Brooklyn Bridge Park

Eighty-five acres of working cargo piers, abandoned after the shipping industry left, have been rebuilt into a mile-plus of waterfront park running from north of the Manhattan Bridge down past Atlantic Avenue. Each pier got its own personality: Pier 1's rolling lawns and granite terrace, Pier 2's courts and roller rink, Pier 5's picnic peninsula, Pier 6's flower fields and playgrounds — all strung together by a harborfront promenade with the skyline standing across the river.

The landscape is smarter than it lets on. Those hills on Pier 1 are built from fill and tuned to muffle the BQE; the salvaged granite of the terraces came from demolished bridges; salt marsh grows where ships once tied up. In between, the park keeps its industrial relics — the Tobacco Warehouse's roofless brick shell, rail tracks in the cobbles — as stage sets.

Give it a whole golden hour: start under the Manhattan Bridge, drift south through the DUMBO cobbles, and let Pier 1's terrace hand you the sunset over the harbor.