Best Streets to Live on in Brooklyn

Brooklyn's best blocks are not where the borough's reputation would put them.

Downtown Brooklyn and the Heights hold the borough's best block and the deepest bench behind it. Red Hook Lane grades 93. Behind it come Willoughby Street at 86, Pineapple Street at 85 and Willow Street at 81, all ordinary mixed blocks.

Brighton Beach comes next, on two blocks almost nobody names. Oceana Drive West grades 92 and Oceana Drive East null, second and third in Brooklyn, both with quiet scores in the nineties, and both are gated developments of 6 buildings apiece.

East Williamsburg and Gravesend supply the rest of the tier: Montieth Street at 82, another 2-building development, and West 12th Street at 83, which is a genuine 301-building residential street and the highest-graded one of that kind in south Brooklyn.

Notice any notable streets missing? The two brownstone neighborhoods that scream 'Brooklyn' don't place near the top at all. Park Slope's best block is 11th Street at 78, and the best in Carroll Gardens and Red Hook is Creamer Street at 75.

Fifth Avenue in Park Slope comes out the best-graded famous street in the borough, at 75, and that is due to the thousands of people who live on the avenue: the restaurants and the R train nearby are considered access rather than friction.

Smith Street scores far better than its reputation predicts, and the basis is worth stating because the number surprises people. It scores 88 on quiet across 203 buildings holding 866 homes, ranked against other streets of its type, and that score covers the whole run from Atlantic Avenue down to 9th Street. The bar strip is a few blocks of it; the rest is residential Carroll Gardens, and those blocks pull the corridor's figure up. It fails on traffic, at 27.

Bedford Avenue finishes last of the eleven: 31 on quiet and 9 on cleanliness, both near the floor. Its 49 overall BestageStreet score comes from those two scores dragging the grade down, not from how busy it looks. Every street in the table is scored across its whole length, and in a borough this shape that matters. Bedford Avenue runs from Williamsburg to Sheepshead Bay under one number, and Myrtle Avenue is graded on its Brooklyn stretch only, stopping at the Queens line.

Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway are missing, and not because they score badly. The city files them as parkways rather than streets, so they sit outside the ranked set. If you are choosing between them and a numbered block nearby, the block is the one we can grade.

A neighborhood average hides more than it shows in a borough this size, so this section groups Brooklyn by what the numbers actually say rather than by the map. Every figure below is an average across the graded streets in the ZIP code named, so you can check any of them yourself.

Downtown and the Heights post the highest neighborhood figure in Brooklyn, and they get there on access rather than calm: the transit score averages 88 in 11201 while the quiet score averages 52. Park Slope's 11215 posts the strongest traffic-safety average in the borough at 71 and a cleanliness average of 29. The quiet south holds the calm and gives up transit for it: Marine Park averages 66 on quiet and 14 on transit.

In 11201, Red Hook Lane sits at the top and John Street grades 40 at the bottom, with Johnson Street at 37 on a traffic-safety score of 1 in between. In the north, Montieth Street posts a traffic-safety score of 97 while Morgan Avenue in the same ZIP set scores 0 on the same measure and grades 29. Williamsburg's own best street is not the waterfront: it is Lee Avenue at the south end, grading 77 with quiet at 99 and cleanliness at 95.

Brooklyn holds 208 blocks scoring 85 or higher on quiet, and they sit mostly south and east, where density drops and through-traffic thins.

East 6th Street in Brighton Beach and Poly Place in Bay Ridge both post a perfect 100, with West 5th Street at 98, Lee Avenue, Creamer Street and Bethel Loop level with it. West 12th Street in Gravesend, Wharf Way, Oceana Drive East and Prospect Park Southwest all read 98. West 5th Street is worth pausing on: 366 buildings and 3,584 homes, which is a real Gravesend street rather than a development, and it scores level with the towers.

Ditmas Park does not read the way it is sold. It shares 11226 with Flatbush, and the ZIP code's 42 graded streets average 32 on quiet. Albemarle Road, its signature block, scores 14 and Cortelyou Road, the strip everyone walks it from, scores 34. Both are whole-street numbers, the same caveat we put on Bedford Avenue: Albemarle Road runs roughly a mile and a half east of Prospect Park and Cortelyou Road further still, so the Victorian blocks and everything past them sit under one score each. The outer-borough quiet guide has the full case.

The loud end holds no surprises: Berry Street on the Williamsburg waterfront scores 8, and North 6th Street 22. The Brooklyn young-professionals guide works through the Bedford Avenue block-by-block case.

Safety here means traffic. The score counts injuries and deaths in NYPD collision records against the homes and businesses on the street, and it says nothing about crime.

Brooklyn averages 49, middle of the pack, and holds 185 blocks scoring 85 or higher, the second-largest supply in the city behind Staten Island. Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights takes a perfect 100, with Montieth Street, 96th Street in Bay Ridge, Oceana Drive West and 11th Street in Park Slope all at 90 or above.

The neighborhood that comes out on top is Park Slope, with its 11215 ZIP code averaging 71 on traffic safety, well above the borough. Short blocks, slow traffic and a very large number of front doors explain it.

The corridors pay for it, and so do some very quiet blocks. Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights scores 98 on quiet and 10 on traffic safety. Quentin Road scores 87 and 10. Fillmore Avenue scores 3, and it is not the floor: Morgan Avenue, Tillary Street and Flatlands Avenue all score 0 outright.

The scores narrow Brooklyn down fast. The hard part is that they leave you with so many good blocks, scattered across a borough that changes character every few stops. A way to cut further:

1. Name your trade. Nightlife and energy, or quiet and space? Short commute, or more apartment? Brooklyn forces the choice more than any other borough.
2. Mind the train. The line matters as much as the address, and the numbers agree: 11201 averages 88 on transit access and Marine Park's 11234 averages 14. A few neighborhoods, Greenpoint among them, ride on a single line.
3. Set a floor. Every friction score is a rank inside a street's own type, so 50 is the middle of that band; below it on quiet the block sits in the louder half of streets like it, and below it on traffic safety in the more dangerous half. Transit, food access and trees are ranked against the whole city instead.
4. Then go walk it. Shortlist three to five areas on scores and commute, then walk the actual blocks at night and on a weekend before you decide.

Our tools are built for exactly this. The map shows Brooklyn scores street by street, the compare pages put Park Slope next to Carroll Gardens, and the street reports drill into a specific address, column by column.

If you want the calm without the transit penalty, Bay Ridge is the corner of south Brooklyn that keeps both: its 11209 averages 62 on the quiet score and 61 on transit access, where Marine Park pairs a higher quiet score with a transit average of 14. Brighton Beach is the other, on the strength of the Oceana blocks.