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Brooklyn was a separate city from New York until 1898, when it was consolidated into the five boroughs against significant local opposition. It has spent the century since asserting its distinctiveness from every direction. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 after 14 years of construction, still holds a certain structural grandeur when you walk across it and look back at the Manhattan skyline -- a view that makes a reasonable argument for the bridge being its own attraction. DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), with its cobblestone streets and converted loft buildings, sits below the anchorages and has the best of that view.

The borough is too large and too varied to reduce to a type: Williamsburg is the neighbourhood that became the shorthand for a particular kind of 2000s cultural identity, but it exists alongside Sunset Park's working-class Chinese and Mexican communities, Crown Heights' Caribbean culture, Flatbush's Haitian and Jamaican diaspora, and Brighton Beach's Russian-speaking community (which has given the waterfront strip the name 'Little Odessa').

Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1866 -- the same pair who did Central Park -- is 560 acres of meadow, lake and woodland that locals use with the casual possessiveness of people who don't need to explain why a park is good.