Dumbo

This guide to Dumbo in New York City traces the neighborhood's deliberately ugly name back to 1978, when artists squatting in abandoned waterfront warehouses tried to scare off developers by branding the area Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. You'll hear about Robert Gair, the inventor whose cardboard-box factories once dominated this waterfront, and meet David Walentas, the developer who arrived in 1981 with a very different plan for the same empty buildings. The guide follows how his approach reshaped these blocks over the years that followed.