The first impression I had coming into Brooklyn, New York was that I was on a ship. Part of it is that I am on an island, perched precariously into the Atlantic Ocean. And like a ship everything is crowded in, people making use of every available square foot.
But more than that it is nature intrudes here in a way I am not used to. That might sound funny as someone from Montana. But Montana was recently built, with streets mostly in a neat grid and where the walls between the inside and the frigid outside are strictly drawn by necessity. But here there are streets running at oblique angles, uneven floors and exposed pipes in older buildings, and vegetation pressing up against everything. It is a different sort of wild.