Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Heights is the oldest of New York’s brownstone neighborhoods, and it still looks the part: block after block of nineteenth-century houses, iron railings, and streets named for the fruit trade, Orange and Pineapple and Cranberry, instead of numbers.

The Promenade is why most people come. A third of a mile of terrace hanging over the harbor, with Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty laid out in front of it, and it is at its best in the half hour after sunset. Underneath it runs the expressway, which is the joke of the place: one of the great views in America, built on a highway roof.

There is real history in the quiet. Plymouth Church was a stop on the Underground Railroad and Henry Ward Beecher’s pulpit, and it still runs tours on weekdays and most Sundays for a few dollars. Montague Street is the local main street, more useful than glamorous. Walk south to Atlantic Avenue for Sahadi’s, a Middle Eastern grocer on the block since 1948, where you should buy more olives and dried fruit than you can carry.

Walk the streets between Montague and Middagh with no route in mind. Look up at the doorways, find the lanes that are barely a block long, then drop into Brooklyn Bridge Park at Pier 5 or carry on into DUMBO. It is a small neighborhood, and the pleasure of it is entirely in the walking.