A Historical Walking Tour of the Bay Ridge Waterfront This Weekend

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    It may be hard to picture now, but Bay Ridge was initially a summer destination for wealthy industrialists, who built mansions on the bluffs overlooking the Narrows. That history and the changes the neighborhood has seen since will be on the agenda Sunday at a Municipal Art Society walking tour of the neighborhood’s northwestern precincts.

    Led by architectural historian Melanie Macchio, the tour will take in gas-lit brownstones, Victorian mansions, prewar apartment buildings, and shoreline parks with panoramic views of New York Harbor. Promised highlights include the Narrows Botanical Gardens, the onetime private estate now known as Owl’s Head Park (pictured below), and the 18th-century “Revolutionary Cemetery,” Brooklyn’s smallest burial plot (or publicly known one anyway), sited on what’s now a residential block.

    “Bay Ridge: Brooklyn’s Western Waterfront Neighborhood” takes place at 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Tickets are $20 for nonmembers; you can buy them here.

    Photos via nycgovparks.gov 

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