New York's 'Left Bank'.(Brooklyn)(Column)

Byline: Gersh Kuntzman, Kuntzman is Brooklyn bureau chief for the New York Post.

Manhattan is dead. Long live Brooklyn! Any doubts about the ascendancy of New York's long-suffering younger sister have just been dispelled on--of all places--the popular sitcom "Sex and the City." Miranda, one of the Manhattan-centric characters on TV's most Manhattan-centric show, has actually moved to that dread outer borough to the east.

Yep. Sold her tiny Manhattan pad and bought a whole brownstone--"over there." That Miranda is a fictional character should in no way undercut the significance of this New York minute. In America, all cultural revolutions--from Bill Cosby revealing the existence of an educated black middle class to Ellen DeGeneres leaping from the closet--are ushered in not by social commentators in prestigious journals but by TV scriptwriters.

Miranda's move across the East River is just such a watershed moment. The only question is, what took her so long? Brooklyn was itself a thriving city when it merged with Manhattan in an ill-advised show of civic unity in 1898. From then on, its independent spirit was subsumed by Manhattan's swelling ego. Indeed, the goal of any ambitious Brooklynite--from Barbra Streisand to the fictional Tony Manero of "Saturday Night Fever"--has long been to move to Manhattan, find success and never go back.

I thought it a fair stereotype when I moved to Manhattan, naturally, as an ambitious young reporter more than a decade ago. People who lived in Brooklyn were mocked as "bridge and tunnel," a clueless crowd who commuted into "the city" by day and returned to boring lives each night. Yet even then, there were signs of Brooklyn's resurgence--and Manhattan's comeuppance. Compared with ...