Brooklyn Heights Promenade

This guide to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in New York City opens in 1942, when master builder Robert Moses set out to route the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway straight through the neighborhood's brownstones and backyards. It follows the Brooklyn Heights Association's fight against him, the petitions and packed hearings that refused to let the plan stand as drawn, and the compromise engineers eventually carved into the bluff itself. Truman Capote lived just around the corner and Norman Mailer kept a studio above the bluff, both drawn to this same stretch of Brooklyn.