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Gather close, children, and listen to a story.

Once upon a time, there were two beautiful boroughs who grew up together, side by side, connected by a bridge, metaphorical hands clasping over water. Their names were Brooklyn and Manhattan. They had other siblings, too—Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. But Brooklyn and Manhattan, the elder, were the closest of friends, the ones who were inseparable, the ones who, as they got older, people started not to be able to tell apart, not in certain lights of day, and then even at night. What was one's "West Village" might easily be mistaken for another's "Fort Greene." They started to look alike, to act alike, even to dress alike. They ate the same foods. They went to the same bars. They made the same amount of money in the same sorts of jobs, and they lived, essentially, the same way—at least, in the parts of Brooklyn that Manhattan went to.

For there were also some inescapable differences between the two. Manhattan confessed fear at going too far in, "too deep," as she put it, for Brooklyn had a gritty streak, unkempt, questionably groomed areas and a touch of lawlessness, that Manhattan never understood. This was one of the topics that, if brought up at the Thanksgiving table, would cause Queens and Bronx to side with Brooklyn and call Manhattan "bourgeois" and an "out-of-touch stick-in-the-mud who has largely been gentrified into meaninglessness." Also: "Full of yuppies!" Manhattan's sore spots, like Murray Hill and the East Village ("You call that gritty? You haven't been gritty since the '80s!") would come up, and Staten Island would announce, "You'll never find anyone who can afford you!" causing Manhattan to rush to her bedroom in tears while he helped himself to more stuffing and everyone else just felt kind of bad. Because they really did love each other, you know? They were a family.