A late-afternoon sun slants through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a reclaimed warehouse café in Williamsburg. The air smells of espresso and sawdust, and the exposed brick walls are decorated with local art and flyers for an upcoming indie film festival.
At a long communal table, a tattooed barista in a vintage band tee guides a Chemex pour-over with monastic focus while two freelance designers huddle over a MacBook, debating fonts for a new app.
In the corner, a dreadlocked DJ sets up vinyl records next to potted succulents, easing the room into a soundtrack of soulful beats. It could be a scene from any creative enclave in the world – Berlin, London, Melbourne – yet this particular alchemy of artisanal coffee, creative energy, and industrial-chic ambiance is unmistakably Brooklyn. The borough once synonymous with gritty docks and working-class neighborhoods has transformed into a global shorthand for cool.
What was once just one of New York City’s five boroughs is now a brand – an international emblem of style, innovation, and cultural cachet. Over the past two decades, “Brooklyn” has evolved into an adjective as much as a place, evoking artisanal foods, vintage fashions, start-up creativity, and a certain je ne sais quoi of urban authenticity.
This report explores how Brooklyn’s local renaissance morphed into a worldwide phenomenon, tracing the borough’s journey from grit to global glory. Along the way, we’ll delve into Brooklyn’s influence on fashion and style, its foodie revolution, the real estate and design boom reshaping its skyline, the rise of tech and creative industries in former factories, and the export of the “Brooklyn aesthetic” to cities across the globe.
We’ll also examine the lightly ironic edge of this success – the gentrification, commercialization, and cultural appropriation that shadow Brooklyn’s fame – mindful of the question: has the hype around Brand Brooklyn put its very soul at risk?
Brooklyn’s Evolution
Brooklyn’s path to brand-hood was far from inevitable. In fact, there was a time not long ago when the name Brooklyn wasn’t cool at all. “When I came here, Brooklyn didn’t have such a great image,” recalls Steve Hindy, who co-founded Brooklyn Brewery in the 1980s.
Many early investors even questioned naming the beer after the borough, doubting “it would play outside of New York”. Back then, Brooklyn was better known for its decaying industrial waterfront and high crime rate than for artisan markets or luxury hotels. It had been an independent city in the 19th century, a proud home to shipyards, factories, and row upon row of brownstone houses built for a rising middle class.
But mid-20th-century deindustrialization hit hard. By 1980, neighborhoods like Williamsburg – today synonymous with hip creativity – were, in the words of one observer, “semi-abandoned, seemingly hopeless” districts of shuttered warehouses and empty lots. Those who could leave did leave: between 1950 and 1980, Brooklyn’s population dropped by nearly half a million, and the borough’s economy stagnated.
And yet, precisely in these unloved pockets of the city, Brooklyn’s modern rebirth was brewing. Cheap rent and big, raw spaces drew pioneers: first came the artists, then the bohemians and misfits in search of community. In the 1970s and ’80s, a wave of young creative types – painters, musicians, writers – began homesteading the North Brooklyn industrial zones.
They were undaunted by the grit (even toxic pollution) of areas like Williamsburg’s Northside, enticed by loft spaces perfect for studios and the edgy romance of cobwebbed factories and defunct breweries. “Word got out: right across the East River was a place with empty and affordable lofts, big enough for art installations,” writes Kay Hymowitz of City Journal, describing those early days.
With them, these urban pioneers brought a spirit of experimentation and a reverence for authenticity – an appreciation for aging brick buildings, hand-crafted goods, and the lively street life of immigrant communities that still dotted Brooklyn’s map.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Brooklyn’s renaissance was in full swing. The crime rate in New York plummeted, making once forbidding streets suddenly trendy and “inviting,” as entrepreneurs clustered in formerly rough areas. A new creative class was staking its claim.
One early trailblazer, chef and restaurateur Andrew Tarlow, opened Diner in 1999 – a tiny restaurant in a derelict 1920s dining car at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. It seemed a crazy gamble at the time (the partners had no business plan and hadn’t even hired a chef when they signed the lease), but the timing was perfect.
Diner’s seasonal, locavore menu and retro-industrial vibe caught the attention of adventurous Manhattanites and earned a glowing review in The New York Times, putting Williamsburg on the culinary map. “Almost immediately, Diner became a key part of the local scene – in fact, it invented the scene, at least in that part of Williamsburg,” Hymowitz notes. Crowds of curious diners ventured across the river to see what was happening in this “forgotten neighborhood” turned creative frontier.
Around the same time, in a similarly scrappy fashion, young designers Lexy Funk and Vahap Avsar started making messenger bags out of discarded canvas found in a dumpster. They stamped their products with a logo of Williamsburg’s skyline and christened their fledgling company Brooklyn Industries, intentionally evoking a bygone factory era. “We wanted it to sound like a steel plant,” Funk later said – a nod to Brooklyn’s industrial past and the authenticity that name connotes.
What began as a hyper-local experiment (selling to friends in the neighborhood) quickly grew into a full-fledged fashion brand, with its website proclaiming that it “fills a void in the clothing market with artistic clothing for urban dwellers”.
Just as with Diner’s success, Williamsburg the place – with its rusted warehouses and freaky artists – was crucial to Brooklyn Industries’ identity and growth. These early success stories signaled a broader truth: Brooklyn’s emerging cultural capital was becoming a selling point in itself.
By the mid-2000s, the narrative of Brooklyn as the place for the creative class was well established. “Brooklyn is an incredibly diverse place and has become a mecca for the creative class in America,” says Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery. His brewery, launched in a former matzo factory in Williamsburg in 1988, went from a risky neighborhood oddity to the ninth-largest craft brewer in the U.S., shipping its hoppy lagers to 30 countries.
Hindy attributes that success partly to what happened here in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn name itself, once seen as a liability, had become an asset: a marker of quality, character, and story. Indeed, to visit Brooklyn Brewery’s tasting room today is to witness the borough’s transformation firsthand – on a typical weekend, some 4,000 visitors pack into the brewery for tours and pints.
Many are tourists on a pilgrimage to what they’ve heard is the birthplace of all things artisanal, eager to taste a bit of the Brooklyn mystique. As Hindy quips, if you travel to just about any city in the world now, locals will proudly point you to their “Brooklyn-like” neighborhood – the greatest compliment a hip district can get.
Thus, seemingly overnight (though decades in the making), Brooklyn morphed from Manhattan’s overshadowed neighbor to a global synonym for urban cool. Media outlets began referring to certain corners of cities as the “New Brooklyn.” By 2015, travel writer Peter Jon Lindberg wryly observed that “the planet now has 3,487 ‘New Brooklyns’” – from Stockholm’s Södermalm (nicknamed “SoFo”) to London’s Shoreditch and Hong Kong’s Tai Ping Shan.
In these comparisons, Brooklyn had transcended geography; it stood for a vibe and a set of values: creative energy, diversity, a DIY entrepreneurial spirit, and an embrace of the local over the corporate. Brooklyn’s brand identity, as one Guardian analysis put it, came to be “characterised by values such as craft, local, individual and small” – the very antithesis of big-box, mass-market culture.
This was catalyzed largely by millennials “rejecting the mainstream, corporate America they grew up with,” seeking authenticity and provenance in everything from food to furniture. A director at a New York marketing agency remarked that the Brooklyn mentality stands for locally sourced production and an intimate scale where “you can trace products from creation to production”.
Ironically, even as Brooklyn’s cachet grew, long-time residents and sociologists noted a creeping homogenization – a “cliché” version of Brooklyn that obscured the borough’s true complexity. The stereotypical image of the “Brooklyn hipster” emerged: tattooed and bearded, riding a fixed-gear bike to a pop-up market, perhaps en route to a rooftop beekeeping workshop.
It’s a caricature, for sure, yet one rooted in the very real influx of creative young people and the businesses that cater to them. Williamsburg, once a warren of derelict factories, suddenly sprouted sleek coffee shops and $30-a-plate bistros in former dive bars.
The neighborhood became, as City Journal described, the “brag-worthy destination for the Condé Nast crowd” – a place where town cars now whisk the almost-famous to gallery openings and boutique hotels, and where Midwestern tourists line up for tastings at Brooklyn Brewery, that now-international brand trading on its home-borough name.
The artists, notably, “are long gone,” Hymowitz writes, having been priced out by the very gentrification they helped spark. This duality – the authentic creative ferment vs. the glossy hipster stereotype – is one of the contradictions at the heart of Brand Brooklyn.
Fashion and Style
One of Brooklyn’s most visible exports is its style – a blend of effortless cool, vintage quirk, and cosmopolitan flair that has influenced fashion far beyond New York. On any given day in neighborhoods like Bushwick or Fort Greene, you’ll see the elements of Brooklyn chic on full display: thrifted denim jackets over bespoke designer dresses, bold eyeglass frames, artisanal leather boots, and plenty of well-tended beards and undercut hairstyles. “Brooklyn style is eclectic.
I feel like people are comfortable wearing anything,” noted Vogue editor Laia Garcia-Furtado while surveying street fashion here. It’s a high-low mix that prizes individual expression – perhaps a natural outgrowth of a borough that houses both orthodox Jewish tailors in South Williamsburg and Afro-Caribbean church-hat boutiques in Crown Heights alongside cutting-edge designers in Dumbo.
The men and women of Brooklyn have become known for “artsy, vintage, and all-around-cool looks,” as Glamour magazine put it , and these looks have percolated into the global style zeitgeist.
In fact, many indie fashion labels that went on to achieve broader fame first gained traction in Brooklyn’s style ecosystem. Brands like Rachel Comey, Ace & Jig, or Catbird Jewelry began by catering to the borough’s creative denizens – artists, writers, musicians – who favored designs that felt personal and handcrafted. “Brooklyn saw them first,” Brooklyn Magazine quipped, highlighting how the borough often incubates trends before they hit Paris or Milan runways.
It’s telling that Brooklyn even launched its own unofficial “Fashion Week” (branded as Fashion Week Brooklyn) to showcase local designers and streetwear creators outside Manhattan’s traditional fashion circuit. The Brooklyn look – think heritage denim, flannel shirts, beanie hats, vintage florals, and statement sneakers – became a staple of hip enclaves worldwide.
By the early 2010s, retailers as mainstream as J.Crew and Barney’s were selling variations of the Brooklyn hipster uniform, from selvedge jeans to handcrafted leather goods, effectively commodifying the aesthetic that had bubbled up from Williamsburg’s flea markets and Bedford Avenue boutiques.
Even the high-fashion elite felt Brooklyn’s pull. In a notable moment of cultural crossover, designer Alexander Wang decided to stage his Fall 2014 runway show not in Manhattan, as per tradition, but at the Brooklyn Navy Yard – in a vast repurposed warehouse turned event space.
The choice scandalized some jet-setting fashion editors (who grumbled about trekking across the East River), but it symbolized a shift: Brooklyn was officially en vogue. Around the same time, legendary Parisian house Dior held a splashy show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well, and Vogue’s Anna Wintour herself began attending Brooklyn gallery parties and benefits.
If Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue represents old-guard luxury, Brooklyn came to represent next-gen style – edgier, more experimental, and rooted in the street. The borough’s influence even shows up on the data charts: Brooklyn’s design sector grew explosively in the 2000s, with the number of fashion and design-related businesses more than doubling (+101%) between 2003 and 2012.
By the mid-2010s, Brooklyn boasted five times more fashion designers than the U.S. average for a city its size – a stunning concentration of talent that helped solidify its reputation as a style capital.
But what truly defines Brooklyn style isn’t just what people wear; it’s the philosophy behind it. It’s the embrace of craftsmanship and story. Stroll through the boutiques of Williamsburg or Red Hook and you’ll find hand-printed graphic tees telling local stories, jewelry made from materials sourced in the neighborhood, vintage pieces lovingly restored, and pop-ups where you can meet the designer making your clothes.
The ethos is encapsulated in Brooklyn Industries’ motto, “Live, Work, Create,” which captures how, for many here, fashion and art are not distant spectacles but an integrated way of life.
Brooklyn’s fashion influencers have made the world see that style can be personal and political – a statement of values. It’s no coincidence that the term “Brooklyn hipster” became shorthand (sometimes mockingly) for a global tribe of young urban creatives known for thrifting, DIY fashion hacks, and a proudly non-mainstream look.
And just as with food or music, the world has lapped up this look-alike Brooklyn aesthetic. From the flea markets of Bangkok to the cafes of Buenos Aires, you’ll spot locals sporting Brooklyn-inspired beards and beanies, plaid shirts and tote bags, in an echo of the borough’s distinctive style.
There is, admittedly, a double-edged sword to this phenomenon. As the Brooklyn look went global, some lamented that it became a caricature – the “sameification of difference,” in Lindberg’s words, where you could hop from Istanbul to Portland to Melbourne and find the same Edison-bulb-lit boutiques selling artisanal soaps and reclaimed wood furniture.
What began as the organic culture of one borough risked turning into a formulaic hipster template. Yet Brooklyn’s true style pioneers continue to push boundaries. Within the borough, you’ll still find vibrant subcultures keeping things fresh: Afrocentric fashion collectives in Bedford-Stuyvesant reinventing 90s streetwear, Caribbean-American designers in Flatbush blending island colors with Brooklyn grit, hijab fashion stylists in Bay Ridge, and Brooklyn’s LGBTQ+ ball scene contributing flamboyant, gender-bending trends.
The real Brooklyn style is as diverse as Brooklyn itself – a reminder that behind the global brand lies a kaleidoscope of cultures and identities far richer than any single stereotype.
Culinary & Craft Beverage Revolution
If Brooklyn has a scent and flavor that have captivated the world, it is undoubtedly the aroma of small-batch roasted coffee, wood-fired pizza, and perhaps a whiff of locally brewed IPA. In the last twenty years, Brooklyn has undergone a culinary renaissance so profound that entire tourism itineraries are built around its food and drink scene.
This borough that gave the world the egg cream and the kosher deli has evolved into an epicenter of farm-to-table restaurants, fusion cuisines, and craft beverages – all while maintaining an emphasis on authenticity and locality that has become part of Brand Brooklyn’s core.
A key chapter of this food revolution began when “artisanal” ceased to be a dirty word and instead became Brooklyn’s calling card. Early pioneers like Andrew Tarlow (of Diner and Marlow & Sons) and the team behind the Brooklyn Flea market helped re-introduce old-fashioned concepts of butchery, baking, and preserving to a modern audience.
In a delicious twist of fate, a once-decaying industrial neighborhood (Williamsburg) spurred a revival of pre-industrial modes of production – think pickles, charcuterie, bread, and bitters made the way your great-grandparents might have recognized. “We make small-batch charcuterie using sustainable meat and fine-dining technique, with a bit of Brooklyn swagger thrown in for good measure,” boasts the website of Brooklyn Cured, one of many local food startups born in this era.
It’s a sentiment that could be the mantra of Brooklyn’s foodie entrepreneurs, from the chocolatiers to the kimchi fermenters. Indeed, the borough’s artisanal explosion has spawned everything from Brooklyn Brine (pickles) to Mast Brothers (chocolate), Kings County Distillery (whiskey) to Brooklyn Soda Works (craft sodas) – each proudly stamping Brooklyn on its label as a mark of pride and quality.
Consider the example of Brooklyn Soda Works. Co-founder Caroline Mak recounts that when they started selling fizzy fruit sodas at a Brooklyn flea market in 2010, naming the company after the borough “was not a calculated move to capitalize on what is now a massive cachet about Brooklyn – we named it that because we aren’t that good at naming things and wanted to be associated with the borough we loved”.
Yet she acknowledges a wider truth: “If you were going to make an ‘artisanal’ product, you would most definitely use Brooklyn in its name”. In Brooklyn’s food universe, provenance is paramount – and nowhere is that more evident than at the markets that have become veritable temples of the local-food movement. Smorgasburg, an outdoor food fair launched in 2011 on the Williamsburg waterfront, exemplifies this spirit.
Every weekend in summer, tens of thousands of people (locals and tourists alike) swarm the stalls to sample an eclectic mix: Jamaican jerk tacos, Tibetan momos, vegan doughnuts, craft kombucha, and the latest Instagram-famous hybrid dessert. As a travel experience, Smorgasburg is as essential as a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge – visitors come to literally taste the melting pot of cultures and creativity that Brooklyn has to offer.
It’s common to overhear a German visitor marveling at Filipino ceviche or a Midwest couple trying their first kombucha – proof that Brooklyn’s culinary influence attracts a global audience. By 2019, in fact, Business Insider noted that Brooklyn’s new luxury hotels like the Williamsburg Hotel and the William Vale were “catering to tourists trading in shopping on Fifth Avenue for eating at Smorgasburg”. Food had become as big a draw as fashion or art, cementing Brooklyn’s reputation as the place for adventurous palates.
Brooklyn’s drink scene has undergone a similar craft renaissance. Coffee, for starters, might as well be its own food group here. The borough embraced third-wave coffee early, with pioneers like Gorilla Coffee and Cafe Grumpy roasting and brewing with obsessive dedication.
To walk into a Brooklyn café is often to witness a near-ritual: baristas carefully weighing out single-origin beans, water poured in slow circles through a filter, latte foam art so perfect it’s a shame to sip. Locals chat about which roaster has the best Ethiopian Yirgacheffe this week, and many cafés double as art galleries or mini-libraries – reinforcing that sense of curated, creative life.
It’s no wonder that Brooklyn Roasting Company became a local favorite and eventually expanded overseas to caffeine-hungry Japan, spreading the gospel of Brooklyn coffee abroad. Craft beer is another realm Brooklyn helped pioneer on the East Coast.
The success of Brooklyn Brewery (now distributing internationally) paved the way for dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs across the borough, each experimenting with bold flavors. A stereotype of Brooklyn’s global image is the bearded hipster downing an IPA at a craft brewery – and indeed, it’s a scene you’ll find in Gowanus taprooms and Greenpoint beer gardens any night of the week.
A reported statistic drives home how far Brooklyn’s craft beverage movement has come: at the turn of the 20th century, there were some 45 brewers operating in Brooklyn’s “Brewer’s Row”.
That faded in the industrial decline, but today a new generation of brewers, distillers, and winemakers are reviving the tradition – from Other Half Brewing’s lines of hazy IPAs that beer geeks worldwide trade cans of, to Red Hook Winery aging wine in repurposed shipping containers by the harbor. Even the non-alcoholic drinks are hip: Brooklyn has boutique soda makers, small-batch coffee sodas, and yes, kombucha taprooms.
Food is culture, and in Brooklyn it interweaves with community and identity. Long before “Brooklyn” was a flavor, the borough was a foodie haven thanks to generations of immigrants – something the global brand narrative can sometimes gloss over. Italian bakeries in Bensonhurst, Jewish appetizing shops in Sheepshead Bay, Caribbean roti shops in Flatbush, Polish pierogi cafés in Greenpoint – these are the culinary bedrock that made Brooklyn synonymous with good eating.
It is precisely that patchwork of food cultures that inspired many of the new wave of chefs. You taste it in the fusion menus: a Korean-American chef in Prospect Heights doing kimchi grilled cheese, or a Mexican-Chinese mashup in Bushwick. The New Brooklyn Cuisine is adventurous but also mindful of traditions.
As food writer and Brooklyn resident Melissa Clark noted, the borough’s restaurants often aim to honor their grandmothers’ recipes and their own creative whims in equal measure (cue the gourmet riff on a Trinidadian curry goat, served with locally farmed greens).
For travelers, Brooklyn’s culinary landscape offers a narrative in every bite. It’s a place where a single day’s itinerary might include artisanal bagels for breakfast in Park Slope (old meets new), a slice of coal-oven pizza in DUMBO with a view of the bridge (iconic New York), a lunch of Ethiopian injera in Kensington (Brooklyn’s immigrant soul), and an avant-garde tasting menu in Williamsburg for dinner (Brooklyn pushing the envelope).
Each experience feels hyper-local, yet collectively they form part of the global fascination with Brooklyn-ness. It’s gotten to the point that far-flung cities now strive to reproduce the feel of a Brooklyn eatery.
As Lindberg joked, you can travel the world and find “the same barrel-aged Negronis, the same distressed chalkboards, the same band The National sound track to remind us of home” – a testament to how Brooklyn’s foodie aesthetic has been exported (for better or worse) everywhere.
Of course, success has its pitfalls. The commercialization of the artisanal ethos worries many of Brooklyn’s original small-scale makers. As Caroline Mak of Brooklyn Soda Works pointed out, the explosion of Brooklyn as a global brand can be “at odds with what makes these businesses quintessentially Brooklyn in the first place: their localism and smallness”.
She and others have felt the squeeze of rising rents; the very popularity of “Made in Brooklyn” has driven up costs in Brooklyn. “Even the outer boroughs are way more expensive than locating a brewery in, say, Pennsylvania,” Mak notes, pondering whether her company can sustainably stay when their lease is up. And as independent shops struggle with gentrified real estate, big corporations have swooped in to capitalize on the Brooklyn cachet.
In one telling example, PepsiCo launched a soda called Caleb’s Kola that mimicked a craft cola – from the story on its label to the retro-chic logo – so convincingly that you “could easily mistake it for a small, independent Brooklyn brand,” observes Joey Dembs, the marketing director. “
As soon as big brands realize there is money to be made by leveraging that Brooklyn brand, it becomes a caricature of what it once was,” Dembs warns. Yet he adds that amid the hype, “there is still good in Brooklyn – people who are campaigning for what it stands for and trying to keep [the] soul of the area”.
In the food scene, that might mean chefs doubling down on community initiatives (like hiring locally or running pay-what-you-can cafes) or makers forming cooperatives to resist being bought out. The soul of Brooklyn’s culinary revolution lies in genuine passion and community roots – something that, hopefully, no amount of global hype can completely dilute.
The “Brooklynization” of Space
No discussion of Brooklyn’s rise is complete without examining the physical transformation of the borough – the real estate boom, urban design innovations, and the very look of the streetscape that have both resulted from and fueled Brooklyn’s cultural ascent.
In the past 20 years, Brooklyn’s skyline and neighborhoods have undergone a dramatic facelift, symbolizing its journey from overlooked outskirts to must-live destination.
This physical change is part of Brooklyn’s brand story: the charming tree-lined brownstone blocks, the converted warehouses with murals, the trendy hotels and rooftop bars with Manhattan skyline views. These are the stages on which the Brooklyn lifestyle plays out, and they’ve proven irresistible both to new residents and outside admirers.
Rewind to the mid-20th century: Brooklyn’s built environment was characterized by flight and neglect. Beautiful 19th-century brownstones in areas like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights were subdivided or crumbling, industrial sites lay contaminated and empty.
Starting in the 1960s and 70s, however, a wave of urban homesteaders – often called “brownstoners” – began reclaiming and restoring Brooklyn’s historic housing stock. These were the original gentrifiers: artists, academics, and young professionals (many from Manhattan or beyond) who saw potential in Brooklyn’s old neighborhoods. “It was part of the counterculture movement of the time,” explains Thomas Campanella, an urban studies professor and author of Brooklyn: The Once and Future City.
The Woodstock generation “wanted something other than corporate America,” and they found it in Brooklyn’s cheap, grand homes and sense of community. In 1968, one visionary couple famously bought a Carroll Gardens brownstone for $28,000 – about $230,000 in today’s dollars – a steal even then. (For perspective, that same home was reportedly valued around $6.75 million in 2018.)
These early gentrifiers, often with limited funds but plenty of sweat equity, “bought up old buildings and put their sweat into restoring them,” Campanella notes. They displaced some working-class and minority residents in the process – laying the groundwork for Brooklyn’s later notoriety as a “poster-child for gentrification in America”.
Fast-forward to the 2000s, and Brooklyn’s real estate boom truly kicked into overdrive. After 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession, waves of younger New Yorkers (older millennials and Gen Xers) decided that Manhattan had become untenable – too expensive, too corporate, too cramped for starting families.
Brooklyn, by contrast, offered relative affordability, space, and a vibe that felt more like a community than a concrete jungle. “Moving to Brooklyn has always been a milestone for the young New Yorker,” writes Business Insider, describing how millennials in the 2010s saw Brooklyn as the place “where you could see yourself living for the long term,” with more of a neighborhood feel. Nicole Beauchamp, a luxury real estate advisor, noted that for many young buyers, “it was easier for them to buy a condo in Brooklyn and have a decent amount of space” than to attempt the Manhattan market.
Developers eagerly met this demand. The 2010s kicked off a luxury development boom in Brooklyn that continues to this day. High-rise condos and rental towers sprouted in Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg; amenities like rooftop pools, coworking lounges, and artisanal coffee in the lobby became common, as if each new building were trying to encapsulate the Brooklyn brand for its residents.
Some hallmark projects gave tangible shape to Brooklyn’s new identity. The old Domino Sugar Refinery site on the Williamsburg waterfront, for example, has been transformed into Domino Park – a public park with playgrounds and gardens, retaining some of the refinery’s original steel girders as industrial art, flanked by sleek new glass apartment towers.
It’s a blend of old and new that feels quintessentially Brooklyn: honoring heritage while embracing modern urban design. Over in Prospect Heights, the arrival of Barclays Center in 2012 – a strikingly modern arena of glass and weathered steel that’s home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets – announced that Brooklyn was now a player on the world stage, capable of hosting Jay-Z concerts and NBA All-Star games. (When the New Jersey Nets relocated and rebranded as the Brooklyn Nets, even their merchandise – caps and jerseys emblazoned simply with a stark “BROOKLYN” – became a global fashion statement, further spreading the borough’s name.)
Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, once America’s premier shipbuilding facility and later a rusting relic, has been reborn as a hub for tech startups, film studios, and even high-end fashion manufacturing (like Steiner Studios and a new Wegmans supermarket alongside boutique factories).
The Yard’s historic dry docks and cranes stand as backdrops to its modern coworking spaces and tech incubators – again, that juxtaposition of heritage and innovation that defines Brooklyn’s visual and cultural brand.
Architecturally, Brooklyn’s gentrification favored an “industrial-chic” aesthetic that has since spread globally. Exposed brick walls, reclaimed wood, and Edison lightbulbs became de rigueur not just in cafés and boutiques but even in apartment interiors.
Many of Brooklyn’s new or renovated buildings deliberately incorporate design elements that echo the area’s industrial past – a kind of built-in authenticity. One can see this trend echoed in “Brooklyn-style” bars and apartments around the world: a bit of rawness amid the polish, a sliding barn door here, a vintage filament bulb there.
Shoreditch in London, the M50 art district in Shanghai, Kreuzberg in Berlin – all have been “Brooklynized” to some degree, with developers and designers taking cues from Brooklyn’s loft conversions and creative reuse of spaces.
Crucially, urban planners in Brooklyn have also emphasized public space and sustainability, reinforcing the brand’s positive associations. The creation of the Brooklyn Greenway, a waterfront bike-and-pedestrian path linking neighborhood parks, or the expansion of plazas and bike lanes in areas like Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg, align with the image of Brooklyn as a progressive, livable urban environment.
These efforts have not gone unnoticed abroad. Cities from Seoul to Paris have sent delegations to study Brooklyn’s parks and placemaking strategies. The Outlook Travel tourism magazine reported Brooklyn’s own officials saying, “Our next step is leveraging the Brooklyn brand globally by working with foreign delegates, having held 38 delegations so far”.
In other words, not only has Brooklyn’s look been exported, but Brooklyn’s approach to urban revival – rehabilitating old infrastructure, fostering mixed-use communities, promoting local businesses – is being treated as a model worldwide.
Of course, the flipside of rising real estate fortunes is the loss of affordability and displacement of long-time residents – issues every bit as much a part of Brooklyn’s story as the shiny new condos.
By 2019, the average rent for a Brooklyn studio had climbed to around $2,300, up significantly from just a few years prior. Neighborhoods that were historically working-class Black or Latino enclaves, like Crown Heights and Bushwick, saw an influx of white college graduates and a concurrent exodus of some of their established communities.
Even members of the original “brownstoner” gentrification wave from the 1960s found themselves priced out by the 2000s, as a New Brooklyn elite (often finance or tech professionals) moved in. This process, painful and complex, tempers the success narrative with an awareness of who gets to partake in Brand Brooklyn’s benefits. As one professor noted, the current wave of Brooklyn’s popularity is “a reflection of the gentrification of global cities.
Across the world, lower income and middle class people are being priced out of what used to be their own neighborhoods”. Brooklyn is a prime example – a victim of its own allure. The brand that lured in the world also inevitably drove up demand and costs on local soil.
Yet, in true Brooklyn fashion, even the fight against hyper-gentrification has spawned creative activism: from community land trusts aiming to keep housing affordable, to murals decrying “Greed” on luxury developments, to podcasts like “There Goes the Neighborhood” dissecting the changes.
The awareness of what’s lost amid the gains is very much part of the Brooklyn conversation – and indeed part of its brand, too, in the sense that Brooklyn’s global reputation isn’t just about hip markets and fashionistas, but also about a borough that is self-reflective and occasionally critical of its own transformations. A lightly critical edge permeates many Brooklynites’ pride, an acknowledgement that preserving the borough’s authentic, diverse character is an ongoing challenge.
Tech and Creative Industries
Beyond artisanal pickles and fixed-gear bikes, Brooklyn’s ascent has also been propelled by a boom in technology and creative industries. In the past decade, the borough has cultivated a thriving startup ecosystem and media industry presence that reinforce its image as an innovation hotspot.
If the stereotype of Silicon Valley is suburban tech campuses and Manhattan’s is Wall Street high-rises, Brooklyn’s equivalent might be the sun-drenched loft office with exposed beams and a skyline view, full of coders in sneakers and producers editing video with cold brew coffee on tap.
This sector has further diversified Brooklyn’s economy and given young creatives a reason to both live and work here – a significant shift from the days when Manhattan monopolized all the city’s cutting-edge jobs.
Take a stroll through DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and you’ll quickly sense the energy of Brooklyn’s tech scene. Once a cluster of derelict warehouses, DUMBO in the 2010s became ground zero for startups and digital agencies. In fact, Built In NYC reports that DUMBO now hosts more tech companies than any other neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Major tech players established beachheads here early: Etsy, the online handmade marketplace that epitomizes Brooklyn’s crafty-tech crossover, set up its headquarters in Dumbo, embracing the mantra of connecting small artisans to global buyers. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, launched in a tenement building in Greenpoint, channeling the creative community spirit into entrepreneurial finance.
The maker movement had a champion in MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based startup that became a leader in 3D printing technology and even opened a factory in the borough (a sort of modern echo of Brooklyn’s manufacturing past, but producing high-tech printers).
And in media, Vice Media – the trendsetting, millennial-focused news and entertainment company – famously moved its headquarters into a cavernous Williamsburg warehouse, growing into a global brand while broadcasting a distinctly edgy, Brooklyn-born sensibility.
The cumulative impact of these companies was enormous: they drew in thousands of tech workers, designers, and creatives who not only contributed to Brooklyn’s vibe but also boosted its economic clout. A 2019 report by the Center for an Urban Future found that Brooklyn’s tech startup sector saw 356% growth between 2008 and 2018 – the fastest in the U.S. after San Francisco.
In concrete terms, Brooklyn went from roughly 264 tech startups to over 1,200 in that decade. “Companies or founders of startups are attracted to the incredible talent pool that exists there,” explained Jonathan Bowles, the Center’s director. He added that “there’s just a lot of creative and entrepreneurial energy in Brooklyn right now”.
Indeed, Brooklyn’s share of NYC’s tech firms (about 9.2% of them) is still modest compared to Manhattan’s, but it’s more than six times the combined total of Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. In fields like digital media, e-commerce, and design, Brooklyn has a particularly high concentration of companies.
One reason for this growth is that Brooklyn became a talent magnet. The borough’s lifestyle and relative affordability (at least vs. Manhattan or Silicon Valley) attracted a young, educated workforce. Many of those 20- and 30-somethings moving to Brooklyn with creative degrees began launching freelance careers, startups, or joining local tech firms, preferring a short bike ride to a Dumbo coworking space over a suit-and-tie commute into Midtown.
Local universities also adapted: NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering (in Downtown Brooklyn) and institutions like Pratt Institute started churning out more entrepreneurs and coders, often with programs specifically encouraging students to found companies in Brooklyn’s emerging “Tech Triangle” (Dumbo, Downtown, Navy Yard).
The Brooklyn Navy Yard, in fact, now includes a tech incubator and hosts dozens of hardware and green-tech startups, blending advanced manufacturing with Brooklyn’s artisanal ethos (one can find startups there making everything from solar panels to craft whiskey).
The creative industries beyond pure tech – such as film/TV production, music, publishing, and design – have also flourished. Steiner Studios at the Navy Yard is one of the largest film production facilities outside Hollywood, drawing major film and television shoots to Brooklyn. The hit Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” for example, was filmed at a Brooklyn studio, as have been portions of many Marvel movies.
The music scene, long a Brooklyn hallmark (remember, this is home to Jay-Z and where Biggie Smalls grew up), expanded in new directions with indie labels, recording studios, and venues supporting genres from experimental rock to Afrobeat. It’s often said that an aspiring novelist in America has two paths: get an MFA or move to Brooklyn – a half-joke reflecting the borough’s density of writers and editors.
Indeed, Brooklyn has become a writers’ haven; by the 2010s it was “repulsive with novelists – it’s cancerous with novelists,” as native author Jonathan Lethem quipped with dark humor. Publishing houses like Melville House set up shop in Brooklyn, and countless magazines and digital media outlets (from The L Magazine to Vice to Slate’s Brooklyn office) established themselves here to tap into the creative buzz.
This concentration of creative talent creates feedback loops: tech entrepreneurs mingle with graphic designers and DJs at networking events in Bushwick; app developers partner with fashion designers they met at a Bedford Avenue café to launch a new e-commerce venture.
The whole scene is interdisciplinary, very much in line with Brooklyn’s culture of collaboration. The motto of “Live, Work, Create,” visible in murals and on tote bags, encapsulates how in Brooklyn the boundaries between life, art, and commerce blur productively.
A graphic designer might run a popular foodie Instagram on the side; a coder might DJ at night; a writer might open a small bookstore that doubles as an event space. Brooklyn fosters these hybrid careers and creative side-hustles, which in turn spawn new cultural products and startups.
For travelers and cultural observers, Brooklyn’s creative economy is part of the draw. Tech conferences and creative festivals have started choosing Brooklyn as their venue, rather than Manhattan.
The Northside Festival, launched in Williamsburg, combined tech talks, art installations, and music performances, billing itself as “Brooklyn’s answer to SXSW (South by Southwest).” And it fits: people come not just to see the skyline or eat the food, but to experience this hum of innovation and artistry on the ground.
Visiting the co-working spaces of Williamsburg or the art-tech labs of Gowanus can feel like a glimpse into the future of work and culture – albeit one painted in the requisite Brooklyn palette of exposed brick and graffiti art.
The global impact of Brooklyn’s creative industry boom is evident in how other cities attempt to cultivate similar ecosystems. It’s not uncommon to hear of a “Shoreditch Tech City” in London or “Silicon Allee” in Berlin, with urban planners explicitly modeling on Brooklyn’s mix of live/work neighborhoods that attract the creative class.
A perhaps unintended export of Brand Brooklyn, then, is the idea that old industrial cities can reinvent themselves as innovation hubs without losing their soul. It’s the narrative of Pittsburgh, Detroit, and others – sometimes dubbed the “Brooklynization” of former manufacturing centers.
Brooklyn provided a high-profile case study: it proved that creative folks will flock to an area that offers authenticity and community, and that economic revitalization can spring from the arts and small startups as much as from giant corporations.
However, the presence of a thriving tech sector in Brooklyn also raises questions about identity. Does a tech CEO sipping a $6 latte in Dumbo still embody the true Brooklyn spirit? Or is the borough at risk of simply becoming a cheaper (well, formerly cheaper) extension of Manhattan’s Silicon Alley? To some, the fact that more Brooklyn residents now work in tech or creative fields than in traditional blue-collar jobs marks a profound shift from the borough’s working-class roots.
Brooklyn is “a place where the Creative Class lives rather than works,” noted one study in 2018, pointing out that a high percentage of Brooklyn’s creative professionals actually commute to Manhattan or elsewhere for their jobs. That is changing, but it underscores that Brooklyn’s identity is multifaceted: it’s both the artisanal cheese shop and the VR (virtual reality) startup; the punk dive bar and the glossy design showroom.
The challenge and opportunity for Brooklyn has been integrating these layers – allowing the new industries to thrive while maintaining the character birthed by older ones. So far, the borough has managed a delicate balance, and in doing so, it has crafted a narrative of urban reinvention that resonates globally.
The Global Export of “Brooklyn”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Brooklyn’s rise as a global brand is seeing how Brooklyn travels – that is, how the idea of Brooklyn has been exported, imitated, and appropriated in far-flung places. In the same way that Hollywood movies shaped global notions of American life, Brooklyn’s cultural output and aura have sparked a kind of Brooklyn fever around the world.
From Tokyo to Paris to Dubai, establishments proudly sporting the Brooklyn name or recreating its ambiance have popped up, catering to those who crave a slice of its cool, creative vibe. The result is a diaspora of “Brooklyn-themed” businesses and neighborhoods – some authentic offshoots, others arguably more pastiche – that testify to the borough’s outsized cultural influence.
One can travel thousands of miles and unexpectedly stumble into Brooklyn. Walk into Zeplin Pub in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district, for instance, and you might feel a flash of déjà vu: exposed brick walls, a killer craft beer list heavy on IPAs, a crowd of young creatives in flannels.
A Turkish friend might recommend it specifically because it feels “just like East Williamsburg” – and indeed, they serve Brooklyn Lager by the bottle as a house staple. In Condé Nast Traveler, Peter Jon Lindberg recounted this very experience, marveling (and slightly cringing) that he had come all the way to Istanbul only to end up somewhere channeling his home borough.
It’s a prime example of what he dubs the “Brooklynization of the world” – the way a few hipster enclaves (Brooklyn, Portland, Silver Lake, etc.) have set a now-global standard for style, leading travelers to find carbon copies of the same aesthetic in bar after bar, city after city.
Nowhere has the Brooklyn mystique been embraced more enthusiastically than in Paris. The French have had a love affair with “le Brooklyn” for the better part of a decade now. In the mid-2010s, trend pieces abounded about young Parisians swapping their Rive Droite addresses for edgy apartments in the 11th or 10th arrondissements, decorated with Edison bulbs and indie music posters, claiming they were cultivating a Brooklyn-like atmosphere.
Parisians opened cafés and bars with names like Brooklyn Café and Bob’s Bake Shop (run by a New Yorker) serving bagels and kale salads to earnest devotees of American hipster cuisine.
In 2015, the venerable department store Le Bon Marché went so far as to host a grand expo called “Brooklyn Rive Gauche,” essentially turning part of its Left Bank store into a celebration of all things Brooklyn. They flew in actual Brooklyn artisans and vendors – from jam makers to designers – to stock the shelves.
The press release for the exhibition gushed over Brooklyn as the “starting point of the American Dream,” associating it with everything from the homemade to the organic, bohemian, and even meditation. A spokesperson for Le Bon Marché explained that they chose Brooklyn (instead of New York City as a whole) because “Brooklyn has a distinct enough style and culture that Parisians and the rest of the world have really taken an interest in.”
Brooklyn, she said, has a “raw, authentic New York feel” – the factories, the hard-working people – which they viewed as the “real New York,” in contrast to Manhattan’s glitz. It’s striking to hear a Parisian luxury store essentially valorize Brooklyn’s gritty, working-class legacy as chic – a true full-circle moment for the borough that once was dismissed by Manhattan elites.
The Brooklyn trend in Paris extended beyond retail. Stroll through the Marais or Canal Saint-Martin areas, and you’d find Folks and Sparrows, a café created by a Parisian who spent a decade in Brooklyn, complete with Mason jars and avocado toast. Or Brooklyn Brewery’s beers turning up in Parisian bars.
A wine bar literally named “Brooklyn” exists on rue Charlot. Parisian DJs sport Brooklyn Lager t-shirts and bushy beards, adopting what they imagine to be the quintessential Brooklyn look. This fervor hasn’t been without its critics; some French observers call it a “fake Brooklyn” – a surface imitation that misses Brooklyn’s true diversity.
Vice magazine’s Paris correspondent noted as early as 2013 that “Brooklyn” was becoming synonymous with “trendy” in France, a catch-all label for beards, tattoos, and organic coffee shops. It’s a narrow (and rather ironic) view, considering Brooklyn’s deep well of cultures – from Caribbean to Russian to Hasidic Jewish – that have little to do with artisanal coffee.
Michael Kurtz, a Brooklyn entrepreneur whose Mike’s Hot Honey (a chili-infused honey) was featured in the Bon Marché exhibit, remarked that the Parisian Brooklyn craze was “a narrow view” that glossed over the immigrant and diverse communities that make Brooklyn truly special.
Still, he said, to be chosen to represent Brooklyn in Paris was “a true honor” – evidence of how powerful the Brooklyn brand had become that French gourmands saw it as a mark of quality.
Meanwhile, across the globe in Tokyo, Brooklyn mania also took hold, though often in quirky, whimsical ways. A notable example is Brooklyn Parlor, a hybrid bookshop-café-bar tucked under a shopping mall in Shinjuku, filled with an eclectic mishmash of vintage furnishings and creative bric-à-brac.
It’s the brainchild of Japanese tastemakers who wanted to bottle the feeling of a Brooklyn hangout spot – and indeed it serves pulled pork sandwiches, American craft beer, and hosts live music, all under shelves of second-hand books (a scene that could be straight out of Williamsburg).
In Tokyo’s Harajuku district, there’s a Brooklyn Pancake House serving fluffy American-style pancakes to eager youth. There’s even a Japanese leather goods brand cheekily named Brooklyn Museum (no relation to the actual museum) that sells high-end bags – trading on the cachet of the Brooklyn name for a bit of urban cool.
One Tokyo restaurateur, Makoto Asamoto, took a more nuanced approach: after living briefly in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, he was so enchanted that he opened a restaurant in Tokyo named Fort Greene.
He didn’t plaster Brooklyn in the name, but the restaurant’s atmosphere – with dried flowers, unvarnished wood tables, soul and ska records playing – is his personal homage to the “funky New York neighborhood he loves”. “I wanted this place to have the same mood I felt in the cafes around Fort Greene,” Asamoto says. “My food is mostly French, but the restaurant itself is my interpretation of Brooklyn”. The fact that a Japanese chef would go to such lengths to capture the feeling of Brooklyn speaks volumes about the borough’s symbolic power.
Elsewhere, one finds a “Brooklyn Coffee” in London, a Brooklyn Bar in Stockholm’s Södermalm, a Brooklyn Brewery outpost in Stockholm as well (Sweden has been particularly smitten, with Stockholm’s Hornstull neighborhood often compared to Williamsburg).
In Dubai, of all places, there’s a Brooklyn-inspired pizza joint and even a Brooklyn Cotton Candy Company – proving that even in the gleaming, hyper-modern UAE, the idea of Brooklyn’s homey, retro cool has an audience.
Germany has a Brooklyn Soap Company selling male grooming products with a hip, small-batch image, and a boutique hotel in Berlin attached to a steakhouse simply called The Brooklyn. In Hamburg, a Brooklyn Burger Bar goes all-in with wrought iron decor and cocktails named after Biggie Smalls songs – though amusingly, a British tourist’s review called it the “closest you will find to an English pub in Hamburg,” revealing how cross-culturally tangled these interpretations can get.
This global proliferation of Brooklyn-branded or Brooklyn-esque establishments has become so widespread that Brooklyn’s own Chamber of Commerce took notice.
In 2016, seeing so many companies abroad liberally using the Brooklyn name, the borough launched a “Made in Brooklyn” certification mark to authenticate products actually produced in Brooklyn. “So many companies across the world were saying ‘Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn,’” said Carlo Scissura, the Chamber’s president. “Our feeling was that there are actual companies based in Brooklyn, making, creating and hiring in Brooklyn that we needed to focus on”.
In other words, amid Brooklyn fever, they sought to protect the integrity of the brand at home and ensure the benefits accrued to local businesses, not just those cashing in on the name abroad.
For travelers encountering Brooklyn afar, the experience can be both comforting and disconcerting. On one hand, it’s a testament to New York City’s soft power that a single borough’s ethos can be replicated globally. Brooklyn has become a sort of filter through which people around the world reimagine urban culture – if you’re a young entrepreneur or artist in a faraway city, calling your café or gallery “Brooklyn” is shorthand for creativity, authenticity, and trendiness.
It signals to customers: expect a certain vibe here. On the other hand, as Lindberg articulated, this trend can reduce the rich tapestry of global travel into a “supremely narrow definition of interestingness” – where every cool neighborhood starts to feel the same. When “offbeat” goes mass-market and every city’s hip quarter offers the same latte art and indie playlists, one might wonder if the world is losing some of its delightful variety.
Yet, despite that critique, Brooklynization shows no signs of stopping. If anything, it has evolved. We’re now seeing second-order phenomena: places like Seoul’s Seongsu-dong or Mexico City’s Juárez being dubbed “the Brooklyn” of those cities, each with their local twists.
The world “Brooklyn” has entered the lexicon as a concept. In travel writing, it’s become cliché (and editors likely groan) to compare any grungy-cool area to Brooklyn, but writers still do it – because readers immediately grasp the reference. In a sense, Brooklyn has joined the ranks of cultural metonyms like “Parisian” or “Soho” or “Silicon Valley” – words that instantly convey a bundle of attributes beyond the literal place.
Keeping the Soul in a Branded Brooklyn
As the evening deepens back in Williamsburg, the café’s patrons begin to pack up MacBooks and drift toward the door, perhaps headed to one of the neighborhood’s countless new restaurants or an old dive bar that miraculously survived the waves of change.
The warm light from inside spills onto the sidewalk, where snippets of different languages can be heard – a group of Italian tourists snapping selfies, a pair of Londoners discussing their Brooklyn Brewery tour, a born-and-raised Brooklynite walking his dog, eyeing the scene with a mix of pride and perplexity.
This is Brooklyn in 2025: a place that is at once very local and thoroughly global. The world rushes in to experience it, even as Brooklyn’s own creatives rush out to spread its gospel.
In many ways, Brooklyn’s transformation from a provincial borough to a global brand is a triumph of urban revival. It’s the story of how a community’s grassroots creativity and grit captured the imagination of the world. It demonstrates the power of local culture in an era of globalization – how being true to one’s neighborhood can inadvertently resonate with distant strangers seeking something real in an increasingly virtual, homogeneous world.
Brooklyn gave those seekers an image of the authentic: an old man’s stoop in Bed-Stuy, a block party in July with hydrants spraying, a tattooed baker selling sourdough at the farmers market, a skyline view from a rooftop where artists sip locally brewed beers under the stars. It’s romantic, yes, and not the whole story, but it’s a compelling story.
Yet, as with any brand built on authenticity, the risk is always commodification. When every other city district is branded “the Brooklyn of ___,” when multinational companies co-opt Brooklyn cool to sell soda or soap, when tour buses roll through Bushwick’s street-art blocks and Airbnb investors snap up Greenpoint lofts – the question arises: does Brooklyn lose by winning? Is the Brooklyn that the world fell in love with – diverse, raw, unpretentious – in danger of dissolving into the very sameness it once stood apart from?
The people most intimately aware of this tension are Brooklynites themselves. There’s an oft-cited saying here: “Brooklyn is not a trend, it’s a community.” Many longtime residents greet the hype with a mix of amusement and wariness. They’re quick to note that Brooklyn’s cultural riches predate the hipster era and extend far beyond the cafés of Williamsburg.
They’ll remind you that the real Brooklyn is also the West Indian families of Flatbush, the Orthodox Jewish quarters of Borough Park, the Chinese and Arab immigrant entrepreneurs in Sunset Park, the legacy of Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy and the poetry of Walt Whitman, the pride of Coney Island’s boardwalk and the Brooklyn Dodgers (whose departure in 1957 was the last time Brooklyn was so globally discussed – until now).
In other words, the soul of Brooklyn is deeper than the brand. And indeed, it’s often those very communities that give Brooklyn its resilience and character even as trends ebb and flow around them.
Even among the newcomers and the creative class that fueled Brand Brooklyn, there is a conscious effort to maintain integrity. There’s an awareness that gentrification is a double-edged sword. As one young entrepreneur put it, “We want to be part of the neighborhood, not replace it.”
This sentiment is evident in initiatives like local hiring programs, cultural festivals that celebrate older traditions (the West Indian Day Parade, the Feast of Giglio in Williamsburg’s Italian community), and in the fierce debates at community board meetings over zoning and development. The narrative of Brooklyn as a global brand isn’t simply one of unfettered boosterism; it’s also self-critical.
The borough’s best ambassadors are those who can acknowledge, with a lightly critical edge, the ironies of Brooklyn’s commercial success. They’ll joke about the $15 artisan mayonnaise or the absurdity of a luxury condo where a factory once stood – but they’ll also fight to ensure a food co-op or a community garden survives the next rent spike.
In literature and art, you see Brooklyn wrestling with this very identity. Many contemporary “Brooklyn novels” and films touch on gentrification and authenticity. The HBO series “Girls”, which premiered in 2012 and was often credited (or blamed) for glamorizing the life of 20-something strivers in Greenpoint, ultimately presented a warts-and-all view of how clumsy and self-aware the hipster generation could be.
Spike Lee famously ranted about the “Christopher Columbus Syndrome” in Fort Greene, lamenting that new residents were acting like they discovered a place that had long existed with rich Black culture. Such voices ensure that the conversation around Brooklyn remains honest. As Brooklyn becomes more global, these voices call it back to its roots, keeping it – one hopes – from floating off into pure commodification.
In the end, Brooklyn’s journey from local to global is a fascinating case study in 21st-century urban evolution. For travelers, to visit Brooklyn today is to see a place that is making and remaking itself in real time – a dynamic, living city within a city, grappling with how to stay true to itself even as it becomes a beacon to others.
You can sip the coffee, wear the Brooklyn-branded tote, and take that selfie under the Brooklyn Bridge, but to really know Brooklyn you have to talk to its people, dig into its layered neighborhoods, and appreciate the history behind the hype. Brooklyn invites you to do just that.
As I step out of the Williamsburg café into the twilight, the Manhattan skyline gleams across the river, a reminder that for all Brooklyn’s newfound independence, its fate is still intertwined with the metropolis it anchors. A nearby mural catches my eye – bold letters declaring: “Spread Love, It’s the Brooklyn Way.”
It’s a famous line from the late Notorious B.I.G., one of Brooklyn’s own, and it strikes me as fitting. Because beyond the brands and buzz, what Brooklyn really spread to the world was a love – a love of craftsmanship, of community, of authenticity, of possibility.
And that, more than any logo on a T-shirt or any theme café abroad, is the true legacy of the Brooklyn brand. It’s an invitation to anyone, anywhere: come as you are, create something new, and be part of the story. That spirit, at least, will always be in style in Brooklyn, New York – and far, far beyond.
