A Slice of Brooklyn

If you’re ever out this way and you’ve always wanted to do a little sight-seeing in Brooklyn, a good way to do it would be to book a tour with A Slice of Brooklyn. Not only do they make sure you have a lot of fun, they feed you some pretty good pizza, too.

We were about a half-hour early getting to the corner near Union Square where we were supposed to meet the bus on Monday morning, but the storefront across the street had big picture windows filled with crates and bottles of wine, so we wandered over there and looked over the labels, a very agreeable way to pass the time. When it got close to ten-thirty we drifted back across the street where a small crowd was gathering at the corner around a dark-haired young woman who introduced herself later as Paula, our guide.

Paula, it turned out, had a story for everything we saw, a patter that never let up and a delivery that was never boring. After we got on the bus and she did the head count, she explained as we headed toward Brooklyn that we would be crossing the Manhattan Bridge, and if it seemed somehow wrong that we weren’t crossing on the Brooklyn Bridge it was actually very right, because this way we’d get a really great view of the Brooklyn Bridge. She could’ve stopped there and let us think they were doing it all for us, but it turns out there’s a weight restriction on the Brooklyn Bridge, and she got the driver in trouble once for having him cross it. It was a story she couldn’t pass up telling.

Our first stop was the neighborhood under the Manhattan Bridge, called Dumbo by the people who live there – Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Paula said it used to be old warehouses where artists found cheap loft space and, to keep the hoighty-toity types away, they gave their neighborhood what they thought was a stupid-sounding name. It backfired on them, because apartments there go for millions now that it’s been gentrified. But, there’s a great little park poking out into the East River where you can get an unmissable view of the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Next stop, Grimaldi’s Pizza. We made two stops for pizza on the tour and this was the better of the two; thin-crust margherita pizza and a bottle of root beer to go with it. Paula said it was considered the best place to get coal-fired pizza in all of New York City and that people were often lined up around the block to get in. She had a pretty good story about the original owner selling out to somebody else, then opening a rival pizzeria next door, but I can’t remember it. If you want the details, you’ll have to sign up for the tour and make sure you’re on the bus with Paula.

Then we took a spin through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. One of the fun things about the tour was the way they played scenes from well-known films like Goodfellas, Saturday Night Fever and Last Exit to Brooklyn as we drove through the city, matching scenes in the movies to landmarks that we were passing at the time. Most were, oddly, movies I’d only ever seen snippets of, never watched from start to finish. It turns out I could make a long To Be Watched list of movies set in Brooklyn.

Coney Island was the final stop before heading back to Manhattan. We didn’t stay long, only ten minutes or so, the only time I was disappointed with the tour.