We've briefly looked back at the excellent Valentine’s City of New York: A Guide Book, a popular travel handbook from 1920 that covered everything from the city's public schools to etiquette to where the rich people lived. It also included a chapter on the other boroughs, namely Brooklyn. Here's what we learn, in their words:

  • This is the second borough of importance of the boroughs that make up New York, and is said now to slightly exceed Manhattan in actual number of residents.
  • It is essentially a city of homes.
  • Brooklyn is as different from New York as day is from night. It thinks differently, lives differently, acts differently.
  • Marshall Wilder said: the subways were built so that a New York man could go to Brooklyn without being seen.
  • People from abroad and our own people from other states speak of Brooklyn as a beautiful city. It often perplexes the Brooklynite to know what this term means.
  • There is something in the atmosphere that induces the kindly feeling.
  • There is an immense area yet to be filled up, land that is admirably suited for the building of homes and all within easy reach of business centers in Manhattan.
  • Of the five boroughs... Brooklyn has distinctively the flavor of Arts and Letters.
  • A Brooklyn audience, as has often been remarked, is discriminating and exacting.
  • Henry Van Dyke's unaffected manner, his extensive knowledge of literature and his mastery of the arts and subtleties of humor, represent in actual life the ideals of the Brooklyn mind.

The chapter goes on to identify some of the borough's more notable residents of the time, as well as institutes like the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (now the Brooklyn Museum), and areas like Ocean Avenue and Flatbush. Finally, to set it apart once again from the suit sand ties of Manhattan, the author notes that there is no Brooklyn business district, "there is no stock exchange, no financial district, no curb market, no wool exchange, no newspaper row, no great railway centers." There were, however, plenty of department stores and "a continuous stream of Brooklyn's fair daughters."

Click through for the full Brooklyn chapter (the book can be seen here). And more on New York City in the 1920s here.