A Nice Place to Visit

A Hotel! Bus Tours! Brooklyn Hits the Tourist Map

By Thomas J. Lueck

In Manhattan, sure. But Brooklyn? Still, there they are, those big red double-decker tourist buses chugging past Fulton Landing, around Grand Army Plaza and in the shadow of the sleek, 376-room Marriott that is to open Tuesday as Brooklyn's first large new hotel in 68 years.

"Everybody has heard something about Brooklyn," said Claudia Pongratz, a tourist from Munich, Germany, who squeezed onto the upper level of a double decker the other day with other first-time visitors to New York City's most populous borough, most of them from Europe. "It is part of America I have always wanted to see."

In the latest wrinkle in a buoyant surge of tourism that has swept New York for more than two years, Brooklyn, that historically rich, much maligned place of 2.3 million people that the Dodgers, Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen left, is suddenly on the itinerary. At least for an intrepid few.

Brooklyn business people, and the visitors themselves, offer several reasons for the borough's new popularity. As in much of the city, fear of crime has subsided. Many North American visitors can trace ancestors to Brooklyn, travelers from Europe are attracted by the elegance and history of the borough's brownstones and churches, and many tourists come simply for a brief glimpse of traditional, middle-income residential areas in a city normally defined by the extremes of architecture, finance and human relations.

"They want to see where we live, and get a feeling for our ethnicity," said JoAnne Meyers, manager of the Brooklyn Tourism Council, a four-year-old group whose Web page (Http://www.brooklyn.org/whoweare/tourism) has been attracting hits in recent months from across Europe, Argentina, Israel and Japan.

"We are like a human zoo," she said. "Everybody wants to come and see how we live together because we do it so well."

Whatever the attraction, the emergence of Brooklyn as a tourist destination - or at least an excursion for visitors to Manhattan - is evident in the growing popularity of its cultural institutions, and in large new investments in its tourism and lodging businesses.

Foremost among them is the new Marriott, in downtown Brooklyn next to MetroTech, the office and university complex that was built in the 1980's as one of New York City's most sweeping urban renewal projects. The hotel fills the lower seven floors of a 32-story building, where the higher floors - and unbroken views of Manhattan - are claimed by the office of the Brooklyn District Attorney, an insurance company and other business tenants.

The hotel is intended mainly as a destination for business travelers because of its proximity to Metrotech. Its large underground garage will allow easier access by car than most Manhattan hotels, and Marriott says its weeknight room rates of $180 to $230 are at least 20 percent below those at comparable hotels in Manhattan.

But Marriott executives said they planned to promote the hotel aggressively to tourists.

"Tourism is already catching on in Brooklyn, and we think we can spur a lot more," said Mitchell Heymann, director of marketing for the hotel, formally the New York Marriott Brooklyn, which has booked almost all its rooms next weekend for a convention of black business women. He said that group might provide an example of the kind of guests who would enhance Brooklyn's reputation as a tourist stop, because they could be expected to explore neighborhoods elsewhere in the borough.

Marriott's nearest competitor in Brooklyn is the 150-room Golden Gate Motor Inn in Sheepshead Bay. Long gone are the opulent hotels in Brooklyn Heights that rivaled those of Manhattan, like the towering ST. George, completed in 1980 and now a cooperative apartment house, and the 90-year-old Bossert, which attracted movie stars in the 1920's, and is now a residential building owned by the Jehovah's Witnesses.

To fill the lodging void, bed-and-breakfasts have sprung up in several of the borough's best preserved brownstone neighborhoods.

"People used to come with some trepidation, but now they are enthralled," said Harry Paul, owner of the Baisley House, a two-year-old Carroll Gardens bed-and-breakfast inn in a 145-year-old brownstone once owned by Susan Hayward. The largest share of the inn's clientele is made up of European tourists and American business travelers, he said, and demand is so strong for the three guest rooms that he is already taking weekend reservations for 1999.

The growing number of Brooklyn visitors has provided a lift for the borough's largest cultural institutions, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Aquarium. The borough's rising cultural star, at least over the last year, has been the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where attendance has doubled.

I think we are at a major turning point for tourism in Brooklyn, and this building is bustling," said Sally Williams, a spokeswoman for the museum, where attendance had declined for years until it bottomed out at about 255,000 a year - dismally low for a major art museum - through most of the last decade. But in the last year, she said, the combination of heightened interest among tourists and two hugely popular exhibitions - paintings by Monet and the museum's current show, "Jewels of the Romanovs," which ends net Sunday - have created a surge of attendance. Although attendance figures for the fiscal year that ended June 30 are still being tallied, she said it would easily exceed 500,000.

Still, for all its historic, ethnic and cultural appeal, Brooklyn remains primarily a residential place, not ideally suited for oversized buses rumbling down the block or tour groups peering into people's living rooms.

"We love the tourists, but they are just going to have to visit us on foot," said Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, a homeowners' group that for years has resisted efforts by tour operators to drive their buses along the neighborhood's somnolent side streets, or to park at the entrances to the scenic Brooklyn Heights promenade.

"This neighborhood was laid out with dirt lances in the 19th century," she said. "There is simply no room for tour buses."

Such resistance has done much to influence the tours now being offered in Brooklyn by Manhattan's two biggest double-decker bus operators, Gray Line Tours and new York Apple Tours.

Gray Line, which for years has offered an excursion to the promenade on summer nights, agreed this year for the first time to park its buses at a staging area blocks away. But in response to a surge in tourist demand, it has also expanded its service from one to three buses each night, with tour guides speaking French, German, Italian and Spanish.

By far the largest new tour service is by New York Apple Tours, which started Brooklyn trips in May and now has buses regularly making a broad circuit from the waterfront under the Brooklyn Bridge to the Botanic Garden on Eastern Parkway and back through Brooklyn's downtown commercial district.

"It has been so popular we are already planning to increase the frequency of buses," said Hayim Grant, New York Apple Tours' president. On weekday afternoons, when buses now run every hour. Still, Mr. Grant's company, yielding to pressure from Brooklyn residents, has plotted its tours in a way that may leave some visitors feeling that they have missed the best of the borough. Avoiding side streets, including those with the most well-preserved 19th century buildings, the New York Apple buses remain on wide thoroughfares like Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, lined on many of their blocks by undistinguished and sometimes rundown commercial buildings.

Although the double-decker service is intended to allow people to get off and walk, returning to board another bus at the next scheduled stop, few of those on the tour taken by Ms. Pongratza the other day ventured off the bus. Nor were they encouraged to do so by New York Apple's tour guide, whose enthusiastic description of such unremarkable buildings as the Fire Department headquarters seemed to elicit little interest from those on the top deck.

"I have been to Brooklyn, but I think I missed it," said Jozsef Karaszi, a telecommunications executive from Budapest who took the tour with his wife and son as part of a four-day New York City visit.

For his part, Mr. Grant acknowledged that rough edges in the Brooklyn tour remain to be worked out.

"There is a learning process that takes place with every new service, he said. "In Brooklyn, it will be very important to tell visitors where to get off and walk around, and we will get better at that as our employees become more knowledgeable."