Looped by parkways and bounded to the west by shoreline, Bay Ridge looks self-contained on a map: an island at the edge of Brooklyn. But the neighborhood is anything but insular. Italian specialty shops, Turkish diners, Norwegian delis and Lebanese restaurants along Third and Fourth Avenues suggest its richly diverse population. And Bay Ridge’s streets seem similarly mixed — decidedly urban on one block, suburban on the next.

IN THE GILDED AGE, the leisured class came here for summer sports and bay breezes at resorts like the Crescent Athletic Club. Henry C. Murphy, the mayor of Brooklyn when it was its own city, and later a state senator, kept a big estate at Bay Ridge’s northwest corner. A subsequent owner, Eliphalet Bliss, offered the land, stables, house and observation tower to the city, and through Robert Moses’ initiative in the 1930s it became the 24-acre Owl’s Head Park — with flowering trees, water views and, these days, basketball courts and a skate park. Though Mr. Bliss’s buildings were torn down in 1940, his initials remain on the gates.