Literary Matchmaker: Brooklyn Parks Edition

Depending on your neighborhood, you may be surprised by how much green space exists in Brooklyn. The borough is home to just about 4,456.6 acres of public parks—which, according to NYC's government data, is a little less than 10% of its land area. In honor of our borough's wealth of parks, I put together a list of 20 eclectic reads that are tied to local outdoor destinations. Now that the kids are back in school and the leaves are getting ready to change colors, it's time to touch grass and turn some pages. Happy reading! 
 

Brooklyn Bridge Park has beautiful views of the bridge, the water and Manhattan, plus it has a roller rink! Practice your roller-skating here and get inspired to join the roller derby by reading Roller Derby: The History of an American Sport by Michella Marino, which weaves together oral histories, personal experiences and archival materials, accompanied by illustrations. 

In Crown Heights’ Brower Park, you'll find a beautiful monarch butterfly garden built by the community and the Friends of Brower Park. I recommend spending an afternoon with the Brower Park butterflies in the company of Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior. It tells the story of a woman who finds a valley filled with millions of monarch butterflies on a hike one day, and grapples with larger themes of climate change. 

Canarsie Park, tucked just alongside Belt Parkway and overlooking Fresh Creek Basin, gets its name from the Canarsie (or Canarsee) Indians who lived in this area until Dutch settlers took it over. It is likely that the Canarsee had a burial ground where the park currently stands. While not a book specifically about the Canarsee themselves, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides a 400-year overview of our nation's history through a native lens. 

Make your way over to Coney Island Creek Park with Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. This collection contains 18 of the famous Danish writer’s dark stories, including his original version of "The Little Mermaid" (which does not have the happy ending and bouncy spirit of the familiar Disney version). Nothing better than reading about an iconic mermaid right near the home of the iconic Mermaid Parade. You can also imagine Andersen’s ugly duckling paddling through Coney Island Creek, the sole remaining creek in the area. 

When visiting Brooklyn’s oldest park, Commodore Barry Park (established in 1836), you might think of Commodore Barry himself, who is credited as “The Father of the American Navy.” But you also may think of the navy and its industry more generally, as this park sits right next to the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Curious to learn more? Read Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, a novel about a woman working in the Navy Yards during its heyday in World War II. Fun fact: Egan conducted some of the book's research at BPL’s very own the Center for Brooklyn History! 

Let's stay along the waterfront and go from one of Brooklyn’s oldest parks to one of its newest: Domino Park, which opened in 2018 and is located at the Domino Sugar Refinery site. You can reckon with the violent and complicated legacy of the global sugar trade and industry by reading Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones. Its title refers to the process of growing, burning and cutting sugarcane in 1930s Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the wake of the Parsley Massacre. 

Dyker Beach Park dates all the way back to 1895 (although it was used as public land by the Canarsee Indians and as “common land” by the Dutch settlers long before that, since it was a bit too marshy to be farmable). It was designed to be “the only seaside park in Great New York” and, according to the Parks Department’s 1896 annual report, would be “the finest seaside park in the world.” While it’s no longer the only seaside park and may not even be the finest, you can still lose yourself at sea while you’re there. Bring along Alvaro Mutis’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, a compilation of novellas by the Colombian author. Maqroll is a marauding sailor which the New York Review of Books describes as a “Don Quixote for our day.” Sail the world with the Gaviero while you sit alongside the sea! 

The iconic Fort Greene Park is famous for many things, including its monument paying tribute to Revolutionary War prisoners and for being the stomping grounds of Walt Whitman and Spike Lee. There’s already so much going on in this park, I decided to keep things simple and pair its rolling hills with an entertaining book featuring a green cover: The Guest by Emma Cline. 

If you’ve ever been to Marine Park, you know that golf is among one of the MANY activities available there (bocce courts, hiking trails and soccer fields, to name a few others). Take a book break with The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, who coined the quote, “golf is a good walk spoiled.” Be sure to read “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” so you can get frog-racing inspiration for when you’re done with your spoiled walk—I mean… your round of golf. 

Green-Wood Cemetery deserves a place on this list for being not only a cemetery but a world-renowned arboretum with the largest collection of mature trees in New York City. Given its incredibly vast size, Green-Wood gets two books to accompany it: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, for a spooky read while you sit among the ghosts, and the children’s book Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Brooklyn’s own Javaka Steptoe, in honor of the artist Basquiat, who is buried there. 

If you’ve ever been to Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy, you know there’s always a lot going on—picnics, basketball, music, etc. They even have their own dance studio! Similarly, Greek tragedies also always have a lot going on—someone is always plotting to kill their own spouse, overthrow the ruler, commit adultery.....you get the idea. Herbert Von King is also home to a lovely outdoor amphitheater, so you can read Sophocles’s Antigone in a setting similar to where it would have been performed in Ancient Greece. Read about exile, illicit burials and fights to the death while many (happier) activities unfold around you. 

Highland Park can mainly be found in Queens, but its western edge dips into Cypress Hills and some more of the northeast edge of Brooklyn. Within its boundaries you'll find a World War I monument titled “Dawn of Glory” and since it's so far east in the borough, it's probably a good spot to watch the sun rise. Go for an early morning read with Dawn, the first sci-fi novel in Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood trilogy. 

Lincoln Terrace (also called Arthur S. Somers Park) can be found in Brownsville and Crown Heights and is a fabulous place to go for a long stroll or play a tennis match on one of its 11 hard-surface courts. Once you’ve completed your game-set-match, settle down on a bench and read All the President’s Men by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Why? Because Lincoln Terrace is one of two NYC parks named for 16th United States president Abraham Lincoln AND because President Street bisects it. 

Located in Bushwick, Maria Hernandez Park was renamed in 1989 for the Brooklynite and community leader who worked to rid her block of drug trafficking by organizing block parties, cultural gatherings and more. To honor her work to end the violence caused by drugs, read the nuanced take on the topic by Zavala Oswaldo (translated by William Savinar): Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. A political and cultural analysis of the “war on drugs,” it unpacks the structures of our society that fuel and obscure the reality of violence that the drug trade creates. 

While trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is most closely associated with Manhattan’s West Village and her activism in the uprisings at the Stonewall Inn, there is indeed a park named in her honor in Brooklyn! And Brooklyn very much has its own rich LGBT history, which you can read about in Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer. Marsha P. Johnson State Park overlooks the East River, a fitting setting for a novel that explores the relationship between queer communities and the waterfront. 

Greenpoint’s McCarren Park was originally Williamsburg Park from 1903-1906, then had another three-year stint as Greenpoint Park. It was finally renamed in 1909 after Patrick Henry McCarren, a New York politician born to Irish parents who cut his teeth in the sugar and barrel-making industries in North Brooklyn. In honor of this park’s Irish working class heritage, I point you towards a book-movie combo: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and the accompanying film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan, telling the story of a young Irish woman who comes to Brooklyn and is torn between two places: not Greenpoint and Williamsburg, like this park’s neighborhood allegiances, but Brooklyn and Ireland. 

The City of Brooklyn built a reservoir in 1856 on Mount Prospect and had originally planned for it to be included in Olmsted’s Prospect Park. Ultimately, it was decided that Flatbush Avenue would cut it off too much from the rest of the park to be cohesive and thus, Mount Prospect Park was born! The city maintained the reservoir, which supplied Brooklyn with water, until it became obsolete in 1936 when they began to source our water supply from upstate. To think more about our drinking water and where it comes from, try reading Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen. Owen’s book is specifically about water systems out West, but it’s a good practice in thinking about one of our critical and limited resources that we often take for granted. 

Prospect Park isn’t Brooklyn’s biggest park (that superlative goes to the aforementioned Marine Park), but it may be its most famous. For this list's book pairing, I've chosen The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Before you groan, hear me out! I picked Salinger’s most famous novel for three-fold reasons. First, for its sibling dynamic: Prospect Park was designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the same duo that designed Manhattan’s Central Park a few years prior. And the two parks are very much cut from the same cloth. I, however, like to think of Prospect Park as the younger, cooler sibling. A big theme in The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield’s relationship with his younger sister, who he views as a lot more grounded, well-balanced, and kinder than himself. Second, the book and the park are both classics—if you’re visiting Brooklyn, Prospect Park is a stop you don’t want to miss. Finally, there is so much talk of parks themselves throughout the novel, specifically the Other Olmstead Park in Manhattan. Read about Caulfield’s duck pond musings while you watch the Prospect Park swans swim around the lake and wonder where they go in the winter. 

Sunset Park bears the same name as its neighborhood and offers views of the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island and New Jersey, as well as the diverse streets of Sunset Park itself. In the park of sunsets, you should read Dorothy Parker’s 1928 collection of poems, Sunset Gun. It includes the perfect poem to read when you start your day at the park, “Thought for a Sunshiny Morning.” 

Some of the highest ground in New York City (about 130 feet above sea level) can be found in Shirley Chisholm State Park, on the very southeastern edge of Brooklyn. As you may have guessed, it's named for beloved Bed-Stuy Brooklynite and first ever Black woman to be elected to US Congress: Shirley Chisholm. While wandering her namesake park, read the former congresswoman’s own words in Unbought and Unbossed, where Chisholm blends memoir, political analysis and criticism to discuss her own political journey and the US governmental system overall.