New York has gone from winter to summer, apparently skipping spring this year, besides two or three warmer days in April. As you can imagine, the city, full of cars, pavement and concrete, can get pretty hot making it not so desirable to go outside and walk around.
As soon as the temperature hits around 80ºF (still getting used to Fahrenheit), everyone tries to find some comfort inside, in the shade, or in one of NYC’s parks.
Apart from Central Park – perhaps the most well-known park in the world -, there are plenty other parks where you can rest and breath some fresh air for a few hours. Today I’m going to tell you about Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s main and biggest park. It hosts the zoo, botanical garden, ice skating ring, dog beach!, and many more features to keep you busy all day and all year long.
It was designed by Olmstead, right after he finished Central Park, could be considered maybe its younger cousin, so it feels similar in many ways, but also has its own unique atmosphere that makes it perhaps more interesting. Apart from the main paths where you can bike, open lawns surrounded by trees, and different sized lakes, Prospect Park has some almost forest like areas, with narrower paths, where you feel completely isolated from the surrounding city, even more so since the surrounding buildings to Prospect Park are not the brand new skyscrapers in around Central Park.
You can walk around for hours, encountering plenty of different things – even a food truck party-, sit down on the lawn grass to read a book, enjoy one of the many improvised concerts happening all day, or just stare at the landscape and all the people moving around.
It is, for sure, one of the best places to spend a really hot day in the city.