The One Hour That Earns Its Keep
Most New York advice is about what to do. This one is about what to do by sitting still.
Between roughly forty minutes before sunset and twenty minutes after, Lower Manhattan performs a quiet trick: offices finish for the day, tenants flip on desk lamps, hotel lobbies switch to amber, and the skyline goes from grey silhouette to a scatter plot of individual windows. You can watch it happen. You can count the lights coming on if you are that kind of person, which, for sixty minutes a week, most people secretly are.
Brooklyn Bridge Park was designed to let you watch this. The whole thing sits on the east bank of the East River, which means every seat faces west, which means every seat is a seat for the switchover. The only real question is which bench.
How a Port Authority Wasteland Became 85 Acres of Lawn
The land was a freight terminal until it wasn't. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey held these piers through most of the twentieth century; when container shipping moved to New Jersey and Red Hook, the piers sat empty for decades. In May 2002, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed the memorandum of understanding that transferred 85 acres of waterfront to a new Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation.
The design went to Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, a Brooklyn-based landscape firm whose guiding phrase was "post-industrial nature" — explicitly man-made landforms engineered to support real ecology under hard-use conditions. No pretence that this was ever going to be meadow.
Pier 1 opened first, in March 2010. The remaining piers followed over the decade. The park now stretches 1.3 miles from Jay Street down to Atlantic Avenue, holds roughly 3,750 trees, and is open 6 AM to 1 AM, every day of the year, free.
So: specific benches.
Seat One — Granite Prospect, Pier 1
Granite Prospect is the set of wide stone steps at the northwest corner of Pier 1, cut from more than three hundred pieces of granite salvaged from the Roosevelt Island Bridge reconstruction. Counting linear feet, there is roughly two thousand of it. It reads as a Greek amphitheatre pointed at Manhattan.
Go to the third or fourth step up from the water, slightly right of centre. You sit elevated enough to clear the promenade railing. The Brooklyn Bridge rises to your right and frames the northern edge of the skyline; One World Trade sits slightly left of centre. When the financial district switches on its lights, the eye tracks left to right automatically, like reading a page. This is the seat for the composed picture.
Seat Two — Liberty Lawn, Pier 6
Walk south for about twenty minutes, past the soccer fields of Pier 5, to the far western end of Pier 6. There you will find Liberty Lawn, which unlike the rest of the park looks out over open harbour rather than straight across the river. The Statue of Liberty is on your right, Governors Island dead ahead, the tip of Lower Manhattan behind your right shoulder.
The picnic tables at the western edge are the prize. The sun actually sets into the water here, which it doesn't really do from Pier 1 (where it sets behind Manhattan). If what you want is horizon, not skyline, this is the bench. The Staten Island Ferry passes about every thirty minutes, and the container ships heading to Red Hook are surprisingly large up close. A platform called Liberty Lookout sits adjacent for standing-room views, which are usually needed from 7 PM on a summer Wednesday.
Seat Three — The Steps at Main Street Lawn
This one is the quiet pick. Walk north from Pier 1, past the Empire-Fulton Ferry lawn (4.5 acres, absorbed into the park from the state park system in 2010), under the Brooklyn Bridge, until you are nearly under the Manhattan Bridge. A set of wide granite steps leads down to Pebble Beach, a small, literal pebble beach with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge rising directly above you.
The bench here isn't really a bench. It's the steps themselves. You sit lower than the water line. The Brooklyn Bridge arches overhead at a vertical angle almost nobody photographs well, because most people are standing on the bridge rather than under it. DUMBO glows behind your back. If seats One and Two are about the skyline, this seat is about scale: the single object of the bridge, doing its work eight stories up.
What Jane's Carousel Does to the Whole Picture
Thirty seconds from the Main Street steps, Jane's Carousel sits inside a glass pavilion designed by Jean Nouvel. The carousel itself is an original 1922 Philadelphia Toboggan Company build with forty-eight hand-carved horses and two chariots. David and Jane Walentas bought it at auction in 1984; Jane personally led the restoration from her DUMBO studio over roughly twenty-five years, scraping layers of paint back to the 1922 colours. It opened to the public on 16 September 2011.
At dusk, the pavilion lights up. From almost anywhere on the Brooklyn Bridge Park side, it looks like a glowing cube of frozen motion parked against the dark river. From the Manhattan side it looks like a small lit jewel box under the bridge. You don't need to ride it, though the ticket is a bargain. You just need to know it is there. It is the landmark that turns three separate benches into one coherent evening.
Practical notes
- Address: Brooklyn Bridge Park, from 334 Furman Street (Pier 1 entrance) down to Pier 6 at Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
- Getting there: A/C to High Street for Main Street and Pier 1; F to York Street for Jane's Carousel and DUMBO; 2/3 to Clark Street via Brooklyn Heights; R to Court Street for Pier 6
- Go for: Granite Prospect at golden hour; Liberty Lawn at actual sunset; the Main Street steps once it is dark
- Size / timing: 85 acres, 1.3 miles end-to-end. Arrive forty minutes before sunset, not earlier, or the light is still flat
- Photograph it, but know this: Every bench is a tripod-free zone in practice; phones work fine here anyway. Winter is underrated, but bring a windbreaker — the gusts off the river are the real toll
The bench is never the point. The hour is. In a city that sells every other minute, the slow tilt from evening to night at Brooklyn Bridge Park is the one thing it still gives away, free, 365 days a year, for as long as you can stand the wind.
Tags: #brooklynbridgepark #pier1 #libertylawn #janescarousel #graniteprospect #dumbobrooklyn #brooklynheights #nycparks #eastriverviews #lowermanhattanskyline #pullupachair #goldenhour #bluehour #slowevenings #nycromanticise
Sources consulted: brooklynbridgepark.org · en.wikipedia.org · mvvainc.com · janescarousel.com · nyctourism.com · lalh.org · commonedge.org · bkwaterfronthistory.org · timeout.com
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