Eastern Parkway

Eastern Parkway is a tree-lined boulevard extending from Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park eastward through Crown Heights to Ralph Avenue, encompassing approximately 63.64 acres of landscaped medians, pedestrian promenades, and planted margins. It was the first parkway in the world, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1870 as a grand approach to Prospect Park.

Olmsted and Vaux conceived the parkway as an extension of the park experience: a landscaped corridor that would carry the serenity and beauty of the park into the surrounding neighborhoods. The design featured a central roadway flanked by tree-shaded pedestrian promenades and service roads, a model that was replicated in parkway designs across the country.

The parkway is lined by some of Brooklyn's most significant cultural institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum (one of the largest art museums in the United States), the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Public Library's central branch, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum.

Eastern Parkway is the route of the annual West Indian American Day Carnival and Parade, held on Labor Day. The event is the largest parade in North America, drawing over one million participants and spectators for a celebration of Caribbean culture that includes music, dance, elaborate costumes, and food from across the Caribbean diaspora.

The neighborhoods along the parkway, particularly Crown Heights, are among the most culturally diverse in the world, home to the world's largest Lubavitch Hasidic community, a large Caribbean American population, and growing numbers of newcomers from Africa, South Asia, and other regions.

Eastern Parkway is both a work of landscape architecture and a living expression of Brooklyn's extraordinary diversity. Olmsted and Vaux's original vision of a democratic public corridor has been fulfilled in ways they could never have imagined, as the parkway hosts one of the world's great multicultural celebrations each year.