1) Park Slope, North & South

This incorporates part of the "Brooklyn 101" tour--Prospect Park and the north part of Park Slope--but includes a more extensive look at the western and southern parts of Park Slope.

We meet in the area of Brooklyn's magnificent Grand Army Plaza, the psychic center of Brooklyn. We visit Prospect Park, which designers Olmsted and Vaux considered more magnificent than their Central Park. We then explore the mansions and row houses of leftish, literary Park Slope, Brooklyn's old Gold Coast.

After a visit to Park Slope's main shopping street, we will walk west in Park Slope to the new Restaurant Row on Fifth Avenue, a place of recent gentrification. We will continue to the historically more working-class South Slope, walking past an old clock factory since turned into housing and streets evoked by the writer Pete Hamill.

2) Park Slope & Gowanus

This incorporates part of the "Brooklyn 101" tour--Prospect Park and Park Slope--but includes a more extensive look at the western fringe of Park Slope, with an extension to Gowanus.

We meet in the area of Brooklyn's magnificent Grand Army Plaza, the psychic center of Brooklyn. We visit Prospect Park, which designers Olmsted and Vaux considered more magnificent than their Central Park. We then explore the mansions and row houses of leftish, literary Park Slope, Brooklyn's old Gold Coast.

After a visit to Park Slope's main shopping street, we will walk west in Park Slope to gentrifying Fifth Avenue, home of several new restaurants and shops. We will visit the Brooklyn Lyceum, a huge former bathhouse which is being renovated into a theater complex. It also has a cafe and some Brooklyn postcards and gear.

Both tours last 2.5 hours. $15/person. Meeting place to be announced.