Brooklyn’s parks grow out of two pieces of geography and one habit: reusing what industry left behind. The water comes first. Brooklyn Bridge Park was built on cargo piers that turned their backs to the East River for a century, Domino Park opened a quarter mile of shoreline that had belonged to a sugar refinery, Brooklyn Heights Promenade hangs on cantilevers above an expressway, aimed straight at the harbor, and Marine Park runs out into the salt marsh on Jamaica Bay.
The second is the glacial ridge: Prospect Park is draped over it, Sunset Park climbs it to a crest, and Highland Park holds the moraine at the Queens line, around three reservoir basins that seeded themselves into forest. Scale does the rest: Marine Park is close to eight hundred acres of mostly protected marsh; Prospect Park is an engineered landscape of meadow, ravine and lake; Fort Greene Park is one hill with a monument; McCarren Park and Maria Hernandez Park are neighborhood backyards you cross in minutes. Choose by three questions, not by size: who is coming, what hour and season, and how you will get there.
At a glance
| # | Place | Score | Reviews | Stands out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brooklyn Bridge Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 43 160 | Editors' pick |
| 2 | Prospect Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 28 491 | — |
| 3 | Brooklyn Heights Promenade | ⭐ 9.7 | 7 051 | — |
| 4 | Fort Greene Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 6 900 | — |
| 5 | Domino Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 6 614 | — |
| 6 | McCarren Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 6 268 | — |
| 7 | Sunset Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 5 489 | — |
| 8 | Marine Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 4 776 | — |
| 9 | Highland Park | ⭐ 9.1 | 4 688 | — |
| 10 | Maria Hernandez Park | ⭐ 8.7 | 3 433 | — |
Highlights
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Editors' pick:
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Opening hours
Open late: Brooklyn Bridge Park, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Fort Greene Park, Domino Park, McCarren Park, Sunset Park, Marine Park, Maria Hernandez Park.
Check the hours before you set out — they shift on holidays and out of season.
Full ranking
1. Brooklyn Bridge Park · ⭐ 9.7
(43160 reviews)
+7 photos
Brooklyn, NY 11201, United States
For most of the twentieth century this was a place you were not welcome. A mile and a third of bulk-cargo piers, cold-storage sheds and coffee warehouses turned their backs to the East River, fenced off from the neighborhoods on the bluff above. Today it is the most ambitious piece of landscape architecture built in Brooklyn in over a century — eighty-five acres running from th…
«Very beautiful! Especially when it's dark.»
2. Prospect Park · ⭐ 9.5
(28491 reviews)
+7 photos
Brooklyn, NY, United States
Brooklyn's great central park covers roughly 526 acres of meadow, woodland and water, and it is the park Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux built after Central Park, using everything Manhattan had taught them. There they had been boxed into a long rectangle broken by a reservoir and sliced by cross-town traffic. Brooklyn handed them an unbroken site draped over a glacial ri…
«We were here on a school field trip; it's small in size, but there are all kinds of animal…»
3. Brooklyn Heights Promenade · ⭐ 9.7
(7051 reviews)
+7 photos
Montague St &, Pierrepont Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11201, United States
Some parks are gifts; this one is a truce. In the 1940s the city's most powerful builder wanted an expressway driven straight through the old streets of Brooklyn Heights. What the neighborhood got instead was a slab of concrete hung out over the highway on a stack of cantilevers — planted with trees, lined with wrought-iron benches, and aimed squarely at Lower Manhattan. It run…
«A redeveloped riverside area with a stunning view of Manhattan, perfect for sunset! A grea…»
4. Fort Greene Park · ⭐ 9.3
(6900 reviews)
+7 photos
Dekalb Avenue &, S Portland Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Some thirty acres of sloping lawn, old shade trees and a broad summit rise straight out of the brownstone blocks of Fort Greene, and at the crest stands a granite column taller than almost everything around it. It is not ornament. Beneath its base lies a crypt holding the remains of American prisoners of war who died aboard British prison ships moored in Wallabout Bay between 1…
«Free public park and hours: Fort Greene Park is an NYC Parks public property (admission is…»
5. Domino Park · ⭐ 9.7
(6614 reviews)
+7 photos
15 River St, Brooklyn, NY 11249, United States
For more than a century and a half this stretch of the Brooklyn shoreline belonged to sugar and to nobody else. Behind a wall of warehouses, sheds and cranes, the Domino Sugar Refinery boiled, filtered and crystallized on a scale that once sweetened most of a country, and the neighborhood that grew up in its shadow could smell the place every day but never reach the water. Domi…
«Quite possibly my top 2 favorite experiences in nyc. I visited during sunset, and the view…»
6. McCarren Park · ⭐ 9.3
(6268 reviews)
+7 photos
776 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY 11222, United States
Thirty-six acres of ball dust, running lanes and Saturday market awnings, stretched along the seam where Greenpoint meets Williamsburg. McCarren Park has no single grand monument and does not need one: the whole place works as one continuous backyard for two neighborhoods that otherwise live indoors, up staircases, behind buzzers. At the eastern end stands the long brick bathho…
«This is a great park, filled with people from early morning to late at night who come to w…»
7. Sunset Park · ⭐ 9.3
(5489 reviews)
+7 photos
7th Avenue &, 43rd St, Brooklyn, NY 11232, United States
Some parks borrow a name from the district around them. This one handed its name over. Sunset Park is twenty-four and a half acres of grass and terraces draped over a glacial hill in western Brooklyn, and from its crest the city arranges itself into one of the great free views in New York: the towers of Lower Manhattan, the harbor, the Statue of Liberty standing small and unmis…
«Sunset Park has become one of my favorite parks in the city. It's surprisingly spacious —…»
8. Marine Park · ⭐ 9.3
(4776 reviews)
+7 photos
Fillmore Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11229, United States
Almost eight hundred acres on the edge of Jamaica Bay, and most visitors never see the half that matters most. Marine Park is Brooklyn's biggest park by a wide margin, and it splits neatly in two: a hard-working recreational half of ballfields, courts and a municipal golf course, and a wild half where Gerritsen Creek runs tidal through cordgrass, egrets stalk the shallows and o…
«This is a nice park with lots of places to explore. We should have brought headlamps or so…»
9. Highland Park · ⭐ 9.1
(4688 reviews)
+7 photos
Jackie Robinson Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11208, United States
Brooklyn ends here, and Queens begins, along a ridge of gravel and sand that a glacier dropped about twenty thousand years ago. Highland Park runs along the top of it — roughly 141 acres split into a busy lower park of courts, fields and playgrounds, and an upper park that holds one of the strangest landscapes in New York City: the Ridgewood Reservoir, three vast stone-walled b…
«The Brooklyn–Queens border, it feels like a separate story. Ridgewood Reservoir is the thi…»
10. Maria Hernandez Park · ⭐ 8.7
(3433 reviews)
+7 photos
P33G+7F, Brooklyn, NY 11237, United States
Just under seven acres in the middle of Bushwick, and there is almost never a moment when it is empty. Maria Hernandez Park is small enough to cross in five minutes and dense enough that those five minutes take you past a domino table, a handball wall, a dog run, a stage, a spray shower and a basketball game with an audience. It carried the name Bushwick Park for nearly a centu…
«Went on a Sunday. What a great place!! Overflowing with families, great community soccer…»
Questions & answers
Which place tops the ranking? Brooklyn Bridge Park — score 9.7/10 (Editors' pick).
How many places are in the list and how were they chosen? The selection includes 10 places chosen by our editors based on rating and reviews.
What is the average rating in the top? 9.4/10 — average score of 10 places in the list.
Which place has the most reviews? Brooklyn Bridge Park — 43160 visitor reviews.
With a small child: the playground piers at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the carousel and zoo in Prospect Park, the playground on Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Running: the car-free loop in Prospect Park, the track at McCarren Park, the stairs in Fort Greene Park. Picnics: the Long Meadow or the grills on the piers. Water: tidal pools and summer kayaking, the jets at Domino Park, the pools at McCarren Park and Sunset Park. Quiet: Marine Park at low tide. Heat sends you under the Ravine canopy; winter bares the trees and opens the view from Sunset Park.
Two honest limits. The selection leans northwest — the waterfront and the brownstone belt; only Marine Park and Highland Park reach the far southeast and the Queens line. It is thin on practicalities: no park-by-park account of wheelchair access or lighting after dark, and Highland Park’s upper paths are daylight territory. Domino Park allows no open flame, swimming is banned on the harbor and the lake, and Fort Greene Park has fenced work zones.
See also:
Best flower shops
Sources: Google ratings and reviews, official websites and social media of the places, other open data. Selection and texts by the brooklyn-name.com editorial team, August 2026.