Brooklyn

Brooklyn was an independent city until 1898 and has never entirely accepted the merger. On its own it would be the fourth largest city in the United States, and it holds enough to justify two or three days rather than the single afternoon most visitors give it.

The Brooklyn Bridge

The bridge is the obvious way in and one of the great walks anywhere.

It was begun by John Roebling, who died of tetanus after an accident on the site before construction properly started. His son Washington Roebling took over and was himself disabled by decompression sickness — caisson disease, the bends — contracted in the pressurised chambers sunk into the riverbed, a hazard nobody then understood. He directed the remaining years of work from his sickbed, and his wife Emily Warren Roebling learned the engineering, carried his instructions to the site, dealt with the contractors and the politicians, and effectively ran the project for a decade. She is now properly credited, and there is a plaque on the bridge saying so.

It opened in 1883, the first suspension bridge to use steel wire, and with a main span of 1,595 feet it was by a long way the longest in the world. The two Gothic towers of granite and limestone stand 276 feet above the water.

Two things older writing gets wrong. On opening day the bridge carried some 150,000 people and about 1,800 vehicles — horse-drawn ones, since cars did not exist in 1883. And the bridge is not red. The steelwork is painted a pale tan, and has been for most of its life; the towers are bare stone.

The change that matters for walking it: in 2021 a protected bike lane was added on the roadway below, and the raised promenade became pedestrian-only. Before that, walkers and cyclists shared the boardwalk and it was genuinely unpleasant — people stopping to photograph in front of commuters at speed. That conflict is gone, and the walk is now what it should always have been.

Walk it from the Brooklyn side towards Manhattan, so the skyline is in front rather than behind. It takes half an hour at a steady pace and considerably longer with photographs. Early morning is far quieter, and the wind over the East River is colder than the weather suggests, so something windproof is sensible whatever the forecast.

Dumbo and the waterfront

Dumbo — the cobbled district below the Manhattan Bridge — holds the single most photographed view in Brooklyn: standing on Washington Street looking up, with the bridge framing the Empire State Building between its towers. Expect company.

Brooklyn Bridge Park runs for over a mile along the water beneath both bridges, built out in stages on former shipping piers. It has lawns, playgrounds, a beach of sorts, sports pitches on the piers, and the best free view of Lower Manhattan in the city. Jane's Carousel, a restored 1920s carousel in a glass pavilion at the water's edge, is a genuinely lovely thing.

Above it, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is a cantilevered walkway over the expressway with a straight-on view of the Manhattan skyline, and it is the place to be at sunset.

Brooklyn Heights itself is the oldest part — quiet streets of brownstones and Greek Revival houses, the first neighbourhood in the city to be given historic protection, and worth an hour's aimless walking.

Prospect Park

Olmsted and Vaux built Prospect Park a few years after Central Park, with the benefit of everything they had learned and fewer constraints, and they both considered it the better work. It is smaller at 526 acres, less interrupted, and far less visited — which is rather the point.

The grand entrance at Grand Army Plaza has the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch, a Civil War memorial topped with a bronze chariot, with an art space inside it and the Bailey Fountain alongside. A large farmers' market runs on the plaza on Saturdays.

Inside, the Long Meadow stretches for about a mile and is said to be the longest unbroken meadow in any American park — an uninterrupted sweep of grass with no building visible. The Ravine is the park's woodland, built around the only forest in Brooklyn, with a watercourse running through it. Prospect Lake has boating in warm weather, and the Boathouse is an Italianate building housing an Audubon centre.

One correction for anyone following older guidance: the Wollman Rink that those accounts describe was demolished. Skating and boating now happen at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, which opened in 2013 at the southern end of the lake. The Wollman Rink still in use is the one in Central Park, and the two get confused.

The park's bandshell hosts a free outdoor summer festival of music that has been running for decades and is one of the best things in the Brooklyn calendar.

Around the park

Three major institutions sit on its edges, all within a few minutes of each other:

The Brooklyn Museum — a major collection, notably strong on Egyptian material and on American art, and reliably far less crowded than its Manhattan equivalents.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden — fifty-odd acres with a Japanese hill-and-pond garden, a rose garden, a Shakespeare garden planted with species mentioned in the plays, and the Steinhardt Conservatory. Its cherry blossom in spring is the most popular single event in any New York garden, with a festival built around it, and the timing shifts by a fortnight either way with the weather. Note the name: it is the Botanic Garden, not Botanical, and the institution minds.

The Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, an Art Deco building shaped to the corner with a gilded entrance, free to walk into.

Green-Wood Cemetery

The most underrated place in Brooklyn. A Victorian garden cemetery of 478 acres laid out in the 1830s — hills, ponds, winding paths and extraordinary monuments, built as a public park before public parks existed and so popular in the nineteenth century that it was among the most visited places in America.

Battle Hill is the highest point in Brooklyn and gives a view over the harbour to Manhattan. A colony of wild monk parakeets, descended from escaped birds, nests in the Gothic gate and makes a great deal of noise. It is open to the public, it is free, and it is almost always empty.

Coney Island

The end of several subway lines and an hour from midtown. A wide beach, a long boardwalk, and the surviving pieces of what was once the largest amusement area in the world — the Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster from 1927 that is a protected landmark and rides like one, and the Wonder Wheel from 1920. The New York Aquarium is on the boardwalk.

Go on a warm day or not at all; out of season it is bleak in a way some people love and most do not. The Mermaid Parade in June is an institution. Next door, Brighton Beach is the centre of the city's Russian-speaking community and a different world again.

The neighbourhoods

• Williamsburg — the one that became shorthand for a certain kind of gentrification, now well past that and still the centre of Brooklyn's bar and music scene. Also home to a large Hasidic community in its southern half, which is a separate and quieter world.
• Greenpoint — Polish, north of Williamsburg, lower-key.
• Bushwick — the street art district, with large commissioned murals across whole building walls.
• Park Slope — brownstones and prams, beside Prospect Park.
• Bedford-Stuyvesant — the greatest concentration of nineteenth-century row houses in the city, and a long and important place in Black American cultural history.
• Sunset Park — a large Chinatown and a large Latin American community, and some of the best eating in the borough.

On food generally: Brooklyn's reputation rests less on expensive restaurants than on the pizza, the bagels, and the cooking of the immigrant communities in Sunset Park, Brighton Beach and Bay Ridge. Specific establishments are left unnamed here deliberately, because they change — but the traditions do not, and asking locally produces better answers than any list.

Getting there

Most of Brooklyn is straightforward on the subway, and the lines from Manhattan are frequent. The alternative worth knowing is the ferry, which stops at Dumbo, Williamsburg and Greenpoint among others, costs little more than a subway fare, and gives a view of the skyline from the water the whole way — much the most pleasant approach on a decent day.