Clinton y Sanders Bring Their Battle to Brooklyn

In Brooklyn Heights, on the 11th floor of an office building, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters was humming on Monday. Staff members and volunteers were working the phones in spacious offices with windows that look out on the Manhattan skyline. Photos of supporters, an array of campaign buttons and a hanging gong, with the names of states she has won scribbled onto it in marker, adorned the sleekly designed space. A retired New York police officer stood guard.

Two miles away, in a gritty open-floor office space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that smelled of fresh paint, an army of mostly young Bernie Sanderssupporters began gathering two weeks ago to spread his message. Last weekend, they nibbled on orange slices, perched on plastic folding chairs and sifted through mountains of newly delivered cardboard boxes filled with Bernie for President pamphlets. Visitors walked up a driveway and through a half-open side door to enter.

Brooklyn, where Mr. Sanders grew up and where Mrs. Clinton established her campaign headquarters a year ago, is the center of the next political contest: the New York Democratic primary on April 19. It is a crucial one in a race  and an election year  that has been full of surprises.

The state has 291 delegates, including 247 pledged delegates up for grabs. (There are also 44 superdelegates.) Even with his recent wins in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Hawaii and Wisconsin, Mr. Sanders would need an estimated 56 percent of the remaining pledged delegates nationwide to overtake Mrs. Clinton, who maintains a lead of 219. A win for Mr. Sanders in New York would not only buoy his candidacy, but it would also be an embarrassment to the former senator from New York.

Of the three million people registered to vote as Democrats in New York City, about 945,600 live in Brooklyn, meaning the borough  the most populous in the city is home to a significant portion of the 5.8 million Democrats registered across the state. Drawing even more attention to the borough, the two campaigns, after weeks of squabbling, have agreed to a televised debate between the candidates on April 14 to be held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The styles, staffs and settings of the two campaigns are telling, both of the Democratic race and of Brooklyn itself, a rapidly changing amalgam of affluent Park Slope professionals, newly arrived Williamsburg hipsters, longtime owners of Fort Greene brownstones, diverse Caribbean-American residents of Crown Heights and members of tight-knit Orthodox Jewish communities in Borough Park. Million-dollar condominiums are rising next door to blocks of decaying public-housing complexes; shiny new coffee shops and high-priced gyms are appearing on formerly blighted streets.