Prospect Park: Brooklyn's Greatest Green Space

Prospect Park is the masterwork of Olmsted and Vaux — the landscape architecture partnership that also designed Central Park — and is considered by many to be their finest achievement, a 526-acre park completed in 1873 that feels more naturalistic and less manicured than its Manhattan counterpart. The Long Meadow, a 90-acre expanse of open grassland running the length of the western side of the park, is one of the largest stretches of uninterrupted lawn in any American city — used for picnics, kite flying, and informal sports from dawn to dusk. The Ravine is the only remaining fragment of Brooklyn's original forested landscape, its stream and rocky gorge feeling genuinely wild within an urban park.

The Prospect Park Band Shell on the western edge of the park hosts Celebrate Brooklyn!, the longest-running free outdoor performing arts festival in the United States — free concerts from June through August spanning classical, jazz, world music, and hip-hop that draw enormous crowds to the lawn in front of the stage. The Prospect Park Zoo is a compact and well-run collection beloved by families for its sea lion feeding demonstrations and walk-through wallaby exhibit. The lake at the southern end draws ice skaters in winter and rowboats in summer.

The Boathouse visitor centre is one of the most beautiful building exteriors in all of Brooklyn, its Venetian Renaissance facade reflected in the water — worth visiting even if you never enter. Park Slope, adjacent to the western boundary, is lined with 19th-century brownstones and a restaurant strip on 5th Avenue that competes with Manhattan for quality and diversity. The Grand Army Plaza entrance at the north end of the park, with its monumental Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch, sets up one of New York's great arrival sequences for any first-time visitor to the borough.