Duane Park

Duane Park is a green triangle about the size of a generous apartment, and it happens to be the first parcel New York City ever bought specifically to be a park — acquired from Trinity Church in 1797 for five dollars. For a century it was the hub of the butter-and-egg district, ringed by dairy warehouses whose handsome brick and cast-iron fronts still enclose it.

Today it's Tribeca's calmest hundred feet: a bench triangle under honey locusts, replanted and kept up by devoted neighbors, where the loudest regular event is a dog shaking off rain. The surrounding low warehouse walls hold the light in the evening, and the whole scene — lamppost, flowers, cobbled street beyond — feels like the city at its most domestic.