Brooklyn's Rise to Cool

New York magazine helpfully provides a chronological, sociopolitical summary of the history (by the way, I'm really not sure what the point of the rest of the article is):

Just as the 1989 killing of the African-American Yusuf Hawkins by Italian-­American teenagers in Bensonhurst helped David Dinkins beat Rudolph Giuliani to become the first black mayor, the Crown Heights disturbance, which included the stabbing death of a young Hasidic student, secured the 1993 election for Rudy. Conveniently aided by the end of the crack era, Giuliani’s race-tinged hard line brought down the crime figures, thereby making the city, or at least Manhattan, “safer.” This paved the way for the far more efficiently wired Bloomberg era. The mayor’s office was free to reconfigure New York’s most precious commodity, real-estate space. Key was the Manifest Destiny–like expansion beyond the increasingly claustrophobic boundaries of Manhattan Island, where few ­mid-level managers could afford to live anyway. Brooklyn, already headlong into a latter-day, brownstoner-led neo–Arts-and-Crafts movement, was the obvious destination of choice. Strategic “upzoning” for “density” and copious tax breaks to developers transformed scruffy, “under­utilized” neighborhoods, paving the way for the luxury riverfront high-rises in Williamsburg and hundreds of smaller projects across the north end of the borough.