WTF is South Brooklyn?

OVERFLOW is explicitly a magazine for South Brooklyn.  That phrase, South Brooklyn, is all over our pages--we throw it around like gelt in December.  

I would say the most common question we get is "South Brooklyn, what the fuck?"  After all, geographically, significant portions of Brooklyn are further south than Prospect Park.

Well, as you may have noticed if you've taken a look at our publication, we get awfully excited over local lore and history--maybe overly obsessed with uncovering the truth behind that shiny brownstone facade.  

When we were first daydreaming about OVERFLOW, one of the first questions we had was just how to describe this little corner of our great borough.  Folks in real estate seem ever excited to carve up the nabe into mini-markets to help out-of-towners wrap their heads around the networks of streets and services.   Hence mutant hoods like "BoCoCa" pop up in our vocabularies.

We decided to take a longer term view, and go with the traditional name for the first major neighborhood that served the City of Breuklyn--namely that collection of shops and dwellings to the south of "downtown," which we imagine was comprised of a few two-story buildings, an apple cart, and about a thousand town-drunks.  This was truly among the first neighborhoods in the whole-tri-state-region, and we think its name, South Brooklyn, should remain on the tip of our collective tongue for some time to come.

For more on the history, see to this useful wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Brooklyn

And check out this bitchin' map from 1766.