The BAM corridor

One avenue carries most of the neighbourhood's programmed culture, and it explains why the surrounding blocks look and behave the way they do.

Lafayette Avenue is the reason Fort Greene has the density of theatres, rehearsal spaces and pre-show restaurants that it does. The Brooklyn Academy of Music sits on it, and over the past few decades a cultural district has been assembled around it deliberately — new performance and rehearsal buildings, a public plaza, and a good deal of residential development that followed.

What BAM is

BAM is the oldest continuously operating performing arts centre in the United States, and it programmes far more broadly than the name suggests: opera and dance, yes, but also experimental theatre, a serious repertory and first-run film programme, talks, and music that runs from contemporary classical through to international touring artists.

The two principal rooms are the Howard Gilman Opera House — the ornate one, and the one most people picture — and the BAM Harvey Theater, a deliberately unrestored space a couple of blocks away on Fulton Street whose stripped-back interior has become part of its identity.

The effect on the streets

A large arts institution changes the rhythm of a neighbourhood in specific ways. Restaurants along Fulton and DeKalb fill in a narrow window before curtain and empty again. Bars two blocks off the avenue stay calm while the ones directly on it do not. Weeknights in Fort Greene can be busier than weekends, because that is when the programming is.

The Barclays Center, a few blocks south at Atlantic Avenue, adds a second and much larger pulse to the same streets on event nights, which is worth knowing if you are trying to get a table.

Around the corridor

Fort Greene Park is two blocks north, with the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at its high point and a greenmarket that runs on Saturdays. It is the other pole of the neighbourhood — the corridor programmes culture, the park is where the neighbourhood is simply itself.

The Fort Greene Historic District covers much of the residential grid between them, which is why the side streets carry such a consistent run of nineteenth-century brownstones and why buildings like the Masonic Temple survived intact.

Planning around it

Check BAM's own calendar rather than any third-party listing — seasons are announced well ahead and popular runs sell out. If you are eating before a show, book it, and give yourself more time than the walk suggests.