Dumbo, Brooklyn

Where it sits. Dumbo is the strip of Brooklyn waterfront directly beneath and beside the two great East River crossings: the Brooklyn Bridge anchors its western edge, the Manhattan Bridge lands in the middle of it, and Vinegar Hill continues east. Brooklyn Heights sits on the bluff above to the south, reached by a steep climb. The name is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, coined in the 1970s, and the story local to the neighbourhood is that residents chose something deliberately ugly in the hope of putting developers off. It did not work.

The story behind it. Before the bridges this was Fulton Landing, the ferry slip that connected Brooklyn to Manhattan. Through the nineteenth century it filled with factories and warehouses: Arbuckle Brothers coffee and sugar, Benjamin Moore and J. W. Masury paints, E. W. Bliss machinery, Brillo soap pads. Robert Gair, a Scottish immigrant, worked out how to mass-produce the corrugated cardboard box in his building on Washington Street, and for decades the area was known as Gairville after him; that building now houses Etsy. The district contains the earliest large-scale reinforced concrete factory buildings in America. From the late twentieth century the developer David Walentas and his firm Two Trees bought a great deal of it and converted the lofts, first for galleries and then for technology firms, which is why an industrial quarter is now the most expensive residential neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Ninety-five contributing buildings were listed on the National Register in 2000, and the city designated Dumbo its ninetieth historic district on 18 December 2007. A rehabilitation of the Belgian block streets, completed in 2025 at a cost of around 108 million dollars, turned up several thousand artefacts going back to the eighteenth century.

On screen. One view accounts for most of the visitors. Standing on Washington Street between Water and Front Streets and looking north, the tower and lower chord of the Manhattan Bridge fill the gap between two brick warehouse walls, and the Empire State Building appears inside the frame, five kilometres away across the river. That composition is bound up with Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which shot several sequences in these streets and put the view on its poster. Be precise about it: the bridge in the shot is the Manhattan Bridge, not the Brooklyn Bridge one block west, and the film's interiors were built elsewhere. Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, the trailer for Joker (2019) shows Joaquin Phoenix running through the Dumbo Archway beneath the bridge approach; Celine Song's Past Lives (2023) turns on a scene at Jane's Carousel; and Bananarama shot the video for Cruel Summer here in 1983, with the then decade-old World Trade Center in the background.

What you actually see today. Belgian block paving, cast-iron bollards and the surviving rails of the Jay Street Connecting Railroad, which served the waterfront until the 1950s and is still visible in the roadway. Empire Stores, a Civil War-era coffee warehouse of rough stone, reopened in 2017 with a food hall, a West Elm flagship and a Brooklyn Historical Society branch. Jane's Carousel, a 1922 machine by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, was restored over decades by Jane Walentas and installed in 2011 inside a glass pavilion designed by Jean Nouvel, where it runs beside the water. Brooklyn Bridge Park stretches west and south along the piers with lawns, a beach of sorts at Pebble Beach, and the best unobstructed view of lower Manhattan in the city. Two long-standing pizzerias, one under each name that has occupied the same lineage, produce queues on Old Fulton Street.

Getting there and timing. The F train to York Street puts you two blocks from the Washington Street view; the A and C to High Street land at the western end near the Brooklyn Bridge ramp. The NYC Ferry stops at the Dumbo landing, which is much the most pleasant approach. Sunrise on Washington Street is the only reliable way to photograph the bridge without a crowd; by mid-morning at weekends there is a queue of people taking turns in the middle of the road. That road carries traffic, and standing in it to compose a picture is genuinely dangerous — the pavement on the east side gives nearly the same frame.

What to combine it with. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan from the Washington Street ramp, or south along the park to Brooklyn Heights and the Promenade, a cantilevered walkway above the expressway with a straight view down the harbour to the Statue of Liberty. Vinegar Hill, five minutes east, is a pocket of 1830s brick houses that most visitors never reach.