A Day Around the Brooklyn Bridge

Come off the bridge and drop down into Dumbo — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — where Belgian-block streets run between nineteenth-century warehouses that once moved coffee, paper, and machinery and now move photographers.

Washington Street is the obligatory stop, with the Manhattan Bridge framed dead-center between the brick facades. Take the photograph; everyone does. Then earn a better one by wandering the quieter blocks around Water and Plymouth Streets, where the neighborhood's industrial character survives without an audience.

When you want a pause, Almondine Bakery on Water Street has been the neighborhood's French bakery for years — the kind of place where a croissant and a coffee buy you a seat and a window.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is the reclaimed waterfront that changed how the borough meets its river — a string of piers converted to lawns, playgrounds, sports fields, and gardens running south from the bridge. Enter near Jane's Carousel, the restored 1922 carousel that turns inside Jean Nouvel's glass pavilion at the water's edge, improbable and lovely in equal measure.

Then simply follow the shoreline. Pier 1's lawns face the lower Manhattan skyline across the East River; the granite terraces further along are made for sitting with something cold while ferries stitch back and forth. On a clear afternoon there is no better place in the city to do absolutely nothing.

As the light lengthens, climb the hill into Brooklyn Heights and walk its streets of brownstones and Federal houses — among the first neighborhoods in the city to be protected as a historic district. The fruit streets, Cranberry and Pineapple and Orange, are as charming as their names.

End the climb at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, cantilevered above the expressway with the harbor spread below. This is where the day's geography snaps into place: the bridge you crossed this morning to your right, the skyline you left behind straight ahead, the Statue of Liberty small and green to the south. Sunset here is a neighborhood ritual. Join it.

For the full-circle ending, descend back to the water for dinner at the River Café, the restaurant moored on a barge at the foot of the bridge since the 1970s, with white tablecloths, a piano, and lower Manhattan filling the windows. It is a jacket-and-reservations sort of evening, and for an anniversary or a proposal there is nothing else like it in the city.

If you would rather keep the night simple, no one will think less of you: a pastry from Almondine, a bench at the water, and the bridge lighting up overhead make a fine dinner party of two. Either way, give the bridge one last look before you go. It has been holding the city together for a century and a half, and it wears the evening well.