These 2 Brooklyn landmarks are NYC’s most underrated sites to visit

November 29, 2023 Mary Frost

Plymouth Church’s statue of Henry Ward Beecher was sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who created Mount Rushmore. Photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle

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Two historic Brooklyn institutions have topped the list of New York City’s most “underrated” landmarks by Viator, a TripAdvisor company.

Green-Wood Cemetery (Greenwood Heights/South Slope) and Plymouth Church (Brooklyn Heights) came in at numbers one and two after Viator’s experts analyzed reviews on TripAdvisor and compared them to the number of hashtags they received on Instagram — resulting in a list of the most amazing NYC sights that fly under the radar on social media.

Green-Wood Cemetery’s landmarked gates are an iconic sight. Photo: Lore Croghan, Brooklyn Eagle

With more than 61 million tourists visiting the city in 2023 (all of them seemingly packed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the highest-rated tourist destination in Brooklyn overall), visitors may want to seek out these less crowded attractions, Viator says.

Number One: Green-Wood Cemetery

Green-Wood — a tree-filled, 478-acre tranquil respite which has been designated as a National Historic Landmark — was founded in 1838. By the early 1860s Green-Wood was the nation’s second-most popular tourist attraction (following Niagara Falls), attracting 500,000 visitors a year when the entire population of the U.S. was only 31.4 million.

Here lies Henry Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA. Photo: Lore Croghan, Brooklyn Eagle

Families would meet at Green-Wood for picnics, walks and carriage rides; the cemetery’s popularity helped inspire the creation of public parks, including Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The tree-filled site is also a stop for migrating birds.

Today, attracting almost 450,000 visitors a year, Green-Wood is known not only as a cemetery but also as a historical resource, a place to reconnect with nature and an outdoor museum, filled with notable works of sculpture and architecture.

Magnolia trees in bloom at Green-Wood Cemetery. Photo: Lore Croghan, Brooklyn Eagle

Many of the country’s luminaries are interred there, including musician Leonard Bernstein, publisher Horace Greeley and author Frank Morgan (“The Wizard of Oz”), Civil War generals, artists from Asher B. Durand to Jean-Michel Basquiat, and rogues including Boss Tweed and Gambino crime family leader Alberto Anastasia. The cemetery has its own historian and artist-in-residence.

As spectacular as Green-Wood is, it seems to have been overlooked by the Instagram generation, with only 1,029 hashtags despite five-star reviews.

Plymouth Church’s sanctuary seats 2,800. Photo courtesy of Plymouth Church

Number Two: Plymouth Church

The landmarked Plymouth Church, at 75 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, was founded in 1847 as a Congregational church. Plymouth’s first pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, was a charismatic minister — and the most famous man in America during his day. His fiery preaching and opposition to slavery filled the pews, so much so that when a fire damaged the original sanctuary, a new one was built seating 2,800.

Beecher staged mock slave auctions from the sacristy, urging the congregation to purchase the freedom of actual slaves including Sally Maria Diggs, a 9-year-old child nicknamed “Pinky” for her light complexion. Congregants threw money and jewelry into the collection plate to buy her from the slave traders. (Beecher was also embroiled in a salacious adultery trial, which sold a lot of newspapers and ended in a hung jury, the church reports).

Historical evidence shows the church was likely the Underground Railroad’s “Grand Central Depot” in Brooklyn during the 19th century. Abraham Lincoln sat in Pew 89, today marked by a small plaque.

The Music Room at Plymouth Church. Photo: Mary Frost, Brooklyn Eagle

The sanctuary’s stained glass windows, designed by artists including Frederick Stymetz Lamb and Louis C. Tiffany, are recognized as artistic treasures. The sanctuary also features an Aeolian-Skinner organ, installed in 1904 and one of the largest in the country. Noted musicians including Philip Glass and Charlemagne Palestine have given performances on this unique instrument. The statue of Henry Ward Beecher in the church’s front yard, and a bas-relief of Abraham Lincoln in the garden, were sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who created Mount Rushmore.

Talk about underrated — Plymouth Church received only nine Instagram hashtags, despite sterling reviews. Viator calls it a “hidden gem” which defies the conventional tourist radar, making it a top “underrated” destination.

See below for the other sites on Viator’s list of the most underrated attractions in the city: