If you live anywhere near the 2/3 line in Brooklyn and don't have a membership to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, you should probably consider reevaluating things.
If you are over, say, 23 years old and have developed a moderate sensitivity to the most pressing type of pollution in New York City--noise pollution--you will immediately love the place for being an outdoor oasis where noise is drastically reduced. Sure, Prospect Park is right next to the Garden, but if you go to parks to sit peacefully to think or read, moments that approach actual quiet are far too fleeting in Prospect Park.
Individual admission to the BBG is $12, and yearly membership is $50, so it's one of the best deals in a city with precious few of them. It pays for itself in about four visits. The quiet alone is well worth the price, but the plants, ponds, turtles, fish and birds are impressive too.
There are some issues though, of course, since this is New York City and no experience can be totally free of jarring unpleasantness. Since the entire world is just an open playground for obnoxious children to run and scream in now, and adults have no place in the world, the BBG is of course rife with screaming, running children. This is just the cost of living in New York.
Most days the child groups are tolerably sparse, but some days seemingly every school in Brooklyn has taken a field trip to the BBG. If you visit and this seems to be the case, you're better off just leaving entirely and trying your luck a different day.
A seemingly more controllable issue is the noise generated by the nearly constant lawn and plant maintenance by the dozens upon dozens of staff. Between the hordes of screaming children and the menacing industrial roar of mowers and trimmers, moments of actual quiet are fleeting--not as fleeting as in a public park, but so much so that it is all but impossible to sit outside and think without being interrupted for any meaningful stretch of time.
This need not be the case. There are plenty of products available for even domestic use that operate close to noiselessly. The maintenance equipment used by the industrious staff at the BBG seemingly haven't been updated in decades--they rival the overhead airplanes in noise pollution.
A final issue is the striking disjunction in energies between tourists and members. Tourists, often in somewhat large groups, rush through the place crunching their maps, talking loudly, and generally storming around. They paid $12 a pop to get in, so they are damn well going to march around to every crevice of the place to pose for cell phone pictures in front of every moderately intriguing item. They are damn well going to treat it like an open air museum in which they have vowed to extract every last ounce of gawking value, rather than a serene, green outdoor space where moments of sanity-nurturing quiet may be greedily horded.
Not to sound like an elitist, but there should be a members only space to the BBG, where people who come multiple times a week for the peace it provides can retreat. The difference in energy between people who are treating it like a purchase they want to extract maximal value from, and people who treat it like a home away from home, is simply too stark to be permitted.
The BBG has all the makings of a truly invaluable oasis in an evil city lousy with noise pollution, but it fails in a variety of ways to make good on its tantalizing promise.
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