The Corpus of Contemporary American English has only one entry in its database that uses the phrase "darkest Brooklyn" -- an article in the Spring 1998 issue of American Scholar by Alfred Kazin titled "The art city our fathers built."

I first walked into the Metropolitan Museum seventy-one years ago, as a boy of eleven, led by my father, an immigrant house painter from darkest Brooklyn who liked his firstborn to accompany him as he timidly looked into the city's public places -- the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the great library on Fifth Avenue, the Aquarium on the Battery, the Staten Island ferry when it charged a nickel. [American Scholar, Spring98, Vol. 67 Issue 2, p17, 10p]

Kazin seems to be using darkest Brooklyn in the sense of Brooklyn's innermost ethnic core, where the gentry dare not tread.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English has only one entry in its database that uses the phrase "darkest Brooklyn" -- an article in the Spring 1998 issue of American Scholar by Alfred Kazin titled "The art city our fathers built."

I first walked into the Metropolitan Museum seventy-one years ago, as a boy of eleven, led by my father, an immigrant house painter from darkest Brooklyn who liked his firstborn to accompany him as he timidly looked into the city's public places -- the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the great library on Fifth Avenue, the Aquarium on the Battery, the Staten Island ferry when it charged a nickel. [American Scholar, Spring98, Vol. 67 Issue 2, p17, 10p]

Kazin seems to be using darkest Brooklyn in the sense of Brooklyn's innermost ethnic core, where the gentry dare not tread.