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.

In an unusually dry season for the Northeast, fires were pushing potentially dangerous smoke into New York City.

Forty firefighters responded to a blaze near the LeFrak ice skating rink at about 2:40 p.m. and put out the flames by 3:22 p.m. An earlier fire nearby burned a 2-acre wooded area.

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.

On Friday night, flames could be seen piercing through trees in the 526-acre New York City park in the middle of the borough.