New York ? It isn’t easy trying to paint a borough of 2.5 million people with a broad brush, particularly one with 90 distinct neighborhoods, more than 150 ethnic groups and layers upon layers of history.

That doesn’t stop Dorothy Pecorara from trying.

“Brooklyn is the center of the universe,” says the 70-year-old lifelong resident of the Bensonhurst section. “It’s the motherland.”

Hyperbole? Yes. But it’s not as much of an exaggeration as you might think.

Politicians and local civic leaders like to say that one in seven Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn, the most populous of New York City’s five boroughs. Whether that’s true or not, few places can match its roster of famous natives or the imprint it has left on American culture through the films, TV shows and books inspired by its locales, lore and people.

To many Brooklynites, Brooklyn IS New York. If the stereotypes of the New Yorker  the accent, the rough edges, the street smarts, the sarcasm, the energy  weren’t born here, they certainly fermented in its largely working-class neighborhoods.

“Brooklyn has its own specific fascination,” says veteran tour operator Justin Ferate. “It’s a magical place.”

World-class attractions

Center of the universe or not, Brooklyn has much to offer as a tourist destination  charming, ethnically diverse neighborhoods, many caught in a time warp from more than a century ago; the largest collection of row houses in the country; trendy restaurants, galleries and shops.

There’s also the Brooklyn Bridge, hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1883; Coney Island, perhaps the world’s best-known amusement park and still home to the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel and the original Nathan’s Famous hot dog restaurant; and the world-class Brooklyn Museum of Art and avant-garde Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Tourism in New York City has been in the doldrums the past few months, beginning even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but there are signs it is picking up again, says Ferate. Most notable has been a decline in the number of school groups taking tours.

“Parents appear to be uncertain about sending their students to New York for the school trip,” Ferate says. “There have been some recent school bookings that indicate that this may be beginning to change.”

Most of the tourism in Brooklyn is focused on the gentrified neighborhoods in the northwest. Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Clinton Hill, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, and parts of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant look much as they did a century ago.

There are 16 historic preservation districts, some extending for more than 20 blocks. Many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods  preserved and otherwise  have a small-town feel, with wide commercial avenues flanked by quiet residential streets.

Famous figures

Perhaps Brooklyn’s biggest allure is its colorful past and the remarkable list of natives who have helped make it the ultimate nostalgia trip. For an overview of its famous sons and daughters, you can stroll through the Celebrity Path at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where more than 100 of them are immortalized in concrete paver stones.

Better yet, get a good map and drive and walk the neighborhoods where they lived. A word of caution before you set out to do so: Brooklyn is vast  nearly 12 miles north to south and 10 miles east to west. Standing alone, it would be the nation’s fourth largest city  more populous than Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis combined. Unless you rent a helicopter, you can’t see it all in a day or two.

Brooklyn’s literary figures were largely congregated in Brooklyn Heights and adjacent neighborhoods. The heaviest concentration of entertainers  particularly comedians  was in the traditionally Italian and Jewish neighborhoods of south and central Brooklyn.

A good starting point for a driving-walking tour of pop-culture Brooklyn is Bensonhurst, the borough’s Little Italy, and the fictional home of Ralph Kramden, the affable bus driver in the “Honeymooners;” the Sweathogs in TV’s “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and Tony Manero, a.k.a. John Travolta, in “Saturday Night Fever.”

Cruise down 86th Street  preferably on a warm summer night  beneath the elevated subway line as Travolta and his screen buddies did when they weren’t dancing at the Odyssey 2000 disco in neighboring Bay Ridge. It’s the same street where portions of one of the greatest car chase scenes in cinema history was shot, in the 1971 film “The French Connection.”

From there, it’s a short jaunt to New Utrecht High School at 1601 80th St., inspiration for Buchanan High School, home of Barbarino, Horschack and the Sweathogs. Curly of the Three Stooges walked the halls there before dropping out, and during the mid-1920s he and his brothers had four houses built on nearby Bay 43rd St. and Bath Avenue, still standing today.

Bensonhurst figures prominently in the history of organized crime, with all of New York’s major families  the Gambinos, Luccheses, Colombos, Genoveses and Bonannos  having had operations there. Joseph Colombo Sr. lived with his family in a split-level house at 83rd St. and 11th Ave., just up from the Dyker Beach Golf Course. Gambino underboss and turncoat Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano lived in a brick row house on 78th St. near 18th Avenue, ran an after-hours social club at the corner of 62nd and 17th and had his headquarters at Talis restaurant  called Danzas today by new owners  at 6205 18th Ave.

People paid their respects to many of the deceased mob figures  some who died of natural causes and others from bullets to the back of the head  at Scarpaci’s Funeral Home at 1401 86th St.

The hallowed ground where Ebbets Field  home of the Brooklyn Dodgers  stood until 1957 is at 55 Sullivan Place. In its place today is a fitting monument to the sacrilege of its destruction  a bleak, 20-story high-rise housing project.

A few blocks away is Prospect Park, considered by its architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, to be superior to Manhattan’s Central Park, which they also designed.

Promise of renewal

With the possible exception of the departed Brooklyn Dodgers, nothing in Brooklyn has provided more bittersweet memories than the decline of Coney Island. But recently it has become a source of renewed optimism with a new professional baseball team  the single-A Mets affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones.