Brooklyn Magazine is a glossy quarterly published in, well, Brooklyn. It aspires to be a New York magazine for the Brooklyn hipster set, and is filled with ads for Brooklyn beer, Brooklyn real estate, Brooklyn clothiers, and Brooklyn literature.

In its pages one can discern the makings of a distinctive borough aesthetic: off-center, handmade, pastiche, vintage, cluttered — West Coast grunge meets East Coast sophistication. Homes are filled with repurposed school desks and chairs, retro turntables, flea market finds that are kitschy but cool, and objets de nature made from tree trunks and taxidermy. While mid-century modern furnishings are occasionally seen, handmade and found objects trump the manufactured and the mass-marketed; old and worn, put together with a seemingly unstudied elegance, is preferable to new and shiny. Breuckelen, the old Dutch name for the borough, is now the moniker of a local distilling company, as well as a café and an apparel company.

There is a lot to admire about the values that animate this emerging lifestyle: concern for the environment, reverence for the past, a desire to make an urban life that is rich and inviting. Like other middle-class urban pioneers, the agents of the new Brooklynism reject the dream of suburban living with its focus on the family and its desire to flee crime, crowds, and the space of difference. They revel, instead, in the unruliness of cities and the possibility of creating neighborhoods that urbanist Jane Jacobs would be proud of, where people of different ethnicities, races, and especially classes live cheek-to-jowl, where bohemianism and literary experimentation flourish.