Which Sunday do you actually clear your calendar for?
That's the real question this fall, and it doesn't have the same answer twice. The Montague Street Business Improvement District and the Brooklyn Heights Association are closing the two-block stretch between Clinton and Hicks Streets to cars from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on seven Sundays this year, running September 13 through October 25. Three of those Sundays have already happened. Four are still ahead, and each one is built around a different event rather than a repeat of the week before. Treat this like a generic farmers-market open street and you'll miss the one Sunday that was actually made for you.
Four Sundays left, four different streets
The back half of the season looks nothing like the front half, and each date has its own reason to show up.
October 4 belongs to the animals. St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church, at 157 Montague, hosts a Feast of St. Francis Blessing of the Animals, open to dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles and whatever else lives in your apartment, regardless of faith. A few doors down at GTHR Yoga, 158 Montague, there's an outdoor yoga session built for pets and their people, no experience required, just a mat and a leash. Donations of bedding, carriers and unopened pet food collected that day go to Brooklyn Cat Café, Animal Care Centers of NYC and Sean Casey Animal Rescue.
October 11 turns the block into a square dance floor. Hopalong Andrew opens with cowboy songs, then caller Sammy Osmund and katydids lead a community square dance from 1 to 4 p.m., with the Brooklyn-based Jalopy Theatre behind the programming. Beginners are explicitly welcome and the moves get taught on the spot, which matters if the last time you square danced was a school gym floor. The Brooklyn Heights Association also runs its free neighborhood walking tours that day at 1 and 3 p.m., meeting in front of Khaosan Thai Restaurant at 128 Montague near Henry Street, past the brownstones and Revolutionary War sites that don't usually get pointed out on a normal walk to the subway.
October 18 is for the pickleball players. The Brooklyn Heights Association's annual Montague Open Streets Pickleball Tournament returns with both competitive bracket play and casual games open to whoever wants to pick up a paddle. Registration details were still being finalized as of last week, worth checking montaguebid.com before you show up expecting a spot.
October 25 closes the season, and it closes loud. The Montague Diner Dog Costume Contest brings neighborhood dogs in Halloween gear to the street in front of the diner, while the Brooklyn Heights band Rogue Connections plays folk, rock and original music from 3 to 4 p.m. Kids' art runs from noon to 5 p.m. with Miss Piera and Le Meraviglie Art Studio, alongside giant street chess and oversized sidewalk games. If you only make one Sunday this fall and you have a dog, this is the one built for you.
The Sunday that already lost to something bigger
September 27 was Brooklyn Heights' first-ever Community Tag Sale on Montague, with 40 neighborhood households clearing out closets, shelves and cupboards for secondhand clothing, books, housewares and the odd décor piece nobody in the building wanted anymore. All the seller spots filled before the date arrived, and the BID stopped taking new signups, so what showed up on the street was fixed days in advance rather than a walk-up free-for-all.
It also landed on the same afternoon as the Atlantic Antic, the roughly ten-block street fair that runs from Fourth Avenue to the waterfront along Atlantic Avenue through Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill, one of the borough's oldest and largest single-day festivals. A two-block tag sale and a ten-block borough institution sharing a Sunday isn't really a competition. For anyone who lives close enough to walk both, the smarter read of that Sunday was less "pick one" and more "start on Montague, then let it feed you south toward Atlantic Avenue," since the tag sale never needed to be the whole afternoon on its own.
It's a small piece of scheduling, but it says something true about how this season is built. Not every Sunday on the Montague calendar is meant to carry equal weight. Some are the main event. Others are a warm lap before the bigger one a few blocks away.
Halloween falls on a Saturday, and the parade moves with it
Halloween lands on Saturday, October 31 this year, which matters more than it sounds like it should. The Brooklyn Heights Association's annual Halloween Parade on the Promenade has run on the Sunday closest to Halloween in recent years, October 26 in 2025 and October 28 in 2023, gathering at the north end near Orange Street and marching south to Remsen. This year, with Halloween itself falling on a weekend day, the parade steps off on the actual date, October 31 at 10:30 a.m., starting at the north end of the Promenade and marching to the south end, where a bake sale caps the morning.
The shift means the Montague Open Streets season and the Halloween Parade no longer overlap the way they have in past years, when the parade fed directly into the season's final open Sunday. This year the open streets calendar wraps October 25, and Halloween arrives six days later as its own separate morning, standing on its own rather than closing out the same stretch of car-free Sundays.
If you're new to the neighborhood or just haven't tracked the parade before, the route hasn't changed even as the date has. It still starts at the north Promenade entrance, not Clark Street, a correction the Association has had to make more than once in past years when the starting point got mixed up in early announcements.
None of this is a reason to move to Brooklyn Heights or a pitch about what the neighborhood is worth. It's just what's actually happening on your own street this fall, week by week, and which Sundays are worth the walk down to Montague.
If you want the specific date confirmed before a Sunday sneaks up on you, montaguebid.com keeps the live schedule, and Sharma NY is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here, whether or not real estate ever comes up.
