I visited Coney Island for the first time this past April. This is a view at dusk from the elevated subway platform.

A cover story of the November issue of Travel & Leisure magazine is “Brooklyn-Bound”. My emphasis added:

I wonder if curious visitors aren’t coming with misplaced expectations. If someone told you Brooklyn is “the next Manhattan,” they got it dead wrong. Brooklyn is nothing like Manhattan. Brooklyn looks and feels and is like no place else.

The first thing you need to know about Brooklyn is that it is huge: New York’s most populous borough, home to nearly a third of its citizens. An independent Brooklyn would be the nation’s fourth-largest city. Brooklyn is a vast metropolis blessed and cursed to lie 500 yards from Manhattan.

The second thing you need to know about Brooklyn is that it is small. Big in breadth and attitude, but intimate in the height of its buildings, the modesty of its storefronts, the compactness of its communities. Defined by the stoop, the bodega, the bocce or basketball court, Brooklyn has an enduring neighborhood-ness. Come to my block next month and they’ll be decking the stoops for Christmas; come in June, and the kids next door will be manning a lemonade stand.
– Brooklyn-Bound, November issue of Travel & Leisure magazine

Or come to my front door tomorrow evening. We stocked up on over 30 pounds of candy over the weekend. Halloween is big in this neighborhood.

Thanks to The Gowanus Lounge for bringing this to my attention.