Brooklyn Heights is the most architecturally coherent of Brooklyn's old neighbourhoods, a compact grid of Federal, Greek Revival and Italianate rowhouses that dates from the 1820s and 1830s, when Brooklyn was a separate city and its heights overlooking New York Harbour made it a desirable address for Manhattan merchants. The neighbourhood became the first in New York City to receive historic district designation in 1965, and the main residential streets — Pierrepont, Montague, Remsen, Joralemon — have barely changed since. Walking them gives a more authentic sense of 19th-century bourgeois New York than almost anywhere else in the five boroughs.
The Brooklyn Heights Promenade is one of the great urban vantage points on the East Coast: a cantilevered esplanade running for three blocks along the cliff above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, looking directly across the East River at the Lower Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge. The view is best at dusk, when the buildings light up against a fading sky. Below the promenade, Brooklyn Bridge Park has converted former commercial piers into lawns, playgrounds, kayak launches and a restored carousel. Montague Street is the neighbourhood's commercial strip, modest in scale, with a bookshop, a few restaurants and the kind of dry cleaner and hardware store that have been driven out of most of the borough by rising rents. The neighbourhood adjoins DUMBO to the north and Cobble Hill to the south.