Williamsburg has spent twenty years being described in the same three sentences, and the version most people visit — the stretch of Bedford Avenue between the L stop and the river — is the least representative part of it. The neighbourhood's actual character is in its odd, small, single-purpose places: a museum in one room, an arcade behind a laundromat, a comics shop that functions as a library, a boat club on a polluted creek. None of them take more than an hour, most of them cost nothing or nearly nothing, and together they make a much better afternoon than another walk down Bedford.
Several of these keep tiny hours — a few afternoons a week, or evenings only. Tell Karpo in iMessage what time you will be in Williamsburg and it will string together the ones that are actually open into a walkable order.
The One-Room Institutions
The City Reliquary on Metropolitan Avenue is the best five dollars in north Brooklyn: a volunteer-run museum of New York ephemera — subway tokens, seltzer bottles, paint chips of the Statue of Liberty, a shrine to Jackie Robinson — arranged with total seriousness in a space smaller than most apartments. It opens limited afternoons, so check before you go. Desert Island, a few doors down, is a comics shop in a former bakery with the original sign still up, and it is the sort of place where you go in for ten minutes and leave forty-five minutes later with a small-press book nobody else will have. Spoonbill & Sugartown on Montrose deals in art, architecture and design books, new and used, and is one of the last genuinely browsable bookshops in the neighbourhood. Add Quimby's, the Chicago zine institution's Brooklyn outpost, and you have an afternoon of reading rooms that between them cost about the price of one cocktail.
Games, Records and Things Hidden Behind Other Things
Sunshine Laundromat on Manhattan Avenue is exactly what it says at the front — a working laundromat — and behind the row of machines is a door into a pinball bar with a serious collection of tables. Barcade on Union Avenue does the same trick with upright arcade cabinets and a long draft list, and it invented the format before it became a chain. Main Drag Music sells and repairs used instruments and lets you sit and play them, which is a free hour for anyone who has ever owned a guitar. For records, Superior Elevation on Broadway and Academy Records Annex up in Greenpoint are the crate-digging stops that survived, and both price fairly rather than for tourists. Nitehawk Cinema on Metropolitan shows repertory and new releases with food and drink brought to the seat, and its late programming is far stranger than the marquee suggests.
Outside: The Waterfront and the Bridge
Domino Park runs along the river on the site of the old sugar refinery, and the machinery has been left in place as sculpture — syrup tanks, gantries and cranes on an elevated walkway above the river path. It is the one genuinely great piece of design in the neighbourhood and it is free. North Brooklyn Boat Club runs volunteer-led paddles on Newtown Creek in warm months, which is an unforgettable way to see a working industrial waterway. The Williamsburg Bridge pedestrian path is a twenty-five-minute walk to the Lower East Side with the best free view of the East River in the city; do it at dusk, going west. And on Saturdays from spring to autumn, Smorgasburg sets up at Marsha P. Johnson State Park on the water — go early, before the queues make it unpleasant.
Building the Afternoon
The sensible route is east to west, ending at the water. Start on Metropolitan Avenue with the museum and the comics shop, cut north to Manhattan Avenue for records or the laundromat arcade, drift down through the residential blocks where the actual architecture is — wood-frame houses, cast-iron cornices, the odd surviving church — and come out on the river in time for sunset behind Manhattan. That is four to five hours at a walking pace, costs perhaps thirty dollars including a coffee and a slice, and involves none of the blocks people complain about. If you have less time, do the museum, one bookshop and the bridge walk; if you have more, add Nitehawk in the evening.
Practical Notes
The small places keep small hours and several open only from the afternoon, sometimes only Thursday to Sunday, so check the day before you commit to a route. Bring a card and a little cash; the volunteer-run spots often prefer the latter. The L train is the obvious way in but the J, M and Z at Marcy Avenue and the East River Ferry at North Sixth Street are both better than people expect and the ferry view is worth the fare on its own. Weekends after noon on the waterfront are extremely busy between May and September; a weekday afternoon is a completely different and better neighbourhood. And if it rains, the whole itinerary works indoors apart from the bridge, which is unusual for a walk-based plan in New York.
Three Things Worth Doing Twice
Some of this is one-and-done and some of it improves on the second visit. The bridge walk changes completely with the weather and the hour, and doing it in winter at four in the afternoon, with the light going and almost nobody on the path, is a different experience from doing it on a July evening in a crowd. The little museum rotates its temporary displays and runs occasional events in its back yard, so it repays a return trip in a way a large institution does not. And the record and instrument shops reward regular, low-stakes browsing rather than a single determined visit — the whole point of a shop with used stock is that it is different in a fortnight. Everything else on this list is a reliable one-off, which is exactly what you want when you are showing somebody the neighbourhood for the first time.
Tags: #Williamsburg #Brooklyn #NYC #ThingsToDo #OffbeatNYC #NeighborhoodGuide #DominoPark #Smorgasburg #BrooklynWeekend #NYCMuseums #RecordStores #Pinball #EastRiver
Sources consulted: cityreliquary.org · smorgasburg.com · nitehawkcinema.com · nycgovparks.org
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Ask Karpo first
Half of these open only a few afternoons a week and the waterfront market runs seasonally. Ask Karpo in iMessage which of them is open while you are in Williamsburg and what order to walk them in.
