Cobbled streets, converted warehouses and the single most photographed view in Brooklyn — the Manhattan Bridge framed between two buildings on Washington Street.
The name
An acronym coined in the 1970s — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — reportedly by residents hoping something that ugly would put developers off. It did not work.
The neighbourhood was Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront: warehouses, the Brillo factory, Robert Gair’s cardboard box works, and the ferry landing that connected Brooklyn to Manhattan before the bridges. The Belgian block paving and the loading bays are original.
The photograph
Stand on Washington Street between Water and Front. Looking uphill, the Manhattan Bridge tower is framed exactly between the two brick warehouses, and on a clear day the Empire State Building sits in the gap under the arch.
It is one of the most photographed spots in New York and there is often a queue and a wedding shoot. Early morning is the only quiet time. It is a live street with traffic on it, which people forget while composing.
What else is here
Jane’s Carousel, a restored 1922 carousel in a glass pavilion by Jean Nouvel, right on the water.
Brooklyn Bridge Park runs from here south, with the piers, the beach and the Granite Prospect view.
Empire Stores, a converted coffee warehouse, holds Time Out Market on its upper floors with a roof terrace, plus shops and a small free exhibition on the neighbourhood’s history in the courtyard.
The Archway under the Manhattan Bridge anchorage hosts markets and events.
Powerhouse Arena is a good independent bookshop with a event programme.
St Ann’s Warehouse, in a converted tobacco warehouse, is one of the best theatres in New York for adventurous work.
Brooklyn Heights
Up the hill to the south-west, and the contrast is total: America’s first designated historic district, with brownstones from the 1820s onward on quiet leafy streets.
The Brooklyn Heights Promenade is a cantilevered walkway over the expressway with the best framed view of Lower Manhattan anywhere. Free, always open, and considerably calmer than anything at water level.
Plymouth Church on Orange Street was Henry Ward Beecher’s, a station on the Underground Railroad, and Lincoln worshipped in it twice.
The walk from the Promenade down Montague Street and back to the water takes twenty minutes and is one of the better short walks in the city.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.