Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a really diverse place. There are great public buildings, incredibly beautiful, quiet, leafy river front / ocean front houses, the view of the Manhattan skyline, nice alleys and old buildings, run down, small, boring, average-looking places, hipper areas, metropolitan places, rather rough-looking community housing projects, a former navy shipyard, some decrepit, abandoned industrial ruins (Hey developers: this is New York, people would rent a bookshelf to sleep in if given the opportunity, and this is predestined loft material, directly across the river from Manhattan, in the immediate vicinity of Brooklyn Bridge; why on earth is this abandoned?), and the largest Orthodox Jewish community I have ever seen. For about an hour I saw literally only two people apart from myself that were not dressed in orthodox garb. From kids up to old folks, everyone was dressed like that. And none of them looked at me. I mean at all. Normally you always give a cursory glance to people, if only to avoid bumping into them on the sidewalk, and given that I was the sole red spot in a sea of black garment, you would expect at least some looks. None. They completely ignored me, staring at the floor in front of them and walking very busily. They gave me the creeps a little bit, I have to admit. Only when I reached the outer parts of the community some people actually looked me in the eyes. I also saw some group of people in front of what seemed to be a synagogue doing some ritual, and later saw a Jewish wedding. All seemed quite foreign to me.

Strangely enough I was actually on the way to what I had read on the internet was a hipster area. Brooklyn apparently is a byword for cool and hipster. I didn't know that. But so far the only hints came at the beginning of my walk, in Brooklyn Heights. A 'stache and flannel guy, yep, a mid-thirties woman looking bored and sucking on a lollipop ring she had on her finger, yep, but that was it so far. The area described in the article was still staunchly Jewish. Then I saw this:

And this:

And my Shoreditch-sharpened instincts kicked in.

Then I saw a guy with flannel shirt, skinny jeans, converse, and a single-speed bicycle. Clean shaven, though. And as a whole rather student-y looking. But the signs of hipsterdom were definitely increasing. I'll have to investigate this further.

Update: There's apparently a north-south dividing line, the Brooklyn Broadway, north of which hipster territory begins, and which as it turns out is also the spot where above pictures were taken. So this is the spot where the next walk will begin.