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Hipsterless Brooklyn: Vintage Photos From a Vanished World

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Brooklyn is big. If it were its own city, and not part of Gotham, its 2.5 million residents would make up the fourth largest metropolis in the United States. Brooklyn covers almost a hundred square miles of mind-bogglingly varied terrain, from the beaches of Coney Island and Sea Gate to the thronging sidewalks of Williamsburg — filled with stoop-shouldered young men who, tragically, can’t afford socks.

There’s cobble-stoned DUMBO; the mean streets of East New York; the mansions of Brooklyn Heights; the tree-lined avenues and Victorian homes of Ditmas Park; the quasi-wilds of Prospect Park; the soaring container cranes of Red Hook; the unnameable, party-colored, aromatic ooze of the Gowanus Canal and scores of other distinctive neighborhoods and landscapes.

The borough boasts countless ethnicities, creeds and religions. It’s somehow bustling and low-key at the same time. It has given the world memorable phrases (fuhgeddaboudit!) and immortal delicacies (yo, egg cream).

[More: A tribute to the Brooklyn Bridge at 130.]

But somehow, recently, Brooklyn has maybe gotten a little too big — or, rather, it’s started to believe the hype about itself, which is another way of saying that it’s not quite as hip as some of its residents, new and old, like to think it is.

In 2011, GQ pronounced Brooklyn the coolest city in America — a verdict that elicited eye rolls everywhere, not least in Brooklyn itself. Meanwhile, mere days ago, Vogue (yes, that Vogue) tried to explain “why New Yorkers are flocking to the borough” — evidently forgetting that Brooklynites are already, in fact, New Yorkers.

“Models, writers, actors, and artists have been flocking to 
New York’s Left Bank for its destination restaurants, bustling farmers’ markets, Parisian-style parks, and passionate dedication to l’art de vie,” panted the vogue.com post.Welcome to the new bohemian chic.”

And yet, despite the growing number of creatures swarming Kings County is hopes of hunting down, hog-tying and sucking every last ounce of life from that “new bohemian chic,” Brooklyn remains chock full of genuinely creative people, great restaurants, fascinating history, eclectic music, art, parks and architecture — in short, the sort of stuff you’d expect from a world-class city. Even one besieged by “New Yorkers.”

Here, LIFE.com offers photos of Brooklyn, made by LIFE’s Ed Clark right after World War II, that all these years later reveal something elemental to the borough’s enduring appeal: namely, a free-wheeling and, above all, an unpretentious self-confidence.

And if that ain’t the key to l’art de vie, what is?

[More: See the gallery, "Lower Manhattan: Where New York Was Born."]
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