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Eldan
2018-10-10, 04:34 AM
Okay, I have no idea where to put this, so let's just put this here.

We are going to play a game of Unknown Armies, set in Brooklyn. And I'm playing a character who draws power from, well, basically weird historical facts, urban legends and potentially conspiracy theories.

The problem is, I wrote this character before finding out exactly where it is set and the thing is, I don't really know anything about Brooklyn. At least nothing more than I could gather from a Wikipedia article and some links there on.

So, why not turn to the friendly neighborhood collection of nerdy Americans? Can anyone fashion me with:

a) unusual historical details
b) urban legends
c) local eccentricities

etc., about Brooklyn? I'd be grateful for anything that would give me a hint to start on.

Arbane
2018-10-10, 05:21 AM
Well there's LOTS of weird stuff under New York City - abandoned subway tunnels, sewers, cold war bomb shelters Mole People, albino sewer alligators....

Montauk military base (supposed home of the Philadelphia Experiment) is over in Long Island - a short ride.

9/11 happened in Manhattan, and Our current President has a Tower there that bears his name. Anyone of a Tim Powers-esque mindset should be able to make hay from that.

This site might help: Weird N.Y. (http://www.weirdus.com/states/new_york/index.php)

DavidSh
2018-10-10, 10:58 AM
Montauk military base (supposed home of the Philadelphia Experiment) is over in Long Island - a short ride.


Are you thinking of the The Montauk Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Montauk_Project:_Experiments_in_Time)? The Philadelphia Experiment took place in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, although not in our timeline.

Arbane
2018-10-10, 11:30 AM
Are you thinking of the The Montauk Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Montauk_Project:_Experiments_in_Time)? The Philadelphia Experiment took place in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, although not in our timeline.

That's just what they WANT you to think! :smalltongue:

(Yeah, I got my sinister secret government military experiments mixed up.)

Nifft
2018-10-11, 11:46 AM
That's just what they WANT you to think! :smalltongue:

(Yeah, I got my sinister secret government military experiments mixed up.)

And that's how the wormhole between Philadelphia and Montauk remained undiscovered to this day.

gkathellar
2018-10-11, 04:35 PM
Brooklyn is pretty big (on its own, it would be the 4th most populous city in the United States), and its neighborhoods (http://www.mappery.com/Brooklyn-Neighborhoods-Map) are very diverse with their own interwoven histories. It's hard to give a general answer to the question, "what's interesting in Brooklyn?" because it's not easy to know where to start. Here's a resource (https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/milstein/internet-resources/new-york-city) that might help, although Manhattan receives the lion's share of the attention.

I can say a little more about it in the present day, but bear in mind that NYC is a really hard place to explain or understand without having lived there.

The big thing to understand about modern Brooklyn is how divided it is by gentrification, ethnicity, and the availability of transit. That last point's a big one: significant parts of Brooklyn (http://web.mta.info/maps/submap.html) have little or greatly limited access to the subway, which is how people get around. Cars are expensive and difficult to manage in a lot of the city - besides, nobody drives, there's too much traffic. Buses are the poor man's train. As a result, status is often a function of proximity to the major subway lines, and in particular ease of access to the hub area called Downtown Brooklyn, stretching from around Borough Hall to around Barclay Center. A cynical person might say this is because the most valuable thing in an outer-borough neighborhood is the ability to leave and go to Manhattan.

A wave of gentrification has hit a lot of the neighborhoods better-served by the subway over the last two decades, many of which have acquired entirely different personas in the intervening period. What differs from Manhattan (which has almost-universal subway access and so is being almost-universally gentrified) is the character of this shift: Brooklyn is more residential, which means there's less in the way of glitz and designer boutiques and high-rises and tourist traps and more renovated townhouses and upper-crust takeout places and craft beer. Some of the Manhattan-style glitz has started to make its way in to the downtown area, but it's taking its time.

Big patches of economic prosperity tend to surround the subway stops, along with the accompanying hipsters, yuppies, and/or post-yuppies, depending on whether the area's demographically younger or older (it's sort of like Pokemon - hipsters evolve into young urban professionals, who evolve into wealthy Park Slope denizens). This is especially true as you head south from the downtown area. Further out, especially to the East, there's less commercial activity, and you start to pass through a really amazing diversity of ethnic enclaves, most of which are securely middle or working class, as well as some areas that could probably be described as "inner city." To the southeast, where there's basically no subway service whatsoever, things get positively suburban, but mostly not in an affluent way.

I can try to talk about particular neighborhoods a little more if it's useful, but I think that's a decent broad sweep of things.

johnbragg
2018-10-14, 08:33 AM
Starting with the stuff that strikes me as most Unknown Armies friendly (I haven't played or read UA, but going with the hidden-secrets-are-all-true vibe.

First of all, you've got the initial Dutch settlements. (Brooklyn = Breukelyn = Brookland, or so the t-shirt said anyway) Trading companies are excellent hosts for any kind of secretive activity you'd like. That's mostly downtown up against the East River.

During the American Revolution, the British win the Battle of Long Island. (Brooklyn and Queens are part of the island known as Long Island, although no one ever mistakes LI as meaning Brooklyn or Queens or vice versa) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Long_Island

Robert Moses builds the highway system, disrupting a lot of neighborhoods and would have disrupted some more if community activism hadn't been invented. (Old fashioned Tammany machine politics helped too, once the demolition started threatening "nice" neighborhoods) So something about ley lines maybe.

In the 70s and 80s into the 90s, no shortage of abandoned housing that could have hosted whatever you need it to. (Sorry, we weren't big on telling each other stories about what witches might live in that scary abandoned house--who lives there? That's easy--crackheads.)

Second half of the 20th century, mafias had a good run. Italian ones are also good cover for secretive doings--lots of ornate oaths of secrecy combined with CAtholic iconography--the obvious setup for a neo-Templar conspiracy of secret Baphometists in CAtholic garb. Either heirs to the TEmplars, or file off the serial numbers and call it something else.