The Brighton Line — on which the B and Q trains run — is the city’s most picturesque transit corridor. From Prospect Park to Brighton Beach, the line runs variously at surface, upon an embankment, and as an el. Making its way among the shady streets of Flatbush, the line feels like a country railroad. It may be the best “subway” experience in New York. The train also takes you to some pretty interesting destinations, one of which, Sheepshead Bay, provides a perfect summer day trip without leaving the city.

Sheepshead Bay station has wonderful curving platforms, and a series of lovely ceramic murals, “Postcards from Sheepshead Bay” (1998), by DeBorah Goletz. Ms. Goletz’s work was commissioned as part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s inspired Arts for Transit program. Outside the station, Sheepshead Bay Road has a village atmosphere.

The road’s intersection with Jerome Avenue is named for Leonard Jerome, a grandfather of Winston Churchill and a “sporting gentleman” who established his eponymous thoroughbred racetrack in the Bronx in 1865. In 1880, he established the Sheepshead Bay Racetrack, with which nearby courses at Brighton and Gravesend, made this part of southern Kings County (not part of the City of Brooklyn until 1894) the thoroughbred racing capital of America. The Sheepshead Bay course occupied the large site bounded by Jerome, Ocean, and Nostrand avenues and Neck Road.

At the corner of Jerome and Ocean avenues, there’s St. Mark’s, a Roman Catholic church which opened in 1929. We see from its size that by the 1920s, many Catholics lived in the area that had until recently been a resort. The racetracks — and the hotels that served them — closed after 1910 when New York State enacted a short-lived (but deadly) ban on gambling. The owner of what was once the largest apartment building in the world, Manhattan’s Belnord at Broadway and 86th Street, Max Natanson, purchased the 650-acre site. Subdivided into lots, modern Sheepshead Bay came into being, bringing with it thousands of upwardly mobile Catholics and Jews.

If you follow Ocean Avenue past several nondescript postwar apartment houses that nonetheless harbored professional-class families during decades when many older city neighborhoods endured urban strife, under the Belt Parkway viaduct you’ll find yourself in another world. Here’s where the neighborhood becomes the seaside fishing village it’s famed for being. On the right is a lovely 1934 Spanish colonial-style building that housed the legendary Lundy’s — a once-famous eatery that called itself the largest restaurant in the world. Lundy’s, which accommodated 2,500 diners, closed in 1979, but an 800-seat version reopened in 1996. Lundy’s stands at the corner of Ocean and Emmons avenues, the latter running along the bay. Before its present location, Lundy’s was situated on the other side — the water side — of Emmons, where no buildings now stand. The move came from Robert Moses’s rebuilding of the bay waterfront to accommodate piers for fishing vessels. Today, one may take afternoon or evening trips on fishing or excursion boats from these piers. The inland side of Emmons features many restaurants, including the old Italian seafood joint Randazzo’s, several Turkish restaurants (many of New York’s Turkish residents live nearby), and Roll-n-Roaster (2901 Emmons), a vintage 1960s fast-food joint that reminds us that for old Brooklynites, the quintessential beach food isn’t hot dogs, but roast beef sandwiches.

Robert Moses also built a bridge across the bay. For some reason, everyone seems to think it’s the original bridge from the 19th century, put up by hotelier Austin Corbin. But Moses rebuilt that bridge as part of his bay improvements and it’s lately been rebuilt again after collapsing, along with the seawall opposite Emmons Avenue, into the bay in 2005. The city knew of the perilous condition of the seawall, and the collapse reminds us that we still live with the specter of “deferred maintenance” from the 1970s fiscal meltdown. A walk on the bridge across the bay offers lovely views out toward Dead Horse Inlet, and takes you across the bay to the Manhattan Beach neighborhood. The bridge may be back, but the lovely esplanade on the Manhattan Beach side remains closed and has had no apparent work done on it since the collapse.

The racetrack operated on the Sheepshead side of the bay, while Corbin’s magnificent hotels — the Manhattan Beach and the Oriental — operated on the Manhattan Beach side. The hotels’ demise after the gambling ban made way for a splendid neighborhood of comfortable homes for Brooklyn’s professional elite, complete with a beautiful public beach that because of its isolation — and parking bans instigated by local homeowners — has a very private feeling. One neighborhood street bears the name Corbin Place, as well it might given that Corbin once owned the place. Recently, it dawned on some locals that Corbin was one of his era’s most vicious anti-Semites, who forbade Jews at his hotels. Controversy ensued over renaming the street, which runs through a largely Jewish area that has been home to many Holocaust survivors over the years. In my view, retaining the name would bring the greater ignominy to Corbin’s legacy.