Brooklyn really asserts itself - architecturally, at any rate - in the area surrounding Prospect Park. A cab ride from downtown Manhattan (about $10) or the #1 or #2 train to Grand Army Plaza is well worth the price to see some excellent urban planning and a lovely green space in the middle of it all.

Explore Prospect Park District and around

Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
1000 Washington Ave. April-Sept Tues-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat & Sun 10am-6pm; Oct-March Tues-Fri 8am-4.30pm, Sat & Sun 10am-4.30pm; $3, free Tues & Sat before noon; tel 718/623-7200, www.bbg.org. #1 or #2 to Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum.

One of the most enticing park spaces in the city, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens , just south of the Brooklyn Museum, is smaller and more immediately likeable than its more celebrated rival in the Bronx, and makes for a relaxing place to unwind after a couple of hours in the museum next door. Some 12,000 plants from around the world occupy 52 acres of manicured terrain. Sumptuous, but not overplanted, it offers a Rose Garden, Japanese Garden, a Shakespeare Garden (laid out with plants mentioned in the Bard's plays), the Celebrity Path (a winding walk studded with leaf-shaped plaques that honor Brooklyn's famous), and some delightful lawns draped with weeping willows and beds of flowering shrubs. A conservatory houses, among other things, the country's largest collection of bonsai, and a gift shop stocks a wide array of exotic plants, bulbs and seeds.

Brooklyn Museum of Art

200 Eastern Parkway. Wed-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 11am-6pm, first Sat of every month 11am-11pm; $6, $3 students; tel 718/638-5000, www.brooklynart.org. #1 or #2 to Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum.

The second-largest art museum in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum of Art seems doomed to stand in the shadow of the Met. A trip through the museum, one of the largest US art museums, with 1.5 million objects in its collection and five floors of exhibits , requires considerable selectivity. The permanent collection includes Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art; Arts of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas; Decorative Arts; Costumes and Textiles; Painting, Sculpture, Prints, Drawings and Photography; and 28 evocative period rooms , ranging from an early American farmhouse to a nineteenth-century Moorish castle.

Look in on the American and European Painting and Sculpture galleries on the top story, which progress from eighteenth-century portraits - including one of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart - and bucolic paintings by members of the Hudson River School to works by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent to pieces by Charles Sheeler and Georgia O'Keefe . A handful of paintings by European artists - Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet and Dufy , among others - are also displayed, although nothing here approaches their best work. You will also find a large collection of Rodin sculptures. The museum's gift shop sells genuine ethnic items from around the world at reasonable prices.

Grand Army Plaza
Laid out in the late nineteenth century, Central Park architects Robert Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Grand Army Plaza as a dramatic approach to their newly completed Prospect Park. The triumphal Soldiers and Sailors' Memorial Arch , which you can climb during spring and autumn (weekends only), was designed in 1892 by John Duncan in tribute to the triumph of the north in the Civil War.

Inside the arch are bas reliefs, including one of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Eakins and one of General Ulysses S. Grant by William O'Donovan, both installed in 1895. The Victory Quadriga (1898), a fiery sculpture atop the arch designed by Frederick William MacMonnies, depicts a rider, chariot, four horses and two heralds.

Prospect Park
Energized by their success with Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux landscaped Prospect Park (tel 718/965-8951, www.prospectpark.org ) in the early 1890s, completing it just as the finishing touches were being put to Grand Army Plaza outside. The park itself is 526 acres, with a sixty-acre lake on the east side, a ninety-acre open meadow on the west side, and completely surrounded by a 3.5-mile two-lane road, which is primarily reserved for runners, cyclists, rollerbladers and the like.

The Prospect Park Zoo (Nov-March 10am-4.30pm; April-Oct Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-5.30pm; $2.50, $1.25 seniors, under 12 50¢) is not a bad place to while away the time, with its richly restored carousel. The park's highlight, however, is the ninety-acre Long Meadow , which cuts through the center of the park. On warm weekends you can find soccer and volleyball matches, families hosting grand picnics and couples reading or romantically entwined.