This borough is a happening destination filled with history, fantastic stores and even better restaurants. Take the subway from Manhattan or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn Heights, with more than 600 houses predating the Civil War, was one of New York's first neighborhoods to be designated a landmark district. It's as peaceful as it is beautiful and grand. Stroll the Promenade for magnificent skyline views. The Williamsburg neighborhood has made the transition from hardship and blight to trendy and chic. No longer just a magnet for artistic types, it's a dining and shopping extravaganza, with ultra-cool nightlife and great galleries.
Once-troubled neighborhoods such as Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant have experienced a remarkable economic resurgence, with perhaps 200 active block associations and a dramatically dropping crime rate. The historic district of Stuyvesant Heights remains the premier enclave. Weeksville, an early-19th-century community of free blacks that is believed to have been a stop along the Underground Railroad, has preserved four small houses as a museum. Stunning Victorian mansions and neo-Romanesque brownstones abound in Park Slope, particularly along Montgomery Place. Located just south of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill is also filled with historic mansions and Gothic churches, as well as the Workingman's Cottages on Warren Place (among the first planned low-income housing in the nation when they were built in the 1870s).
