Brooklyn - one of the five boroughs (districts) of New York, with the most populous - are home to about 2, 5 million people. It is located to the east of Manhattan, in the western part of Long Island.

The first settled here in 1634, the Dutch and called the settlement after the village in the province of Utrecht Brёkelen (now a town in the Netherlands). Until now, the names found in Brooklyn Dutch origin (for example, New Utrecht), and Clarendon Road preserved Dutch brick house built in 1652, the oldest in New York.

In 1776, in Brooklyn, there was the first battle of the Revolutionary War - Americans have lost it to the British. At the northern coast of the area in the Gulf Uollebaut, the British kept on ships, prisons, prisoners of war - here killed more people than all the battles of the war.

In the XIX century Brooklyn grew rapidly, taking immigrants. In 1883 he joined the Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan and Brooklyn residents a year later unanimously voted in favor of union with Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island in one city. This borough has kept still and status District of New York.

These places - the visible embodiment of the image of the US as a "melting pot" of cultures. Then they say in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian (more than 5 percent of the population), Yiddish, Polish, Arabic, Urdu ... Ethnic groups are concentrated in a dozen different quarters. It was here, in the southern part of Brooklyn, is the famous "Russian" enclave of Brighton Beach. Once perceived as Brooklyn area, inhabited mainly by the working class, but that - in the past. Today, there is built luxury housing, chic neighborhoods grow. At the same time boro many quiet green streets with small houses.

Brooklyn Museum, which opened in 1897 - the second largest public museum in New York: in his collection more than a million artifacts, from ancient Egyptian treasures to contemporary art. Brooklyn Children's Museum, which opened in 1899, was the first museum in the world dedicated to childhood. In the southwestern part of the borough it is extremely popular with the townspeople peninsula of Coney Island to the magnificent ocean beaches and the wooden promenade, which in the summer is good to walk barefoot. There are a great Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Aquarium, the huge Prospect Park Zoo and free outdoor concerts. Log in Prospect Park features a beautiful area of ​​the Grand Army Plaza with fountains, monuments and the Arc de Triomphe.

Very impressive two-level suspension bridge Verrazano-Narrows, connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island. He was named in honor of the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, the first European to explore the river Hudson. Now crossing one of the ten longest bridges in the world.