Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Eastern Parkway and Two Children's Museums

Eastern Parkway was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and built between 1870 and 1874. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission and Parks Department credit it as the world's first parkway designed for recreational rather than commercial traffic. It was designated a New York City scenic landmark on August 22, 1978, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 26, 1983. The West Indian Day Parade, the Labor Day Carnival, has been held along it since approximately 1968 and draws an estimated one to three million participants a year.

At 770 Eastern Parkway stands a building put up in 1920 as a medical office and bought in 1940 by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as headquarters and residence for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. It remains the movement's world headquarters and a working synagogue open to the public, with a yeshiva and the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad, and it has carried a continuous livestream of activity since 1999.

In August 1991 the neighborhood was the site of three days of unrest. On the 19th, a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson ran a red light and struck two Guyanese-American children, killing seven-year-old Gavin Cato. In the unrest that followed, over the 19th to the 21st, Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Australian Jewish student, was fatally stabbed. The riot left two dead, 152 police officers and 38 civilians injured, 129 arrests and roughly $1 million in property damage, and became a significant factor in Mayor David Dinkins' defeat in 1993.

North of the parkway, the Crown Heights North Historic District was listed on the National Register on March 31, 2014, with a boundary expansion added on March 11, 2016 that brought in roughly 600 more buildings, among them properties associated with Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress. The district covers 102.86 acres and 1,019 contributing buildings developed between about 1853 and 1942.

The Brooklyn Children's Museum has been operating since 1899. It sits at 145 Brooklyn Avenue, on the same block as Brower Park, with interactive exhibits, art studios and STEM makerspaces, and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm.

Brower Park itself is a T-shaped city park of roughly four acres between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues, running from St. Marks Avenue to Park Place. The city acquired its southern portion in 1892, when it was called Bedford Park, and renamed it in 1921 for George Vanderhoof Brower, a former Brooklyn and Queens parks commissioner. It holds a 1919 World War I memorial, a concrete skate park that opened in September 2011 as the second in Brooklyn, a monarch butterfly garden added in 2014, and the Shirley Chisholm Circle of 2016.

A different children's museum sits on Eastern Parkway. The Jewish Children's Museum, at 792 Eastern Parkway, is closed Fridays and Saturdays, and open Monday to Thursday and Sunday.

On the Franklin Avenue corridor at the western side of the neighborhood, Mayfield has been open at 688 Franklin Avenue since 2012, and Chavela's, at 736 Franklin Avenue, lists hours of 11am to 11pm seven days a week. Both addresses sit close to the line commonly drawn between Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, which no source settles.

The IRT Eastern Parkway Line runs beneath the parkway, and its stations are in Crown Heights. Franklin Avenue-Medgar Evers College, at Franklin Avenue and Eastern Parkway, is the largest: the 2, 3, 4 and 5 call there, along with the Franklin Avenue Shuttle on the BMT Franklin Avenue Line. Nostrand Avenue, at Nostrand Avenue and Eastern Parkway, and Kingston Avenue, at Kingston Avenue and Eastern Parkway, are each served by the 3 at all times except late nights, the 4 late nights, and the 2 and 5 with limited rush-hour service. Crown Heights-Utica Avenue, signed simply as Utica Avenue, has the 4 at all times, the 3 at all times except late nights, and the same limited 2 and 5 service.

One caution about that name. A second station called Utica Avenue, on the IND Fulton Street Line and served by the A and C, is a different station at Utica Avenue and Fulton Street, and its source places it in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

On the IRT Nostrand Avenue Line, President Street-Medgar Evers College, at President Street and Nostrand Avenue, is served by the 2 at all times and the 5 on weekdays.