We always find articles in foreign publications about Brooklyn particularly amusing. So it is with this article in the Irish Times:

I AM IN Brooklyn two days before I notice it. The sky. It’s 7pm in Park Slope and I’m sure it was bright 10 minutes ago when I went into the supermarket, but now the sky is dark grey with a fading pink stripe. After that I am aware of it all the time, this bowl of colour and cloud over brown rooftops and water towers. I am told that it is one of the reasons Europeans love Brooklyn, that it is one of the things that makes Brooklyn feel like a real place.

Brooklynites talk a lot about Brooklyn. They talk about the Williamsburg Savings Bank and how it used to be full of dentists’ offices before it was converted into condos, with a penthouse owned by Michael Jordan. They point out that the dome over the clock tower is real gold, and the four-sided timepiece below is so reliable no house in South Brooklyn ever owned a clock.

They talk about Manhattan, too, but only to point out the many ways that Brooklyn is better. I am told about the art expos and the music events that come to Brooklyn first, and sometimes bypass Manhattan entirely. About the Central Park architects, who later designed Prospect Park, where they ironed out the mistakes they made first time around.

I quickly come to realise that Brooklyn’s identity is defined in relation to its bigger smaller brother, and there is something about all this that makes me feel at home. Those who make their way from the Lower East Side via the Williamsburg Bridge are greeted with the sign “Welcome to Brooklyn: You name it, we got it!” On Bedford Street a fly poster declares that Manhattan was “so five minutes ago”. Underneath someone has scrawled that it has to be at least 10.

Er, that would be an old poster at Bedford Avenue and N. 7 for Northside Piers.