For the business traveler or tourist, Downtown Brooklyn offers many opportunities to relax and experience the borough's cultural and recreational assets. Check out the links below to help plan your visit to Downtown Brooklyn.
New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge
Rendering of Brooklyn Bridge Park
A waterfall in Prospect Park
Cherry blossoms at the BBG
MetroTech summer concert
Brooklyn Tourism Center
The Brooklyn Tourism Center is located in Downtown’s historic Brooklyn Borough Hall. Both the Center and its website provide all the information a visitor will need, including neighborhood descriptions and maps, guides to museums and cultural attractions, listings of area restaurants, subway, bus and commuter rail information, and a calendar of events. The Brooklyn Tourism Center is the perfect first stop for any visitor to Downtown Brooklyn.
Hotels
Downtown Brooklyn is home to the award winning 656-room New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. Recently expanded, the Marriott includes a 1,500-seat ballroom and conference facilities and a top notch restaurant. It is a great place to stay for visitors to Brooklyn or Manhattan who come for business or pleasure. Three hotels are currently in development near the MetroTech Center, including a 320-room Sheraton, an upscale 180-room aloft by W Hotels, and a 184-room boutique Hotel Indigo.
The 93-room boutique Nu Hotel, located on Smith St. between State and Atlantic Ave. will be the first hotel development to open in Downtown Brooklyn since the Marriott. It will welcome guests starting in July 2008. For more information on new hotel developments, click here.
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Brooklyn Bridge Park will be a 70-acre waterfront park and recreation area, stretching from the Manhattan Bridge to Atlantic Avenue with unparalleled views of Lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. On the southern edge of the Park, designers have created public access to the water along with large granite steps and a pedestrian path that lead to scenic viewing spots. A new plaza with bluestone paving and special seating links Brooklyn Bridge Park to Empire Stores / Fulton Ferry State Park, while simultaneously serving as an entryway to both green spaces. Pedestrian paths, new sidewalks, benches, fencing, park lighting and a nautical flagpole make Brooklyn Bridge Park even more enjoyable for all New Yorkers. Here (link to renderings) is what the future holds.
Prospect Park
Prospect Park is a 585-acre urban oasis located just one mile from Downtown Brooklyn. The masterpiece of famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central Park, Prospect Park features the 90-acre Long Meadow, the 60-acre Lake and Brooklyn's only forest. The nation's first urban Audubon Center, the Prospect Park Zoo, and the Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Festival are just a few of the cultural attractions that make their home here at the Park.
With over seven million visitors a year, the Park borders diverse neighborhoods and attracts both residents and visitors. Popular activities range from skating at Wollman Rink to pedal boating on the lake to picnicking on the Long Meadow on a beautiful Brooklyn afternoon. The Park also boasts a stunning variety of natural and geological features. Brooklyn's only forest is here, alongside a complex water system, rolling meadows and shaded hillsides.
Fort Greene Park
Located on a hill overlooking Downtown Brooklyn and New York Harbor, Fort Greene Park is a popular neighborhood hangout and a site of historical significance. The thirty acre park plays host to the year-round Greenmarket, the annual Artisan’s Market, which takes place throughout the summer, and many concerts. Several tennis courts and playgrounds help residents young and old relax on those beautiful Brooklyn afternoons. The park also holds a Revolutionary Way fort and a monument to prisoners held by the British in unbearable conditions on ships just across the harbor.
A fort was originally placed at the park’s summit in 1776 to defend General George Washington’s retreat across the East River during the Battle of Brooklyn. Many years later Brooklyn developed into a full-blown city, and author Walt Whitman pushed for the creation of a public space where citizens could receive a respite from their urban environment. By 1864 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed both Central and Prospect Parks, were called in to establish a park with a rural character that contained shady walks and open grassy spaces. Over 140 years later the park stands as a monument to soldiers who gave birth to this country and the Borough’s first urban planners.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Growing from its humble beginnings as an ash dump in the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) has come to represent the very best in urban gardening and horticultural display. Founded in 1910, the Garden is a 52-acre living museum where beauty, romance, and fun blossom among world-class plant collections and specialty gardens. Admired as an urban horticultural and botanical resource, featuring more than 10,000 different kinds of plants, BBG inspires visitors to discover that plants are essential to life.
With spectacular settings to choose from, BBG is also the perfect place to “tie the knot.” Couples enjoy walking through the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, with its magical mirrorlike waterscapes, cloud-pruned maples, and waterfalls; the Cranford Rose Garden, where tens of thousands of fragrant roses bloom in summertime; and the Osborne Garden, with its classical architecture, cascading fountain, and stately procession of crabapple trees and azaleas.
BBG is located in “The Heart of Brooklyn,” only minutes from Downtown on Washington Avenue, just off Eastern Parkway and easily accessible on mass transit.