Fort Greene

Fort Greene is one of the loveliest brownstone neighborhoods in the city and one of the most culturally important. It has been a center of Black artistic and intellectual life in Brooklyn for decades, and that history is present in the institutions, the bookstores and the churches, not just in the plaques.

Fort Greene Park is the heart of it, and it is the reason to come in daylight. Designed by Olmsted and Vaux, the pair behind Central Park and Prospect Park, it rises to a hill with the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument on top, a single tall column honoring the thousands who died on British prison ships during the Revolution. Locals use it constantly: the hill for the view, the lawns on a Saturday, the tennis courts, and a greenmarket every Saturday morning.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music anchors the other half of the neighborhood. It is the oldest performing arts center in America, and its programming runs from opera to experimental theater to the repertory cinema in the same complex. Buy a ticket for something you have not heard of.

Eat along DeKalb Avenue and Fulton Street, walk the blocks of South Portland and Washington Park for the houses, and stop in at Greenlight Bookstore, which functions as the neighborhood’s front porch.