Everything on the site, by neighbourhood

Twelve pieces across five sections. This page carries all of them.

• Roebling used steel wire when everyone else used ironThe Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 with steel-wire cables, a first at that scale, and a contractor who supplied substandard wire anyway. The bridge carries the extra strands that were added to cover it.
• Emily Roebling ran the bridge for eleven yearsAfter her husband was disabled by caisson disease she carried the engineering to the site, dealt with the trustees, and was first across when it opened.
• The men who dug the foundations came up wrongCompressed-air work under the river caused decompression sickness before anyone understood it. The tower footings are the reason the disease got a name.
• Warehouses became lofts because nobody wanted themThe industrial waterfront emptied, the rents were nothing, and the name was invented by residents to be ugly enough to deter developers.

• Cyrillic on the shopfronts, and a boardwalk behindSoviet Jewish emigration from the 1970s remade the neighbourhood, and the signage, the food shops and the language on the boardwalk followed.
• The train runs over the high streetThe elevated line darkens the avenue and defines it — commerce, noise and shade all arranged around the steel above.

• The Chinatown that grew after the others filledSunset Park's Chinese community formed later than Manhattan's and is largely Fujianese, which shows in the shops and on the menus.
• A private port with its own railwayBush Terminal was an industrial waterfront city — piers, warehouses and rail — and its remains still shape the shoreline.

• Labor Day belongs to the West Indian carnivalThe parade on Eastern Parkway is among the largest in North America and it is a Brooklyn institution with a Trinidadian origin.
• The Dodgers left and the block became apartmentsEbbets Field was demolished in 1960 and the housing that replaced it carries the name. Jackie Robinson's debut there is the reason people still look for it.

• A highway severed it and the isolation preserved itThe Gowanus Expressway and the BQT cut Red Hook off from the rest of Brooklyn, which is why its nineteenth-century street pattern survived.
• A concrete terminal that never really workedThe Red Hook grain terminal was built for a canal trade that had already moved. It has stood empty for most of its life.