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From Steve Koepp’s Apple Discovers a New Stage for Its Fanfare: Brooklyn in The Bridge:

The event being planned for the Brooklyn Academy of Music was so hush-hush for awhile that BAM staffers were using a code name: Acme. By this morning, however, the secret was out. Crowds were lining up by the hundreds to see the latest announcements from a company that knows how to put on a show: Apple.

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It was a historic event, the first time the company has staged one of its keynote product announcements in New York City, so it became almost as much a celebration of the location as the merchandise. “I am moving to New York!,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared after a Brooklyn-sized roar from the crowd…

Companies may come for the crowds as much as the venues. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who has been covering Apple since 1983 and publishes the Apple 3.0 blog, said today’s crowd “whooped and hollered” more than he has seen recently at Apple’s West Coast events, which have become “sort of ho-hum.”

“It’s a feather in Brooklyn’s cap, that they’re doing it in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. It’s more their vibe,” said Elmer-DeWitt, given Apple’s attachment to creativity. “Apple dropped the word so often in the presentation it should have been a drinking game.”

Full disclosure: Koepp and I toiled side by side in the word factories of Time Inc. His new venture, The Bridge, covers business in New York City’s “most populous and innovative borough.”