The Dyker Heights Christmas Lights, Street by Street

There is no entrance, no centre and no signpost. That is the whole difficulty with this place: people arrive at the right neighbourhood and walk the wrong streets. Here is what is on each of them.

84th Street, 11th to 12th Avenue

This is the block. It is where Lucy Spata put up the first display in 1986, it is where the largest houses are, and it is where every guided group is taken first. Allow twenty to twenty-five minutes for it alone, more if it is busy, because you will keep stopping.

Three houses on it are worth knowing by number. 1152 is the Spata house, still decorated, still carrying the angels she puts up for her mother. 1145 is the Polizzotto house, one of the biggest displays on the street. And 1135 is the Saitta House, a Queen Anne of 1899 on the National Register of Historic Places, which most of the people photographing the block have no idea they are standing in front of. All three are private homes; the history page explains how they got here.

83rd Street, 11th to 12th Avenue

One block north and nearly as good, with large front gardens and a lot of animated figures. It is consistently less crowded than 84th, which on a Saturday evening in December is worth more than a slightly smaller display.

If you are walking a loop, take 83rd on the way back rather than the way out. You will have the pavement more or less to yourself while the group that arrived with you is still working along 84th.

The first two blocks carry most of what people come for. The last two are where you go when the first two are full.

12th Avenue, between the streets

The connecting avenue, decorated in patches rather than solidly, and where the food trucks and the ice-cream vans tend to park. It is worth walking rather than cutting through, partly for the displays and mostly for the hot chocolate.

85th and 86th Streets

Thinner, and deliberately worth your time for that reason. Fewer displays, far fewer people, and 86th is on your way to the R train anyway. If you have an hour and the core blocks are three deep, spending fifteen minutes here is a better trade than queuing.

Bay Ridge, immediately west

Bay Ridge, the next neighbourhood over, has decorated streets of its own, quieter and much less photographed. Only one of the coach departures takes it in as part of the walking hour, and if you have seen 84th Street before it is the freshest thing on offer.

The hill, and what it does to your plan

Dyker Heights is named for a hill and the display sits on the high ground, around Eleventh Avenue and 82nd Street. The gradient is gentle in any single block and noticeable across an hour, especially standing still in the cold. There are no benches anywhere on the route.

If that is a problem for anyone in your party, it is worth knowing that coaches cannot enter these streets at all — so a coach ticket always means the walk. A private car is the only option that can drive the blocks with you in it.

What is on the avenues, and what is not

The avenues carry the traffic and the trade rather than the biggest displays. Eleventh is the quieter of the two and the better one to walk if you want to look at houses; Twelfth is where the vans park and where you will actually buy something. Thirteenth marks the eastern edge, and beyond it the density falls away quickly.

Walking an avenue between two streets costs you five minutes and saves you doubling back, which over an hour is the difference between seeing four blocks and seeing three.

A half-hour version

1. Start at 84th Street and 11th Avenue.
2. Walk east to 12th Avenue, slowly.
3. Turn north one block.
4. Walk back west along 83rd.

That is the two best blocks and nothing wasted. It is more or less what a guide does with the first half of the hour before letting a group wander, which tells you it is the right shape.

Where the food and drink actually is

Mostly on 12th Avenue and on the corners of the two main streets. Households set up tables and tents in their driveways selling hot chocolate for a few dollars, and one traveller describes ice-cream vans running snow machines while they sell hot drinks. Another counted food trucks on almost every corner.

All of it is cash and none of it is in any tour fare. There is nowhere on the route to draw money and nothing takes a card, so bring small notes before you leave Midtown. The holiday markets page covers what is on sale here and the real winter market several tours finish at.

Photographing the blocks

Everything works against you and it still comes out well. It is dark, the subjects are light sources, the crowd is moving and you are cold. The two things that help most are bracing the camera against something solid and turning the flash off — a flash lights the railings and kills the display behind them.

The quieter blocks are better for photographs than the famous ones, simply because you can stand still. 83rd Street early in the evening and the stretches beyond 85th give you room. And these are homes: photograph the display, not through the windows.

Getting between the blocks without doubling back

The grid does the work. The streets run east to west and the avenues north to south, so a rectangle covers everything without repeating a step. Walking out along one street and back along the next is the whole trick, and it is why the loop takes an hour rather than ninety minutes.

If you arrived by train, finish on the side you need. Coming off the R at 86th Street you can walk in along 86th and out along 84th; coming off the D at 79th you can reverse it. Getting there has both approaches, and the dates page covers which nights are worth the effort.

What the residents ask while you are there

Stay on the pavement, keep the noise down after nine, photograph the display rather than the windows, and take your rubbish with you. Brooklyn Community Board 10's district manager puts it as one sentence: everyone should be mindful that this is a residential community. Forty years in, that is still the only rule anybody has asked for.

Knowing the blocks is most of it; the rest is getting there and back. Every departure is on Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Tours.