NYC 2025: Sunset View from Brooklyn Heights

This view exists because of two unrelated decisions made decades apart, in two completely different eras of what the Brooklyn waterfront was for.

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade came first, in the sense that it's older: a 557-metre platform built to cantilever out over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, resolving a wartime dispute over where to route the highway without demolishing the neighborhood above it. The southern half opened to the public in October 1950, the northern half just over a year later — a compromise structure that turned out to have one of the best skyline views in the city.

Pier 1, where the walk starts, has a completely different origin. This stretch of waterfront was a working cargo port for over a century, revitalized in the 1950s with wider piers built for larger ships, then rendered obsolete within twenty years by the rise of container shipping. Piers 1 through 6 sat abandoned from 1983 until a community group's decades-long campaign turned them into Brooklyn Bridge Park — Pier 1 became the first section to open, in March 2010, roughly sixty years after the Promenade a short walk north.

Both places now do the same job: give people a place to stand at sunset and watch the Manhattan skyline and the East River from across the water — the ferry terminal, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the evening crowd that gathers for it regardless of which decade's engineering they happen to be standing on.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not just a skyline, but two pieces of infrastructure built for entirely different reasons that both ended up pointing at the same view.