The smell of acrid smoke spread throughout New York City on Saturday and persisted into the evening, after brush fires broke out on Friday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and nearby New Jersey. It was a surreal experience for a city that is rarely home to wildfires but is in the middle of a drought.

Brush fires broke out in the Palisades, New Jersey early Friday morning, sending smoke across the Hudson River and into NYC.

The fire was in an “extremely dense” part of Prospect Park on a hill, and there were no structures nearby to be threatened, an FDNY official said.

Firefighters extinguished a second brush fire in Prospect Park on Saturday, roughly a mile away from the site of Friday night’s larger blaze City Fire Department officials said. Forty smoke eaters responded to a fire near the LeFrak Center at Lakeside ice skating rink at about 2:40 p.