The Gardens of Brooklyn Heights
Fancy window boxes and beautiful views
Right before we moved to Brooklyn my parents gave me a copy of New York Green, by Ngoc Minh Ngo. It came out almost a year ago and I’d never heard of it, and to be honest the only gardens I’d been to in New York at that time were the High Line and the medieval style plots at the Met Cloisters. I wrote in my last post that Asheville struck me as a garden town from the start, but New York still had some convincing to do.
The book helped ease me into looking at the city in a new way. There are gardens of all kinds here, from fashionable and contemporary art pieces, to formal botanical institutions, to very informal community plots. I want to post about the ones I visit, including some that are covered very well in the book already. Some of these will be proper garden gardens, while others might be just a prettily planted window box, because isn’t that a garden, too?
If the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights—sitting high on the bluff overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge—were a garden, it would be a collection of these window boxes, very professionally and fashionably planted. I don’t think that the neighborhood is mentioned in New York Green because there’s not necessarily one big public garden, unless you count the romantic stretch of plants lining the back of the Brooklyn Promenade, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
I don’t live in Brooklyn Heights, but I like to run there, and when we first moved to the area, the neighborhood was a comforting place for me to visit. I liked the smallness of it, the narrowness of the streets. With all of its Italianate brick and brownstone buildings and wrought iron railings it reminded me, weirdly enough, of the little town of Galena, Illinois, where my mom was born and where I spent a lot of time as a kid. Galena is a small town that once upon a time was bustling and on its way to becoming a great city, also perched high in the hills above a river, but beyond that there aren’t a lot of similarities
Brooklyn Heights was one of New York’s first suburbs, luring wealthy Manhattanites across the river to its rolling hills and fields. The new residents built big estates and farmed the land: the street Garden Place got its name because it was laid out in the gardens of a long gone manor house. More streets broke up the old farmland, the bridge went up connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan, and by the late 19th century Brooklyn Heights was almost completely developed.
Another reason why Brooklyn Heights reminds me a little bit of Galena, Illinois is that it has that same quality of being somehow trapped in time. The areas just to the north and east of the neighborhood were chopped up and cleared out by Robert Moses beginning in the 1940s, but thanks to local activists most of the Heights was spared. It wasn’t until the 1950s and ‘60s that outsiders began to see value in the historic aspects of the neighborhood. Young, artistic-leaning people, priced out of Greenwich Village, began buying (comparatively) cheap Brooklyn Heights brownstones and restoring them back to their original 19th century charm. Of course this really changed the makeup of the neighborhood, and it’s all very complicated, so if you’re at all interested in the subject, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn is a good read.
Brooklyn Heights started out as a wealthy neighborhood, and it’s definitely a wealthy neighborhood now. Quite a few celebrities live there, though I haven’t seen any yet, and to be honest I probably wouldn’t recognize one if I saw one. Aside from being embarrassingly face blind, I’m always too busy looking at the planting, which is always changing in Brooklyn Heights, or at least as often as the seasons change. There are landscape design companies that come in and overhaul window boxes four times a year, removing old plants and putting in more seasonally appropriate plantings, and they don’t skimp, either. Right now window boxes are filled with hellebores and tulips, but soon enough they’ll get their new summer wardrobes. By the way I love this interview with the ‘Window Box King of Brooklyn Heights,’ Ukrainian native Serhiy Mshanetskiy. The window boxes alone are worth a subway ride out to the neighborhood.
Of course there are actual gardens in Brooklyn Heights as well, though most of them are hidden on rooftops or in backyards. But on Grace Court there’s a whole stretch of rear gardens in open view, set behind a wrought iron fence. These gardens have been there for over a hundred years, though whether they’ll stay remains to be seen, since land is precious in Brooklyn and developers are always looming. But for now Grace Court is a lovely little 19th century block, very much trapped in time, and its gardens are currently bursting with daffodils.
The rear gardens of Columbia Heights street were lost to development back in the 1940s, when Robert Moses, at it once again, decided to run the new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway along the edge of Brooklyn Heights. Residents were horrified, of course, and one of them proposed that the expressway be covered by a sort of platform that the old private gardens could be rebuilt upon. Moses appeared to give in, but secretly he already had plans in motion for a covered expressway of a different kind: a promenade for the public, with railings overlooking the river on one side and a narrow public garden on the other. So the residents of Columbia Heights may have lost their own gardens, but the people of Brooklyn Heights won out in the end. The planting is gorgeous, and the view of the Manhattan skyline might just be the best view in town. When my family comes to visit, this is where I want to take them.
Garden Notes:
We had an earthquake last Friday and everything survived intact, surprisingly enough, including my poorly constructed sweet pea teepees. Still, so weird!
It’s been a rainy April, but we’ve had some warm days, and the seedlings I’ve planted out in pots are beginning to grow a little faster.
Proper April garden update, next week!
Again…lovely articles and pictures ☺️
I lived in Brooklyn Heights for the first few months I lived in NYC and I loved reading this. Putting that book on my list!