Brooklyn sets its own terms

During our Manhattan detour, we stopped for a $21 tostada at Cosme in the Flatiron District. Granted, it came from Mexico’s Michelin-starred chef Enrique Olvera and contained sea urchin, but it was certainly an only-in-New-York indulgence.

The next night we ate at Leuca, chef Andrew Carmellini’s new restaurant in the William Vale Hotel in Williamsburg, where the line to get to the hotel’s rooftop bar, in full thrall of the Manhattan skyline, started around 4 p.m. The ground floor restaurant wasn’t an easy reservation either, but the menu was equally exciting — two words: goat fazzoletti — and a full meal came in around $50 a person.

Brooklyn has its own cadre of celebrity chefs lured across the river by lower rents. But it’s not a mini-Manhattan for the budget-minded. It’s its own animal, somehow more inviting and accessible to the 99 percent. Here, the singer Iggy Pop was posing nude for a drawing class when we visited the artfilled Brooklyn Museum and jazz great Ramsey Lewis was performing a free concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard, an expansive, 300-acre patch of waterfront established in 1801 and the birthplace of the USS Maine, now serves as an incubator for startups. We visited the center of green entrepreneurship, hosting everything from a film studio to an eco-manufacturing center and artist studios, on Turnstile Tours’ two-hour trip around the docks ($30) that drew both history buffs and hipsters.

We closed our Brooklyn spree in the aural company of filmmaker Ken Burns, who narrates a new Detour walking tour atop the Brooklyn Bridge ($4.99). He calls it “one of the greatest achievements in human history.” The handsome 1883 suspension bridge was the first to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn by something other than a boat.

The span helped pave the way for Brooklyn’s loss of independence, 15 years later, when it became a part of the larger city. Still, more than a century later, its indie identity is alive and well — and more hospitable than ever.

Elaine Glusac is a freelance writer.