Brooklyn Heights

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade, taken from Pierrepont Street, has overlooked New York Harbor since 1950. The walkway, with a spectacular view of Manhattan, was created when master builder Robert Moses ran the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway around the neighborhood instead of through it.

The Heights, roughly from the Brooklyn Bridge down to Atlantic Avenue and from the riverfront over to Cadman Plaza West and Court Street, has been home to immigrant and itinerant workers, hookers and muggers, artists and eccentrics, a prominent Communist, a comic-book superhero and a famous burlesque queen,” The Times wrote in 2008. “Now, it’s a few minutes from Manhattan by subway, or a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, or by water taxi to Fulton Ferry Landing.

“Brooklyn Heights was farmland before Robert Fulton’s regular steam ferry service at that landing made commuting to Manhattan easy in 1814. Soon after, enterprising Heights property owners began to sell off plots for new homes, advertising the area to Manhattan’s wealthy as ‘the nearest country retreat’ … Over the following decades well-to-do businessmen and professionals lined the grid of new streets with homes and mansions of brick and stone in all the popular 19th-century styles.”

During the 50s, many young couples moved to Brooklyn Heights – then a somewhat depressed area – and improved houses they bought cheaply. Residents stopped the economic slide and Brooklyn Heights became an affluent community of professionals.

The area has is a rich and continuing cultural history: Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were all residents. It’s also the fictional home in comic books of Clark Kent (in Metropolis).