guy—he's a nut case. He was a shucker here.") whose arrest for harassing dwarfs (I'm not making this up) inspired that day's New York Post Page 1 headline: "Hi ho, hi ho . . . it's off to court he goes."
Or Cari-Ann, a tattoo artist with a Rosie Perez (yes, Brooklynite Rosie Perez) delivery who works next door: "Not only you gotta pay millions of dollahs to buy these brownstones . . . there's no place to stick youah cah . . . "
Which brings us to the boom:
When Manhattan's own revival left well-paid but not filthy-rich professionals out in the residential cold, some began to look across the river. So did real estate people who can spot the beginning of a trend better than you and I.
Brooklyn had the buildings—primarily historic, structurally sound if sometimes neglected and often subdivided, brownstones. It also had a subway system that could carry commuters to Manhattan jobs lots faster than, say, highways from Connecticut and New Jersey, even Queens.
Boom.
"It's become so popular, so chic to live in Brooklyn," says Markowitz, "that it really has caused a lot of upheaval in neighborhoods that wish to preserve their unique residential character."
There are 600 pre-Civil War buildings in Brooklyn Heights. Almost all, today, are out of your price range.
"You're sitting in the first suburb of Manhattan," says Eric Wakin, co-author of "The Big Onion Guide to Brooklyn," just off the presses. We were sitting on a bench on Montague Street, in the shadow of a mansion worth millions. "It's gotten phenomenally expensive here in the last 20 years."
Al Capone used to work and tend bar in Park Slope. Unless he changed professions (which, of course, he eventually did), he couldn't afford to live here anymore. Actor John Turturro, native, lives there now. A neighborhood video store, I'm told, has an entire shelf permanently devoted to Turturro films.
Ft. Greene, beyond shabby not long ago, today has, among other things, a French restaurant and other conveniences consistent with its new residents, attracted by renewal and proximity to another of Brooklyn's points of pride. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is longtime home of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and core of an expanding cultural center that includes the new Mark Morris Dance Center and more to come.
Bedford Stuyvesant (given humanity by Brooklynite Spike Lee in "Do the Right Thing") was notorious.
Sara, an eye technician and friend to Cari-Ann, the tattoo artist: "Ten yeahs ago, they would say, 'Take this house. I'll give it to you.' You would say, 'Get the hell outta heah.' Now youah not gonna be able to touch it, because theahs no brownstones left to buy.
"Pawk Slope. Gawbbled up. They go fuh 2, 3 million dollahs . . . "
But while Pawk . . . Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights and Ft. Greene and others are being gentrified (DUMBO, a once-derelict former commercial district Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, now has lofts for sale, new construction next to the lofts and, of course, a new Starbucks), other neighborhoods are preserving their residential character.
Crown Heights. No stranger to strife—something approaching civil war between resident African-Americans and Hassidic Jews in 1991 helped bring down Mayor David Dinkins and elevate an enforcer named Rudy Giuliani—it is now a stable, bicultural, fascinating place to explore. On Nostrand Avenue, shops braid hair and sell barbecue; on Kingston Avenue, three blocks east, you can buy hand-crafted matzos (in season) for $16 a box and hats of any color, as long as they're black.
Behind Peter Luger restaurant—Brooklyn's most famous steak house, justifiably, which opened in 1887—other Hassidic Jews (and pioneering artists, including a blond from Kenosha) have converted a crumbling Williamsburg neighborhood, once a haunt of crack whores and drug peddlers, into 1887 Jewish Eastern Europe (with kids on Big Wheels).
Brighton Beach, for at least a generation almost solidly Jewish (Brooks grew up next door to drummer Buddy Rich), is still almost solid, but now with a mix of Russians. "They come from all nationalities," says Alex, the driver, "then their families come and they reunite." The Golden Key grocery on Brighton Beach Avenue intoxicates with a blend of aromas—sausages, smoked fish, pastries, trays of stuffed cabbage and blintzes—before I'm thrown out (in Russian) for taking unauthorized photos of the sausages, smoked fish, pastries . . .
The old timers still come to Court Street in Carroll Gardens to buy fresh ravioli or to enjoy the homemade fettucine at a ristorante named for Marco Polo—even if the waiter, like mine, is from Montenegro, once part of Yugoslavia; trendy newcomers cut over to Smith Street in Cobble Hill, parallel to Court Street, to graze its stream of restaurant consciousness; seekers of the rhythms and flavors of the islands head over to East Flatbush, which is next to Canarsie. (The Kramdens lived in Bensonhurst, but for unknown reasons their address was in Canarsie. The moon in the opening of "The Honeymooners" rises over Brooklyn. Jackie Gleason's birthplace? You have to ask?)
To lovers of cities, old American cities—fashioned as much by world events, and international social and political upheavals, and by the promise of a better life, as by subdivision developers—who feared those cities had been homogenized into an urban Wal-Mart, Brooklyn is a revelation.
"Brooklyn," says Markowitz, "is unlike anywhere in America. It is home to everyone from everywhere. It represents New York at its finest."
With a bridge for the ages.
Until the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, Brooklyn was an independent city, linked to Manhattan only by a navy of weather-sensitive ferries and a vague sense of shared destiny. That's why Brooklyn has a downtown and Queens, always an outpost, has bungalows. In 1880, Brooklyn was America's third-largest city, behind New York and Philadelphia; 10 years later, Chicago had climbed into the No. 2 spot, but No. 4 Brooklyn's population had soared nearly 40 percent, to more than 800,000.
With the opening of what then was easily the world's longest suspension bridge, Brooklyn and Manhattan were now fused by a granite and steel umbilical. In 1898, after a referendum with hints of impropriety, the merger was made official, and Brooklyn went from city to borough.
(Today, Brooklyn's population—about 2.6 million—would still make it the country's fourth largest city; Manhattan's 1.7 million, taken alone, would put it sixth, between Houston and Philly.)
Visitors can walk across that bridge, leisurely, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or from Manhattan to Brooklyn, in about a half hour. It's a broad wooden boardwalk, mostly, with cars on either side quickly becoming irrelevant as the journey continues over the East River.
It's free.
They take the walk from Manhattan, sometimes, to get a view, and a picture, of where the World Trade Center used to be.
The smart ones keep on going and discover a treasure most didn't realize was here.
Once more, from "My Favorite Year":
Alan Swann: "But now, I must take leave of you, for Stone and I journey to dine in some far-off land called . . . Brooklyn."
Of that plan, even the real Kathryn Grayson (discovered by former Coney Island singing waiter Eddie Cantor) would no doubt concur:
Nothing to be ashamed of at all.