Description
Dumbo is the Brooklyn neighborhood squeezed between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, on the East River: cobbled streets, brick warehouses, galleries, cafés and one of the most photographed views of the New York skyline.
The best-known shot is from the corner of Washington and Water Streets, where the Manhattan Bridge is framed between two brick buildings. A little farther is the Archway, the stone passage under the bridge's approach, used for films, exhibitions and concerts. Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America used this view for its poster.
Down by the river, at Fulton Ferry Landing, you find Grimaldi's pizza, Jacques Torres's chocolate, the River Café and Bargemusic, classical concerts on a floating barge. In the Empire Stores, an old warehouse, there are shops, a food hall and a branch of the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Not far away the neighborhood keeps some of its industrial memory, with Belgian block streets and old freight tracks, so a stroll feels like walking through a film set from another century.
It is a short walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park, with its lawns and the Manhattan skyline across the water.
In 1978 the artists who had moved into the empty warehouses gave the neighborhood a deliberately ugly name, hoping it would scare developers away: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, Dumbo. It did not work.
For a century this was a riverside of factories on cobbled streets, making coffee, paint, machinery and Brillo soap pads. In a building on Washington Street, the Scottish immigrant Robert Gair invented the cardboard box. Old freight tracks still run along the streets.
Then developer David Walentas bought up much of the area and turned the lofts into apartments, galleries and offices. Dumbo is now a hub of tech startups, with New York's highest concentration of technology firms: Etsy works in Gair's old building.
The best-known shot is from the corner of Washington and Water Streets, where the Manhattan Bridge is framed between two brick buildings. A little farther is the Archway, the stone passage under the bridge's approach, used for films, exhibitions and concerts. Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America used this view for its poster.
Down by the river, at Fulton Ferry Landing, you find Grimaldi's pizza, Jacques Torres's chocolate, the River Café and Bargemusic, classical concerts on a floating barge. In the Empire Stores, an old warehouse, there are shops, a food hall and a branch of the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Not far away the neighborhood keeps some of its industrial memory, with Belgian block streets and old freight tracks, so a stroll feels like walking through a film set from another century.
It is a short walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park, with its lawns and the Manhattan skyline across the water.
In 1978 the artists who had moved into the empty warehouses gave the neighborhood a deliberately ugly name, hoping it would scare developers away: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, Dumbo. It did not work.
For a century this was a riverside of factories on cobbled streets, making coffee, paint, machinery and Brillo soap pads. In a building on Washington Street, the Scottish immigrant Robert Gair invented the cardboard box. Old freight tracks still run along the streets.
Then developer David Walentas bought up much of the area and turned the lofts into apartments, galleries and offices. Dumbo is now a hub of tech startups, with New York's highest concentration of technology firms: Etsy works in Gair's old building.