Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Guided Tour
Restroom on boardLicensed guideHeated vehicle
From $63 per person
How to See the Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
Short answer. It is free and there is no ticket. Go between the Thanksgiving weekend and early January, arrive between six and eight in the evening, and give it an hour on foot. There is no subway station in the neighbourhood, so either walk fifteen minutes from the D or the R, or book a coach from Midtown for $45 to $95.
Three things surprise people about this evening, and all three are worth knowing before you set out. Nothing costs anything. Nobody is in charge. And the subway does not go there.
The first thing: it is free, and there is nothing to book
The Dyker Heights Christmas lights are on private houses along public streets. There is no gate, no barrier, no admission and no ticket. You can walk the blocks on any evening of the season without paying a cent, and none of the households asks you for anything.
What that means practically is that anything you see advertised as a ticket is a transport ticket. It buys a seat on a coach from Manhattan, a guide, and a ride home — which is a genuinely useful thing to buy, but it is not admission. What the evening involves covers the difference properly, and Dyker Heights Christmas Lights guided tour is what the fares here are buying.
The second thing: the subway does not reach it
Dyker Heights is one of the few Brooklyn neighbourhoods with no station of its own. The lines run along its edges and stop short: the R along Fourth Avenue to the west, the D and the N along New Utrecht Avenue to the east. Whichever you take, you finish on foot.
From Times Square, allow forty-five to fifty-five minutes on the train and another ten to fifteen walking, uphill, at the far end. That is not difficult and it is not dangerous. It is simply longer than most people plan for, and it is the reason a hundred thousand visitors a year arrive by coach. Getting there has the two station walks in detail.
Four ways to reach the same dozen blocks. The cheapest and the easiest are not the same option.
| Way in | Door to door from Midtown | What you pay | Walking |
|---|---|---|---|
| D train to 79th Street | About an hour | Two subway fares | 10–15 min each way |
| R train to 86th Street | About 70 minutes | Two subway fares | 10–15 min each way |
| Rideshare | 35–60 minutes | Surge pricing after dark | None |
| Coach from Midtown | Collected at a fixed corner | $45–$95 per person | The guided hour |
The third thing: nobody is in charge of the lights
There is no organiser, no committee and no published schedule. About eighty households put displays up because they want to, on domestic timers they set themselves. Most come on around dusk — half past four to five in December — and most go off around ten at night.
That is why no honest guide will give you a switch-on date. What everyone can tell you is the pattern: up in the last days of November, at full strength through December, coming down in the first week of January. The dates page sets that against every operator's own published booking window for this season.
When to go, if you have a choice
Best week: the first or second week of December. Everything is lit and
the crowds are still manageable.
Best night: a weekday. Weekend evenings in mid-December are the busiest
hours of the season by a wide margin.
Best hour: six to eight. Full dark, everything on, and comfortably ahead
of the ten o'clock switch-off.
Worth knowing: Christmas week is the busiest and, by most accounts, the
best of it.
Avoid if you can: the last week of November, when some houses are still
going up.
What the hour on the blocks is actually like
Louder and more crowded than the photographs suggest, and better for it. Families sell hot chocolate from their driveways, ice-cream vans park on the corners running snow machines, and food trucks work the busier junctions. Some houses play carols through speakers.
The walking is gentle but uphill: the neighbourhood sits on a rise to about a hundred and ten feet, and there is nowhere at all to sit down. Reviewers who brought a parent or grandparent say the ground was the difficulty rather than the distance. What the walking involves goes into it, and the route page gives you a loop.
Take cash, in small notes. Nothing on the blocks takes a card, there is nowhere to draw money, and a three-dollar hot chocolate at the halfway point does more for a cold hour than you would expect. The holiday markets page covers what is actually for sale.
What to wear, and what to leave behind
- A hat and gloves. Your hands come out for the camera constantly, and this is the single most repeated piece of advice in the traveller reviews.
- Shoes with grip. The pavements are uneven and can be icy.
- Layers. A heated coach and a freezing pavement in the same hour.
- Nothing you have to carry. There is nowhere to put a bag down.
- Go to the toilet first. There are none on the display streets at all.
What it is like at street level
Brighter and noisier than the photographs suggest. Several houses run carols through speakers, the inflatables are the size of a small car, and on a good night the pavement in front of the biggest displays moves at a shuffle. It is closer to a street party than to a gallery, and the people around you are having a good time.
What the pictures do not show is how residential it stays. Between the famous houses are ordinary ones with the lights off and someone's car on the drive, and you are walking past front windows the whole way. That is the reason the community board asks visitors to be mindful, and it is why the etiquette matters more here than at a ticketed attraction.
If you are staying in Brooklyn already
Then the arithmetic changes completely, and doing it yourself becomes the obvious answer. From most of Brooklyn the R or the D puts you within a fifteen-minute walk without crossing a river, and the whole outing is two fares and an hour of your evening.
Coaches are built for the Midtown hotel problem, which is a different problem. If you are not starting in Midtown, read the route page, take the loop, and spend the fare on hot chocolate instead.
If you would rather somebody else handled it
Eleven guided trips run to these blocks from Midtown. Seven are coaches, priced per person from forty-five dollars, and every one of them includes an hour on foot because coaches are not allowed into the streets. Three are private vehicles priced per car, which can drive the streets so nobody has to walk. The bus tours page and the private tours page compare them properly.
Which is right for you comes down to how many of you there are and whether the walking is a problem. Two people should almost certainly take a coach. Five should do the arithmetic first.
Whichever way you arrive, the hour on the blocks is the same hour. Every departure is on Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Tours.
Coaches that take the getting-there off your hands
Dyker Heights Christmas Lights and NYC Skyline View Bus Tour
Licensed guideCoach travelMax 150
From $69 per person