DUMBO I TOOLED DOWN Jay St. to Pedro's, a Spanish restaurant ...

I TOOLED DOWN Jay St. to Pedro's, a Spanish restaurant with a bar that's been in Dumbo for a long time. It felt homey right away. "So what?!" a guy yelled, "I was drunk!" Andrew J. Lederer, an extremely talkative comedian, producer and storyteller, was my tour guide, and I couldn't have been happier. Lederer's an outer-borough expert and doesn't seem broken by New York, like so many of us. He loves Pedro's—"Once the bathroom was broken and they let me use the bathroom next door. I said, don't people live here or something? And they said 'Nah, it's alright'." A small family came bouncing out of the building, and Andrew said happily: "Look, it's some people from the bathroom!"

"This place is real homey-type," said a friendly fellow named Orlando. "If I wanna hear some Nirvana or some Doors they say, 'Let's see if we can find it,' and they'll play it for me."

Dave Walentas of Two Trees Mgt. owns a lot of Dumbo. That is, the parts not owned by the Jehovah's Witnesses. I saw at least three large buildings with the ominous Watchtower sign. What can they be doing in there—converting the dead? (Oh right, that's Mormons.) Walentes was an early speculator in Soho, and learned his lesson—get in early and spread out.

I'd only been to Dumbo years ago, to this studio where they made Cat Spat magazine, one of those hack pornography outlets that every other girl has passed through. I enjoyed leafing through a huge stack of them and identifying which band member and performance artist was seen wrestling Melee, an older dom type who lived in the space and was featured in most of the magazines. It was a porn cottage industry, and one day the boom came down and the low-tech Cat Spat residents, who also made videos for private customers and staged live fetish wrestling events, had to move in the middle of the night.

Now everything's a bit shinier than that. At 68 Jay St., there's a nice little bar in a former welding shop. Front Street Pizza, which was once a shack, was allowed to stay at the base of a crisp new building, and the superhip Superfine spun off from the now-gone Between the Bridges.

There's some controversy about what exactly constitutes Dumbo—Grimaldi's, a top Zagat-rated pizza place, had a big Dumbo sticker on the door, but faces Brooklyn Heights, which is just across the street.

"Dumbo is new. This is not new, no matter what the sticker says," Andrew decided.

We went to Five Front, a tony restaurant with a back garden. Andrew clarified: "We walked around the corner, and it's new, so it's Dumbo." The bartender, a San Francisco transplant, agreed: "We claim Dumbo."

Five Front's been there since August, and they're poised for the new block to get going. "They're going to have to pass by us to get to the main street," said the manager hopefully. The main street is palpable—it will be Water St., home of the Water Street Restaurant and Lounge, St. Ann's Warehouse and chef Jacques Torres' chocolate shop and soon-to-be bakery.

"You can rarely see the future," Andrew opined, "but here you can see the vaporous image of what is to come. It is written!"

There's a beautiful basement in the Water Street Lounge with extremely high ceilings where Andrew once ran a weekly comedy show, and you could feel the productions that were going to come. The chef, Reggie, has worked at the Union Square Coffee Shop and the Noho Star, and is just waiting for the new neighborhood to really kick in. "Once we get the atmosphere, people'll start coming."

Walking around by the water, on the wide, empty, messed-up cobblestones, we looked at the interior view of Manhattan past the water.

"People want to feel danger, but they don't want it to be dangerous," said Andrew. "That's the beauty of Dumbo."

Not surprisingly, it reminded me of old Williamsburg, but nicer and without the child abuse.

"Attention FDNY," one sign noted. "Artists Loft in Building."

Andrew chuckled. "That's to let the Fire Department know you have to save people, even though it looks like a dumpy, piece-of-shit warehouse."

We were right by the beginnings of Brooklyn Bridge Park, which will be developed to stretch to Atlantic Ave., somehow wending its way past the venerated River Cafe.

The Nest is a large art warehouse that let us stroll right in. A kid named David Mauro was hanging his video game paintings for an Old School Video Game Tournament. There's a small movie theater in the back. Some kids ignored us, Mauro didn't even try to promote himself and it generally felt free.

Back at Pedro's, the bartender/server was so damn graceful that he practically bowed to us. I got back on the York Street F feeling refreshed.