BROOKLYN - Once commonly considered a Manhattan suburb on the wrong side of the East River, the borough of Brooklyn is a happening place these days.
Both upwardly mobile young professionals and cash-poor artistic types are flocking to Brooklyn in search of that Holy Grail of the Big Apple's high-priced real-estate scene: an affordable apartment. In the process, they are gentrifying, energizing, and sometimes totally transforming many old neighborhoods.
While there is certainly a lot more going on now than there was even a few years ago, Brooklyn has long been unfairly underrated. If the borough, which has a population of 2.3 million, were still a city (as it was before it joined New York in 1898), it would now be the fourth largest in the country.
Brooklyn certainly has all the attributes of a big city, including a bustling downtown business district and residential neighborhoods that include the posh and elegant and the interestingly ethnic. It has trendy shopping, a lively nightlife, good restaurants (some of the oldest in New York among them), superb public parks, and a clutch of colleges and universities. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, which bills itself as the second largest in the country, is first-rate.
A show currently drawing crowds at the museum is ''Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes, and Rage,'' a multimedia exhibition about a pop-cultural phenomenon with origins in Brooklyn. The museum also houses renowned collections of Egyptian and African art and a gallery filled with some of the finest examples of the Hudson River School of landscape painting.
The museum is located on the north side of the sprawling Prospect Park, which the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted considered his best work. One of its new attractions is the Wildlife Center, complete with child- size eggs, giant lily pads, and plenty of opportunities for children to get close to baboons and other exotic wildlife.
The much-loved Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, also adjacent to Prospect Park, re-opened earlier this year after a lengthy restoration. Created in 1915 as the first such public garden in this country, it is intended to mirror nature and suggest Japan's rocky coastline and mountainous landscape. With its reflecting pool and replica of a Shinto shrine, it provides the kind of refuge every metropolis should have.
Park Slope, to the east of Prospect Park, is one of Brooklyn's upscale enclaves, although still a cheaper place to live than similar neighborhoods in Manhattan. The borough's real high-end section is Brooklyn Heights, located just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan - and with an extraordinary view of its skyline. It consists of street after street of immaculately maintained old brownstone row houses, off a main thoroughfare, Montague Street, that is lined with chic restaurants, trendy bars (the Heights Cafe at 84 Montague for one), and upscale shops much like those in mid-Manhattan.
Montague Street leads to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a must-see for any visitor to Brooklyn. Dramatically cantilevered over the Bronx-Queens Expressway, the eight-block-long promenade parallels the East River and has an unimpeded view of the towers of Manhattan. At night, when the skyline is ablaze with light, the view is truly spectacular.
Although physically in Brooklyn, the Heights has always been psychologically and socially oriented almost exclusively in Manhattan. This is now also true of several other Brooklyn neighborhoods, including its newest, D.U.M.B.O.
D.U.M.B.O., an acronym for ''Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,'' is a former warehouse district that has been transformed in the last few years into a sanctuary for artists driven out of SoHo and other once arty Manhattan neighborhoods by soaring rents.
Some 700 artists now occupy lofts within a 10-block area that isn't much to look at itself, but has a terrific view of Manhattan. Not yet another SoHo, where most D.U.M.B.O. artists still display their work, the area has a few small art galleries and recently got its first restaurant, Super Fine, at 65 York St. The adjoining Between the Bridge Bar is a hangout for local artists.
North Williamsburg, known to some of its hip young residents as ''Billyburg,'' is unabashedly an extension of Manhattan's East Greenwich Village, just across the river. Williamsburg's Bedford Avenue is the first subway stop in Brooklyn after Avenue D in the East Village, and is often jokingly called ''Avenue E. ''
Williamsburg today is a lot like the Greenwich Village of old. Tourists are rare, rents are low, and what residents lack in money they compensate for in youthful energy and creativity. Scattered along Bedford Avenue - the antithesis of Montague Street - are art galleries, bookstores, and small boutiques (several in a building that once housed the Real Form Girdle Co.) selling handcrafted jewelry and chic recycled clothing.
Plan Eat Thailand at 128 Bedford is a classic starving artists' eatery serving large portions of tasty, filling food at low prices. Paintings lining the walls of the long, narrow restaurant are the work of neighborhood artists.
Teddy's Bar & Grill at 96 Berry St. is an authentic saloon that opened in 1887 and resembles a Greenwich Village bistro circa 1900.
Greenpoint, just north of Williamsburg, is a Polish neighborhood that newcomers are just beginning to affect. A few art galleries have opened in the last year or so, and young professionals are snapping up the handsome brownstones that suggest a Brooklyn Heights without the view. Yet it is still Little Warsaw, and you won't find nouvelle cuisine at restaurants like Christina's, at 853 Manhattan Ave. Here, the pierogis are savory and enormous, the borscht and other peasant-style soups meals by themselves.
As D.U.M.B.O. and Williamsburg draw closer to Manhattan, Brooklyn's old downtown, to the west of Brooklyn Heights, is taking on a new life of its own. A major catalyst for change - and a symbol of the borough's renaissance - was the completion two years ago of a 376-room Marriott hotel on Adams Street near Borough Hall, Brooklyn's old city hall. The first hotel built in the borough in 60 years, the Marriott, with lower rates than those at similar hotels in Manhattan, has proved so popular that a 280-room addition will be built next year.
Just around the corner at 372 Fulton Street is Gage & Tollner, a Brooklyn landmark that still looks as it did when Queen Victoria was on the throne, right down to the gaslight chandeliers and the beautifully restored, 100-foot-long mirrored dining room. The menu is old-fashioned, too, with appetizers like ''Oysters Diamond Jim Brady'' (baked with tomato and creme fraiche) and entrees such as rack of lamb and T-bone steak.
Novelist Thomas Wolfe, a one-time Brooklyn Heights resident, had one of his characters declare: ''It'd take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo.'' He's right - but it certainly would be fun to try.
