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Brooklyn has played a major role in various aspects of American culture including literature, cinema and theater as well as being home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and to the second largest public art collection in the United States which is housed in the Brooklyn Museum.
Walt Whitman wrote of the Brooklyn waterfront in his classic poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Harlem Renaissance playwright Eulalie Spence taught at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn from 1927 to 1938, a time during which she wrote her critically acclaimed plays Fool's Errand, and Her.
In 1930, poet Hart Crane published the epic poem The Bridge , using the Brooklyn Bridge as central symbol and poetic starting point. The novels of Henry Miller include reflections on several of the ethnic German and Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn during the 1890s and early 20th century; his novels Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion include long tracts describing his childhood and young adulthood spent in the borough.
Betty Smith's 1943 book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and the 1945 film based on it, are among the best-known early works about life in Brooklyn. The tree in the title is the Tree of Heaven.
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly...survives without sun, water, and seemingly earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
— A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Introduction
Chaim Potok, rabbi and Brooklyn resident, wrote The Chosen , a book about two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn that was published in 1947. William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice is set in Flatbush, just off Prospect Park, during the summer of 1947. Arthur Miller's 1955 play A View From the Bridge , and Paule Marshall's 1959 novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, about Barbadian immigrants during the Depression and World War II, are both set in Brooklyn.
More recently, Brooklyn-born author Jonathan Lethem has written several books about growing up in the borough, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. The neighborhood of Park Slope is home to many contemporary writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, Kathryn Harrison, Paul Auster, Franco Ambriz, Nicole Krauss, Colson Whitehead, Darin Strauss, Siri Hustvedt and Suketu Mehta, among others.[ citation needed ]
Brooklyn has played a key role in multiple films of various genres, from the 1917 Fatty Arbuckle comedy Coney Island to the 2011 coming-out film Pariah .
One iconic Brooklyn film is 1945's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn , based on Betty Smith's novel of the same name. It was the first film directed by Greek-American director Elia Kazan, starring James Dunn (who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, and Peggy Ann Garner (who won the Academy Juvenile Award). Around that time other Hollywood films also depicted Brooklyn of that era and milieu, like the dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace .
Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta, a 1977 movie which defined the Disco era in the United States, was set in Bay Ridge, an Italian neighborhood in southern Brooklyn. Working class Jewish communities were depicted in films like 1977's Annie Hall and 1986's Brighton Beach Memoirs .
In the late 1980s, African-American communities in Brooklyn achieved a new cultural prominence with the films of Spike Lee, whose She's Gotta Have It and Do The Right Thing were shot in Brooklyn neighborhoods. Other films in this vein include Straight Out of Brooklyn and Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. . [1] [2]
The nostalgic 2005 film The Squid and the Whale , by Noah Baumbach, examined the family life of the Park Slope intelligentsia. In the 2000s, queer dramas like Shortbus and provocative documentaries like Battle for Brooklyn and Trembling Before G-d also showed then-new facets of Brooklyn. In the 2010s, some mainstream and independent films like The Intern and Obvious Child reflected a more gentrified North Brooklyn.
Brooklyn has been the setting for a variety of television shows, including the 1950s era Honeymooners starring Jackie Gleason, and the 1970s sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter , starring Gabe Kaplan. In the 1980s, The Cosby Show was set in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. In the 1990s, Brooklyn Bridge (about a Jewish American family living in Brooklyn in the middle 1950s) starring Marion Ross aired on CBS.
In the 2010s, a number of shows focused on young, primarily white people in gentrified areas like Williamsburg, including Girls on HBO and 2 Broke Girls on CBS, as well as culturally mixed shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine on NBC.
Additionally, many shows are filmed in Brooklyn even if they are not set there, such as The Good Wife (set in Chicago) and Boardwalk Empire (set in Atlantic City).
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) includes a 2,109-seat opera house, an 874-seat Theater, and the art house BAM Rose Cinemas. Bargemusic and St. Ann's Warehouse are on the other side of Downtown Brooklyn in the DUMBO arts district.
Lynn Nottage's 1995 play Crumbs from the Table of Joy is set in post-World War II Brooklyn and deals with the hopes and frustrations of an African American family recently arrived from Florida. Neil Simon's 1983 play Brighton Beach Memoirs is set in 1937 Brooklyn.
Brooklyn has a thriving contemporary classical music scene led by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, now over 150 years old. [3]
The Brooklyn Jazz Hall of Fame and Museum is located in Brooklyn.
Many pioneers and icons of hip hop were from Brooklyn, like the Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, and the Beastie Boys.
Punk rock pioneers like Patti Smith and The Shirts were based in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Around the turn of the millennium, North Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick developed a major rock scene that incubated bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radio and the Dirty Projectors.
In the early 2000s the Williamsburg neighborhood became a center of electroclash with bands like Fischerspooner and promoter Larry Tee making a local breakthrough with the scene via his Berliniamsburg party at the Luxx Club and the Electroclash Festival in 2001. [4]
The late 2010s saw a resurgence in the borough’s rap scene with the emergence of Brooklyn drill, a fusion of Chicago and UK drill music. Several of the scene’s pioneers, most notably Pop Smoke, are from the southeastern sections of the Brooklyn. The genre has since spread throughout the city and is especially popular with local born black and Latin youth.
The Brooklyn Museum, opened in 1897, the nation's second largest public art museum, includes in its permanent collection more than 1.5 million objects, from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art. The Brooklyn Children's Museum, the world's first museum dedicated to children, opened in December 1899. The only such New York State institution accredited by the American Association of Museums, it is one of the few globally to have a permanent collection - 30,000+ cultural objects and natural history specimens.[ citation needed ]
BRIC Arts' Rotunda Gallery, founded in 1981, is the oldest not-for-profit gallery dedicated to presenting contemporary art work by artists who are from, live, or work in the borough.[ citation needed ]
There are a wide array of architectural styles represented in Brooklyn. The architectural eras and styles range from original Dutch colonial architecture represented by such historic homes as the Hendrick I. Lott House to Dutch Colonial Revival architecture, Art Deco to Post-modern.
Brooklyn is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, behind New York County (Manhattan). Brooklyn is also New York City's most populous borough, with 2,736,074 residents in 2020.
Kreuzberg is a district of Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough located south of Mitte. During the Cold War era, it was one of the poorest areas of West Berlin, but since German reunification in 1990, it has become more gentrified and is known for its arts scene.
Clinton Hill is a neighborhood in north-central Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. It is bordered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the north, Williamsburg to the northeast, Classon Avenue and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the east, Atlantic Avenue and Prospect Heights to the south and southwest and Vanderbilt Avenue and Fort Greene to the west.
The Williamsburg Bridge is a suspension bridge in New York City across the East River connecting the Lower East Side of Manhattan at Delancey Street with the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn at Broadway near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Completed in 1903, it was the longest suspension bridge span in the world until 1924.
Williamsburg is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, bordered by Greenpoint to the north; Bedford–Stuyvesant to the south; Bushwick and East Williamsburg to the east; and the East River to the west. As of the 2020 United States census, the neighborhood's population is 151,308.
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director.
The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.
Boerum Hill is a small neighborhood in the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, bounded by Schermerhorn Street to the north and Fourth Avenue to the east. The western border is variously given as either Smith or Court Streets, and Warren or Wyckoff Streets as the southern edge.
New York City has been described as the cultural capital of the world. The culture of New York is reflected in its size and ethnic diversity. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. Many American cultural movements first emerged in the city. Large numbers of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and ultimately Asian and Hispanic Americans also migrated to New York throughout the 20th century and continuing into the 21st century, significantly influencing the culture and image of New York. The city became the center of modern dance and stand-up comedy in the early 20th century. The city was the top venue for jazz in the 1940s, expressionism in the 1950s and home to hip hop, punk rock, and the Beat Generation. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, is a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, as the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern gay rights movement.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a 1943 semi-autobiographical novel written by Betty Smith.
Brownstone is a brown Triassic–Jurassic sandstone that was historically a popular building material. The term is also used in the United States and Canada to refer to a townhouse clad in this or any other aesthetically similar material.
The building form most closely associated with New York City is the skyscraper, which has shifted many commercial and residential districts from low-rise to high-rise. Surrounded mostly by water, the city has amassed one of the largest and most varied collection of skyscrapers in the world.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a 1945 American drama film that marked the debut of Elia Kazan as a dramatic film director. Adapted by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis from the 1943 novel by Betty Smith, the film focuses on an impoverished but aspirational, second-generation Irish-American family living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in the early 20th century. Peggy Ann Garner received the Academy Juvenile Award for her performance as Francie Nolan, the adolescent girl at the center of the coming-of-age story. Other stars are Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, Lloyd Nolan, Ted Donaldson, and James Dunn, who received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Francie's father.
Bridge Plaza is the northeastern corner of the downtown area of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Its borders are Flatbush Avenue Extension and Manhattan Bridge on the west, Tillary Street on the south, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) on the north and east.
Music Hall of Williamsburg is a New York City venue located at 66 North 6th Street in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The venue is operated by The Bowery Presents, a group stemming from Bowery Ballroom. It has a capacity of 650 people and has shows on most nights of the week.
This is a timeline and chronology of the history of Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's boroughs, and was settled in 1646.
Brooklyn Bowl is a music venue, bowling alley and restaurant in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 2009, it is located in the former Hecla Iron Works Building at 61 Wythe Avenue. It is known for its high-tech green construction and variety of musical acts. In 2013 Rolling Stone named Brooklyn Bowl the 20th best music club in the United States.
Glasslands Gallery was a music venue, dance club and art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Glasslands was founded by Brooke Baxter and Rolyn Hu in 2006, as a relocation of Baxter’s earlier art space in the same building, Glass House Gallery. Hu and Baxter held the lease on the Glasslands space until 2012, when they made a turn key sale to Rami Haykal and Jake Rosenthal of PopGun presents, who had been managing bookings since 2009, and day-to-day operations since 2010. PopGun owned the business and lease for two years, until the venue was displaced to be converted into Vice Media‘s office headquarters. As a concert venue, Glasslands was one of the longest-running of several 2000s independent creative venue spaces in the vicinity of the Williamsburg waterfront, which included 285 KENT, Death By Audio, Secret Project Robot, Monster Island Basement, B.P.M., Live With Animals Gallery, the Rock Star Bar, and many others.
Yoel Goldman is an American real estate developer who founded the Brooklyn, New York-based development company, All Year Management.
Lit Lounge was a nightclub in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The two-floor complex housed a concert venue, lounge, dance floor, and Fuse Gallery, an art exhibition space. Lit Lounge was noted as a major venue for New York City's hipster subculture in the mid- to late 2000s, particularly the indie rock and electroclash scene of the era.