Red Hook
Red Hook and the road that cut it off
An elevated expressway severed the peninsula from the rest of Brooklyn, kept it cheap for fifty years, and left a century-old bread oven sealed inside a wall on Hamilton Avenue.
Section 03
Neighborhoods
Where the pizza is, and why it is there. Almost every answer on these pages turns out to be about infrastructure rather than taste.
Carroll Gardens
Carroll Gardens
Front gardens deep enough to be the neighborhood’s name, and two pizzerias three blocks apart with opposite theories of what a pizzeria is for.
North Brooklyn
The wood-fired north
Williamsburg and Greenpoint got the wood ovens first, because that is where the chimneys were. Then in 2026 one of the rooms that started it decided to be a bar instead.
Bushwick
Bushwick
A wood oven in a cinder-block building on a street with no restaurant economy. Cheap rent did not just lower the costs — it bought the right to be wrong for a year.
Routes
Four walks
Short routes organized around what each one explains, including the three blocks where you can physically feel an elevated highway change a neighborhood.