When in New York City, visit Brooklyn; when in Brooklyn, visit Brooklyn Heights and stay in one of the luxury hotels Brooklyn that will give you one of the most exciting views of Lower Manhattan, the Stature of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Governors Island and the shipping factories and wharves all along the East River. Brooklyn Heights is the most expensive neighborhood in the outer boroughs and with the newly expanded Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the most beautiful homes in the city, is still considered a good deal.

Back in the 19th century, Brooklyn Heights was considered one of the most aristocratic neighborhoods where the residents set the tone in customs and manners for the elite. Most of the brownstone mansions were homes to the merchants who owned trading ships docked near by. At one time, the piers went back to warehouses with roofs that were planted with real lawns and trees, and formed backyard gardens for the houses situated above them. However, the exclusivity of the Heights was destroyed when the IRT subway opened the neighborhood up to commuters in 1908. This in turn made the elite move on to new heights, leaving the old Victorian mansions and brownstones sort of ‘free-for-all’, attracting artists and writers who partitioned the mansions into studios and apartments.

An interesting side-note about the naming of the streets such as Pineapple, Cranberry, Poplar, Orange and Willow Street, which are directly west of the Brooklyn Bridge, is that during the Civil War, all the streets bore the names of the prominent local families. This perturb a certain Miss Middagh to no end and she showed her disapproval of a few of her neighbors by tearing down the street signs and replacing them with placards bearing botanical titles. The city would replace her signs with the original names, but Middagh would changed them again, this continued until the city gave up and accepted her signs as the official names of the streets, but Miss Middagh’s own family name remained as a street name.

Technorati Tags: irt subway