For the first time in the 30-year history of the Greenest Block in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s block-by-block gardening contest, an apartment-building block won the top prize: as Brooklyn Paper reported, the Crown Heights Keepers, on Eastern Parkway between Bedford and Franklin, took the 2025 title.
Every summer, residential blocks, commercial blocks, and community gardens across Brooklyn enter, and judges from the Botanic Garden walk through scoring them: street-tree beds that are actually planted instead of trampled, window boxes, stoop gardens, container plantings, community gardens, and whether a block worked together to green itself. The prizes are modest, but the bragging rights and the block-party energy of winning matter more.
For most of its history the Greenest Block went to rows of brownstones, with their tree pits and stoops built for gardening. In a borough where most people rent and live in apartments, a winning apartment block matters: you do not need to own a brownstone to make your block the greenest in Brooklyn, you need neighbors willing to do the work.
The 30th-anniversary edition includes more than the contest. The Botanic Garden has put up an exhibit called “Block by Block: Streetscapes,” along with a tribute to “Brooklyn’s Greening Heroes,” both running through late October, and a free Block Party is planned for July 30 to mark the milestone. The winners of the 2026 contest will not be announced until August, so the current champs are still last year’s Crown Heights crew.
Underneath the ribbons, the contest rewards neighbors for taking care of their shared space, where a single planted tree pit makes the whole block feel looked after.
If your block has even a few people who garden, registration runs in the spring, so plan to enter next year. In the meantime you can check out the Botanic Garden’s 30th-anniversary exhibit or stop by the July 30 Block Party.
