A Trip to the Brooklyn Flea

Fantastic window boxes on Lafayette Street.

TD and I went to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon to visit a friend in Fort Greene, a neighborhood near Pratt Institute of Technology, the renowned school of art and design. We stopped first at the Brooklyn Flea. You may remember we went to the indoor Brooklyn Flea over the winter in the cold weather. The outdoor one is great too, located in the sports field of a Catholic high school on Lafayette Street.
Darlings, it was hot. I have lived in New York City a long time, and I don't remember it ever being this hot. On Saturday it was almost too hot to stop and take pictures, but I snapped out a few.
I loved this wooden rolling rack. I asked the vendor about it. She said, "Are you a shop owner?" Do I look like a shop owner? Perhaps. No, I said, just admiring. She said it was an antique rack from a shoe factory. I think it would be great piled high with books. You could roll it around the house with you. But I have no room. It had funny tilted wheels, can you see those? I hadn't seen those before, but she said they work perfectly fine.

Out on the sidewalk a guy was hand-cutting silhouette portraits out of black paper. He had a long line of customers.

Right out of Charles Dickens. So charming.

Back inside the market, I stopped at this vendor. I liked the old clocks and watches, and it was located under a shady tent. A pleasant place to escape.

Out in the sun I spotted another rolling cart

with similar tilted wheels. I wonder what those are called.

Then, these oversized industrial carts. But who would have room? I suppose if you lived in a big loft you could put your artist's supplies on them.

The Brooklyn Flea attracts the best-looking people in New York, boys and girls. It's really fun for people watching, with lots of style going on – the style is like a combination of New York City, Chilmark, Mass., and Pratt: very confident, natural, easy, American. One girl was wearing a cropped vintage cotton top, boy's pajama shorts and a straw hat with its wide brim tilted over one eye. Chic. You have to know what you're doing to pull off something like that.

The Winter Home of the Brooklyn Flea

The weekend before last, TD and I headed out to Brooklyn to visit the Brooklyn Flea. I'm a huge fan of this flea market which is located in the warmer months in a school playground in Fort Greene. The coolest people in New York go to it. For these winter months, the Flea moved indoors, into a fantastic space at One Hanson Place, which is the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower. Built in 1927, the tower has 37 floors and was for a long time the tallest building in Brooklyn. Now, the top of it is filled with condos, and the bottom is the home of the Brooklyn Flea on the weekends.


The vast vaulted space looks like a Gothic church, but it's not a church, it's a former bank. A temple to capitalism I guess you could say.


The details are really fantastic, with Romanesque columns, tinted glass windows, gold leaf ceilings and elaborate chandeliers.


The Flea includes more than one hundred vendors selling vintage furniture, clothes, collectibles and antiques, as well as new jewelry and art by local artists. I loved these metal globe lamps; very Rough Luxe.


The Flea covers three floors in the bank; here is the view from upstairs.


On the way downstairs, the beautiful ceiling is mosaiced with blue tiles, and iron silhouettes decorate the upper door arches.


In the basement, the bank vault is filled with local food vendors. Brooklyn is becoming famous for its gourmet food. Delish.


After that, we walked down Atlantic Avenue and visited some familiar haunts. Then we were downright parched so we stopped at the Brooklyn Inn in Boerum Hill for a pint or two. It has to be one of the most charming spots for a bar.

You snag a stool in the windows and watch the world go by as you sip a Brooklyn Lager and dusk settles in.

It's a very pleasant place to be on a Saturday afternoon in January.