1 Main Street, 16

The Clock Tower, DUMBO/Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, NY 11201

New York has a thing for portmanteaus to describe neighborhoods — Soho from “South of Houston,” Nolita (“North of Little Italy”), and, the most unusual of them all, DUMBO, from “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Underpass.” Long a derelict neighborhood of mostly abandoned warehouses and factories, it became one of the city’s hottest residential areas in the 1990s. It doesn’t look like any of its neighbors and, instead, as one of the city’s few surviving industrial waterfront areas, its buildings recall Soho. DUMBO’s are taller than their Manhattan counterparts and the location more stunning — in the shadow of the Brooklyn-side piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as those of the Manhattan Bridge. Just to the east of DUMBO, Vinegar Hill is a unique neighborhood of only a few blocks with mostly 19th-century buildings, cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the Farragut Houses and the Navy Yard.