Should a visitor to Manhattan really cross the river to explore New Yorks first suburb?
The author says it’s about time. I had to leave. The overstuffed leather, the crystal and china, the pale tourists, the clerks who smile instead of sneer and say “Sir” instead of “Yo”–it was all too incongruous. I grabbed a brochure and scrammed. Thus ended my first visit to the first luxury hotel erected in Brooklyn in decades–the New York Marriott Brooklyn. I’d been looking forward to this moment ever since construction started on the hotel and office structure downtown, near the Brooklyn Bridge. While the exterior is big-box drab, the interior accomplishes its mission: to change my mind–and the world’s–about Brooklyn. Which can’t be easy, for no other locality looms as large in our collective memory as this city-cum-borough of 2 million, the first suburb of and greatest rival to that skyscraper-choked rock across the East River and the largely accidental destination of a centuries-long flow of immigrants. It isn’t just that individual Brooklynites, factual and fictional, from Wa
