Secret Brooklyn by Michelle Young and Augustin PasquetJonglez Publishing, 2017

Though Secret Brooklyn is a guidebook (separated into sections by neighborhood, with color photos and page-long listings about various places/attractions), I think it’d be useful only to very intrepid tourists. I think it’s a better book for NYC/Brooklyn residents who are interested in the weird/quirky/overlooked: there are some things in this book I would go out of my way to go to, but there are more spots that are just cool to read about, especially if they’re things I’ve passed by without even knowing about them. There are places in this book that are familiar to me, and others that are totally new to me. I had no idea, for example, that there are two fragments of Plymouth Rock in Brooklyn Heights, or that the doors of a Lebanese church in that neighborhood are from the SS Normandie. I didn’t know that the blue-and-yellow “L” tiling in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station advertises a long-gone department store (Loeser’s), or that the silver-gated area you can see next to the F-train track at Jay Street was where money was unloaded from a special train that ran until 2006, or that there’s a cheese-aging business in an old brewery building’s lagering tunnel, right next to a beer-hall that I’ve been to more than once. I love that this book includes a listing for the Pratt Institute Steam Plant, which used to power my favorite New Year’s Eve event, though when I tried to take my boyfriend to look at the steam plant last year, it was locked and we were only able to peer in through the interior windows. I like that it mentions the abandoned lower-level Bergen Street subway station, which you can see from the train when the F runs on the express track. I like that it mentions the Masstransiscope, and the eruvin that serve as loopholes to the “no carrying things on the Sabbath” rule for Orthodox Jews, and how it calls out interesting parts of well-known attractions, like the Fragrance Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (which I love), or the Statue of Liberty replica in the parking lot at the Brooklyn Museum (whose story I hadn’t previously known). And I love this, from the listing for the City Reliquary (which is definitely worth a visit): “You may not know yet that you’re interested in scale models of the Statue of Liberty, or the skeletons of urban rats, or rock samples from the different New York boroughs. But you probably are. Helping you realize this is what The City Reliquary in Williamsburg is about” (65). If those few sentences appeal to you, the rest of this book probably will, too.