One of my favorite parts of living in Brooklyn is showing it off to visitors. While the idea of “Brooklyn” conjures up all sorts of images and ideas, one of the best parts of being a resident is being a great host to guests who are curious to learn more about the many diverse neighborhoods and cultures that make up this famous borough.

Map in the Brooklyn Indie Guide

Over the past six months I’ve been working on a very special project: The Brooklyn Indie Guide, a handy iPhone or Android app that highlights fifty of my favorite places around Brooklyn! This guide is part of the Indie Guides series, created by my friends Anne and Gary, who are based in Paris, France. These guides are available in French and English and focus on local culture and highlight independent, alternative, underground, and often overlooked or quirky places in cities around the world that other guide books rarely cover. Cities featured in other guides include Athens, Istanbul, Paris (which is free!), Montreal (which is also free!), Rotterdam and Tokyo, among others, and new guides are being released each month!

I was thrilled at the opportunity to share my favorite places in Brooklyn with a wider audience. I’ve been living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn for 13 of the 14 years I’ve been in New York City and watched the borough transform from a pretty awesome place that seemed a little out of the way to mainstream culture (and to many New Yorkers) to globally synonymous with “trend.” Some of the places in this guide are new additions to the borough, but many have been here much longer than I have.

Before I made the decision to move to New York City from Maine I worried about missing out on nature, space and a self-directed pace of life. One of my mentors reassured me, “You can live however you want in New York City.” As real estate prices have risen this goal has become a bit harder to achieve, but my hope with this guide was to highlight some of the many ways one can live in, and visit, Brooklyn.

The guides are all divided into five categories: Eat, Drink, Culture, Shop, and Go Out. Each of these categories features ten locations. In the guide you can search by category, tags, or on a map (and see what’s closest to you on the map!). In selecting each location I made an effort not only to pick places I, or my friends, love, but destinations that will take a visitor all around Brooklyn to interesting and vibrant neighborhoods that they may not otherwise visit, or enable them see another side of heavily touristed areas.

The guide features everything from a neighborhood heavy metal bar, a feminist art gallery, an old-school Brooklyn clam bar, my favorite spot for pizza, a few hole-in-the-wall DIY rock clubs, a shop for vintage inspired punk-hipster beach wear, where to drink great cocktails, or coffee, and where to find the best oysters. There’s also plenty of record and book shops, performance venues, and dive bars to keep you busy. The app even includes a playlist, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me!

In a sense this project has been incubating since 2011, when I first met Indie Guides creators Anne and Gary at a show I played with our mutual friend Michel at Spike Hill (a sorely missed venue and bar in the heart of Williamsburg). They were impressed by a 4 page (!) list of things to check out in Brooklyn I had compiled for Michel. When they got the idea for the guides the other year they reached out to see if I’d like to write the Brooklyn guide and of course I agreed. I’m so pleased with the result, of my suggestions all wrapped up in an easily navigable interface, with a lot of cute illustrations to match! You can download the version for iPhone or Android version (in English or French) from the Indie Guides site!