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Neighborhoods · Brooklyn

Prospect Heights: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Garden and the park

Brooklyn's cultural block: the city's second-largest art museum, a botanic garden with the best cherries in New York, and Olmsted's better park — all on one corner of Eastern Parkway, at the top of the 2 and 3 stairs.

Prospect Heights is a small neighborhood of brownstone side streets north of Prospect Park, and its southern edge — Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue — is the single best corner in Brooklyn for a visitor. The Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the park itself meet there, and the subway stairs come up at the museum's front door. You can do all three on foot without crossing a street that matters.

This is the afternoon half of the one-day Brooklyn itinerary, and it works on its own as a half-day or a full one. The museum and the garden each reward two hours; the park takes whatever you give it. In April the cherry esplanade in the garden is one of the great sights in the city and the neighborhood fills up; in summer the free concerts at the park's bandshell are the evening.

Food is on Vanderbilt and Washington Avenues to the north — coffee, bakeries, a dense run of restaurants at Brooklyn prices — and on Flatbush Avenue, which is louder and cheaper. Grand Army Plaza at the park's northern corner has the Saturday greenmarket.

What's here

  1. Brooklyn MuseumUnder $25

    Prospect Heights · Brooklyn

    The anchor of the block and the first thing to do: the 2 or 3 to Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum comes up at its steps. The Egyptian collection and The Dinner Party are the reasons; the building is the third. Give it two hours and you will still leave things for next time.

  2. Brooklyn Botanic GardenUnder $25

    Prospect Heights / Crown Heights · Brooklyn

    Next door, sharing the block — walk out of the museum and turn right. Fifty-two acres with the Japanese garden from 1915 and the cherry esplanade that fills the neighborhood in April. Check the free-admission windows first; on the right weekday morning it costs nothing.

  3. Prospect ParkFree

    Park Slope / Prospect Heights / Flatbush · Brooklyn

    The garden backs onto it. Walk out toward Flatbush Avenue and you are in five hundred and twenty-six acres with a forest, a ninety-acre meadow and a lake; the Long Meadow north to Grand Army Plaza is the walk, and the bandshell concerts in summer are the free evening.

  4. Green-Wood CemeteryFree

    Greenwood Heights / Sunset Park · Brooklyn

    Not in Prospect Heights, but fifteen minutes' walk from the park's southwest corner — four hundred and seventy-eight acres of Victorian monuments and wild parrots, free. If the park and the garden have left you wanting more green, this is the extension, and it is emptier than either.

How to do it

Museum first, while it is quietest, then the garden, then the park for the rest of the day, which is the order the three sit in and the order the light suits. If it is a summer concert night, eat on Vanderbilt Avenue and carry it into the park; the lawn in front of the bandshell is the seating. The 2 or 3 at Grand Army Plaza takes you back to Manhattan in about thirty minutes, or the B or Q from Prospect Park station on the southeast side.

Common questions

Which subway stop do I want?

Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum on the 2 or 3, which lands at the museum door and is two minutes from the garden gate. Grand Army Plaza, one stop closer to Manhattan on the same lines, is the park's northern corner and the greenmarket. The 4 and 5 to Franklin Avenue is a five-minute walk to the museum. All about thirty-five minutes from Midtown.

Is the Botanic Garden free?

It is ticketed, with free or reduced windows on set weekday mornings and in the winter off-season, and the schedule changes from year to year — check the spot page and the garden's own site for the current one. Cherry season in April is never free and is always crowded, and it is still worth it.

How much time do I need?

A half-day covers the museum and the garden at a brisk pace; a full day adds the park properly and a concert if there is one. If you are coming from the bridge and the waterfront in the morning — the one-day Brooklyn plan — you arrive around one and have the rest of the afternoon, which is about right.

Who should skip this

Anyone who wants Brooklyn's nightlife or its waterfront view — this is the quiet, cultural, green corner of the borough, and it closes when the park gets dark.

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