Read All About It: Brooklyn Is Hip

By ANDY NEWMAN

Brooklyn's days as an unsophisticated and unfashionable urban backwater? Over.

Its role as the butt of the greater New York area's jokes? History.

Remember the sad-sack loserville once known primarily for its grating accent and odd foods like knishes and lox? As they say in the borough of churches, “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

It's all right there on the front page of Tuesday's USA Today: Brooklyn has arrived, “reborn as chic Bohemia,” according to the nation's newspaper. Why, the paper notes, residents now say it's “the coolest place in America, a land of rooftop farms and pop-up art galleries, of haircuts, eyeglasses, hats and body piercings so chic that even Parisians utter, ‘Très Brooklyn!'”

While The New York Times has on occasion been late to the party when it comes to what demographers call “hip trends,” the USA Today article has put us on notice that we can no longer afford to ignore the place that the Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz calls “New York's Left Bank.”

“I wanted to live in Brooklyn and Bushwick because I thought it was cool,” the 27-year-old owner of “one of Brooklyn's trendy art studios” says in an accompanying video. “It was where a lot of my friends were living and it was where we could express ourselves freely.”

“I don't have any reason to hit the city anymore” one longtime resident says, using the locals' term for Manhattan (even though Brooklyn is part of the same city!). “I can just walk down the block and have a sandwich or a drink and not pay the Manhattan prices.”

The proximate peg for the article is the imminent opening of the Barclays Center, an arena that will host big-name concerts and the Nets, the borough's first major-league sports team since the Dodgers (“Wait till next year!”) deserted in 1957.

But it's not just the arena, the paper notes. Fr om “artisanal pickles and home-made granola” to streets where “spike-haired, tattooed skateboarders zip past bearded Hassidic Jews,” Brooklyn is “more than back; it's where it never was.”

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