Bay Ridge is about water. The views from the Shore Road esplanades are breathtaking. But best of all is at the northern end of the community, at 68th Street, where one finds the 27-acre Owl’s Head Park, an official name I prefer to the more common name among the locals, Bliss Park – though the park indeed offers bliss. The locals call it that because the park occupies land that was part of the mansion and grounds of E.W. Bliss, a major Brooklyn industrialist. Bliss in turn took over the house and grounds from Henry Murphy.

Marty Markowitz likes to call himself “Mr. Brooklyn.” But if ever there has been a Mr. Brooklyn, it was Murphy. Murphy founded the Daily Eagle, built the Hotel Brighton, steered the Brooklyn Bridge through the state Legislature, helped found the Long Island Historical Society – you get the idea. Senator Street, named for state senator Murphy, runs east from the park. Local lore has it that Murphy’s grounds had an entrance with gateposts adorned with owls’ heads.

However that may be, the park, like Fort Greene Park, is a hill, verdant and lovely in all ways yet with the added kick that from its summit one may survey more of the harbor than from anywhere else on the southern coast of Brooklyn. It’s a thrill that constant repetition does not erode. (Robert Moses opened the park in 1937.) Directly south, a different sort of view may be had from a long public pier jutting far into the Upper Bay. Just to the south of this pier, in the northern part of the series of esplanades that wraps around Brooklyn to Bensonhurst Park, is the volunteer run Narrows Botanical Garden, a wonderfully diverse set of skillfully conceived and tended gardens, right on the waterfront. It is sheer bliss.