Brooklyn has 2.7 million people, which would make it the fourth largest city in the United States on its own. It is also physically enormous — the distance from Greenpoint in the north to Coney Island in the south is about eleven miles, and the neighbourhoods along the way have nothing much in common.
So a day in Brooklyn means choosing a line through it. Here are three that work, plus the parts to fold in if you have longer.
Route one: the waterfront and the park
The standard first-visit day, and the right one.
Morning — DUMBO. Take the F to York Street or the A/C to High Street. Get the Washington Street shot of the Manhattan Bridge before nine, when there is no queue. Then down to the water.
Brooklyn Bridge Park runs 1.3 miles south from here. The Granite Prospect steps on Pier 1 give you the best free skyline view in the city. Jane’s Carousel is a restored 1922 machine in a glass box. Empire Stores has coffee and a roof terrace.
Late morning — Brooklyn Heights. Up the hill for America’s first historic district: brownstones from the 1820s on quiet streets. The Promenade is cantilevered over the expressway with Lower Manhattan framed in front of it, and it is calmer than anything at water level. Plymouth Church on Orange Street was a station on the Underground Railroad.
Lunch on Montague Street or in Cobble Hill, fifteen minutes south, which has better food.
Afternoon — Prospect Park. Take the 2/3 to Grand Army Plaza. Olmsted and Vaux built this after Central Park and considered it their better work. Walk the Long Meadow — a mile of unbroken grass with no building visible from the middle — then the Ravine, the waterfalls and the Lake.
The Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden share the park’s eastern edge. The museum is excellent, the Egyptian collection is world class, and there is never a queue.
Evening — Park Slope or Prospect Heights for dinner, both on the park’s western and northern edges, both full of good, unpretentious restaurants.
Route two: north Brooklyn
For a second visit, or if food and music matter more than parks.
Williamsburg by ferry from Wall Street or East 34th Street, which is much the nicer approach, or one stop on the L from 14th Street.
Domino Park on the waterfront, built on the old sugar refinery site with the syrup tanks kept as structure, has the skyline view. East River State Park next door hosts Smorgasburg on Saturdays from April to October — around a hundred food stalls, and one of the best eating events in the country.
Bedford Avenue for shops and coffee. Brooklyn Brewery for a tour.
North Williamsburg into Greenpoint — the historically Polish neighbourhood, with the delis and bakeries still on Manhattan Avenue, and the best sunset view in the city from the ferry landing at India Street.
South Williamsburg, below Division Avenue, is one of the largest Hasidic communities outside Israel, Yiddish-speaking and entirely distinct from the rest. Lee Avenue is the commercial street; visit with the same courtesy you would show in any religious neighbourhood.
Evening — Bushwick, one stop further, for the street art on Troutman Street, the warehouse venues, and the best of the recent restaurant openings.
Route three: south Brooklyn
For a summer day, and the least like Manhattan of the three.
Green-Wood Cemetery in the morning — 478 acres of Victorian landscape, free, with Basquiat, Bernstein and Boss Tweed in it, a view over the harbour from the highest point in Brooklyn, and a colony of wild green parakeets nesting in the Gothic gate.
Sunset Park for lunch — Eighth Avenue for Fujianese food, Fifth Avenue for the best tacos in New York, and the park itself for a harbour view with nobody in it.
Coney Island in the afternoon: the 1927 wooden Cyclone, the 1920 Wonder Wheel, the free beach, Nathan’s, and the aquarium.
Brighton Beach for dinner — a fifteen-minute walk east along the boardwalk into Russian and Ukrainian Brooklyn, which feels like a different country and is on the same subway line home.
Getting there and around
Brooklyn’s subway lines almost all run north–south toward Manhattan and barely connect to each other east–west, which means crossing the borough sideways is slow. Plan a route that goes down one line rather than hopping between them.
NYC Ferry is the exception and the nicest way to move along the East River waterfront.
Buses are better than the subway for crosstown Brooklyn journeys and much slower.
What a day cannot fit
Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Fort Greene, Red Hook, Gowanus and about forty other neighbourhoods, several of which are as interesting as anything on the list above. Red Hook in particular — cut off from the subway, with cobbled streets, a Civil War-era warehouse, and the best key lime pie in New York — is worth a half-day of its own.