Princess Diana’s solo journey to New York City helped put Brooklyn on the map

Princess Diana visited Brooklyn in February 1989.

The 27-year-old prince came in Fort Greene via motorcade to attend a Welsh National Opera concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was part of a historic solo trip that included her well-known visit to Harlem Hospital, which was dramatised in Season 4 of “The Crown,” when she held young AIDS sufferers.

However, the thought of a princess crossing the bridge to attend an event in Brooklyn was almost as stunning as her stop in Harlem. The “CBS Evening News” carried an incredulous report about Di’s out-of-town trip, juxtaposing Di’s gorgeous image with images of homeless people, crumbling buildings, and damaged sewers.

“We were so excited that we were getting national television coverage,” Karen Brooks Hopkins, BAM’s former president and principal fundraiser at the time, remembered, recounting how the employees pitched in to buy a little black-and-white TV so they could watch it at work. “The piece then begins with [Dan Rather] displaying litter on the streets of Brooklyn and asking, ‘Why is Princess Di coming here?'” We were completely shattered!”

Brooks Hopkins describes the incident in her new book, “BAM… And Then It Hit Me” (PowerHouse Books), which will be released on March 1 and looks back on her 36 years at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Diana’s visit, she recalled, was a particularly memorable one.

“Coming to Brooklyn meant venturing outside the comfort zone of high society at the time for a princess,” Brooks Hopkins told The Post. Her royal blessing “changed everything for us, for Brooklyn.”

It all began in 1988, when BAM was gearing up to open its first opera season with a gala and performance of “Falstaff” by the Welsh National Opera. Brooks Hopkins had to figure out how to sell enough tickets to cover the costs of the ambitious show.

“Brooklyn at the time was not the Brooklyn we know today,” she explained. “It was a challenge to get people to cross the bridge to see a show.”

That’s when the Welsh Opera’s general director informed her that Princess Diana was a patron and that she would be invited to the performance. Brooks Hopkins didn’t think he could bring the world’s most famous woman to Kings County, so she was surprised when she got a call a few weeks later instructing her to prepare for a royal visit.

“This was the right girl at the right time,” Brooks Hopkins said of Diana, who married Prince Charles in 1981. “I believe she was prepared for her solo trip, where she could be the focus of attention and do things her way.”

Diana’s private detail, along with the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the NYPD, swooped on BAM on the day of the gala, bringing bomb-sniffing dogs and imposing metal detectors. The princess was given her own dressing room, which included her own bathroom and shower. (A day later, the team discovered that someone had “absconded with the royal toilet seat” from her room, according to Brooks Hopkins. They never found the perpetrator.)

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