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14. Best People-Watching
(Including Dogs):
The Saturday Greenmarket
(Union Avenue, between Driggs and North 12th,
Williamsburg )
Closed off on Saturdays for the greenmarket, this little patch of weekend Brooklandia is nearly as crowded as the adjacent dog-run on one side and the McCarren Park track on the other. Point is, thousands of Brooklynites, of all colors and creeds (and breeds!), flow through here on Saturdays; sit, brown-bag it, and watch them all...
(Photos via A Tiny Kitchen Blog)
15. Worst Block to Live On:
Park Avenue
(between Cumberland and Carlton [north side, top floor], Fort Greene)
There are a lot of benighted blocks in the borough with third floor windows a mere ten feet away from the BQE, but this stretch leading up to the perpetually clogged Tillary exit is a special hell of juddering trucks and horn-crazed livery drivers. Throw in Park Avenue’s steady traffic drone echoing up under the overpass and the charmless discount liquor store on the ground floor, and we have a winner.
16. Best Block for Urban Palimpsests:
Graham AVENUE
(between Powers and Ainslie, Williamsburg)
You see it all over Brooklyn: evidence of past glory chiseled into pediments or capitols, scrolled windows into a time when businesses built their own buildings as a matter of course... But there’s something particularly touching about the old
Cono and Sons restaurant sign still hanging from the first floor at 301 Graham (along with the wrought-iron Cono and Sons door!) at one end of the block; and there’s something depressing about the laundry-torium at the other end now occupying the beautiful old Metropolitan Tobacco building. Sigh.
