How Healthy Is Your Neighborhood?
Bay Ridge
Score: 38/50
Available Green Space: 9
From Owl’s Head to Cannonball Park by the Verrazano Bridge, the neighborhood has 90 almost-uninterrupted acres of waterfront parkland, rife with majestic harborviews and tree-shrouded trails. While this is ample parkland, if you live on the eastern edges of the neighborhood, it’s less easily accessed, and there’s not much more green space to explore.
Fresh Air: 6
While it has the waterfront access people crave, unfortunately all of the area’s harbor-adjacent parkland is also adjacent to parkway. Thanks, Robert Moses, for that redundant road and air pollution! The neighborhood in fact is ringed by highways, giving it its curious guitar-pick shape, but they’re avoidable by traveling away from the edges and toward its prettiest suburban residential streets.
Bicycling Infrastructure: 5
The city’s bike-share program has spread out to where the tourists and gentrifiers live, but the residents of our farther-flung neighborhoods could use easy access to quick-loan bipedals just as badly—if not more so! Colonial and Shore roads aren’t heavily trafficked, which makes their bike lanes ideal for north-south trips, but they’re more scenic than practical. What Bay Ridge needs are lanes going east-west, so that people can safely enter and exit. Residents have their own ideas for where those lanes should go, but so does the DOT, which has resulted in a years-long standstill.
Gyms: 8
Does Bay Ridge got gyms? C’mon, brah. It’s got gyms like it’s got tanning salons. (No, but seriously, there are a bunch.) It also has several miles of uninterrupted waterfront bike and jogging paths, which make it an ideal place to exercise outside for free.
Healthy Food Availability: 7
The renovated top-floor of the Foodtown has become the neighborhood go-to for the health-conscious with its abundance of organic and veg-friendly offerings. Also, a neighborhood that just a few years ago was crying about having too few supermarkets now seems to have a glut, all of which offer fresh produce, complementing the many green markets and the growing-but-still-storefrontless local food coop. There’s a farmer’s market on Saturdays (June to November) and health food stores like the old-fashioned Appletree, with its narrow aisles and wooden shelves stacked with vitamin supplements.