The sky's been so hazy the past few days with Canadian wildfire smoke settling in over the neighborhood, same as everywhere else in the city. It’s been strange seeing the eerie discoloration of the sky. Hopefully this summer’s episode ends soon.
National Grid has half the neighborhood dug up this week, more digging than usual even for them, likely tied to all the construction going on around here. The small silver lining this week-summer means a lot of you are out of town having fun, so the streets are quieter and parking is, for once, not an ordeal.

Now Open / Coming Soon — A Boerum Hill roaster, a Gowanus reformer studio that's grown into four locations, and the only restaurant in New York doing Le Marche cuisine

The Big Story — Gowanus has two climbing gyms within a few blocks of each other, and it's not an accident

Things to Do — Jon Glaser tapes a special, a puppet robot uprising, and a full week of Littlefield and Public Records ahead

The Local — A wine bar that decided to be a mountain cabin in 2008 and never looked back

Development Watch — Baltic House opens its doors, and 264 Butler Street's demo finally has a building plan

Quick Hits — Restaurant Week returns, Sal Tang’s is closing its doors, and a Carroll Gardens Thai spot heads to Chelsea

Loved Ones Coffee
253 Bergen Street
Loved Ones Coffee opened its brick-and-mortar location in August 2025, roasting its own beans at a shared roastery in Long Island City. The cafe is dog-friendly, runs a siphon setup for the coffee obsessives, and pulls pastries from Colson and The Hungry Gnome. Good for a solo morning or an outdoor bench afternoon with a friend.

Good Time Pilates
289 3rd Avenue
Good Time Pilates has grown from one studio into four, including a private studio and a Boerum Hill location alongside this Gowanus outpost on 3rd Avenue, plus a fourth in Manhattan. Reformer classes only, small rooms, individualized attention, the kind of studio where the instructor knows your name by week two. Woman-owned and built around accessibility rather than intimidation.

Cremini's
521 Court Street
Cremini's is the only restaurant in New York dedicated to the cuisine of Italy's Le Marche region, and it just picked up Slow Food's Snail of Approval, a real distinction for a real neighborhood kitchen. Ascolana olives, fresh pasta, a wine list that doesn't try too hard. Order the olives. We do, every time.

We're lucky to live in a neighborhood that used to make things. The buildings built for manufacturing, tall ceilings, open floor plates, and no residential neighbors complaining about the noise keep turning out to be exactly what unusual businesses need today. This time, it's climbing gyms.

Bouldering Project, on Degraw Street, operates out of the old Daily News Garage, where the paper's delivery trucks once loaded up for early-morning routes across the city. It became Brooklyn Boulders in 2010, and a 2023 renovation added 60 percent more bouldering terrain, a heated yoga studio, and a youth room, all inside a building that spent decades moving newsprint instead of climbers.

A few blocks over, Movement Gowanus took over a 36,000-square-foot industrial building on Butler Street and built the largest climbing gym in New York City: three floors, more than 300 routes, a rooftop terrace looking out at the skyline. It opened in 2022 as The Cliffs at Gowanus, and the name has since changed, but the walls haven't moved, and neither has the reason it works here. A building with that much open volume and ceiling height doesn't come cheap or easily in most of the city. In Gowanus, it's just what the block was built for.

None of this happened by design, exactly, but it didn't happen by luck either. Breweries needed room to brew, ceilings tall enough for tanks, and floors that could handle the weight and the runoff. Music venues needed room for sound to travel without a downstairs neighbor banging on a pipe. Climbing gyms needed room to fall, forty feet of open air, and a landing zone underneath it. Three different industries walked into the same neighborhood looking for the same unglamorous thing: space nobody else wanted yet. Gowanus had it because it spent a hundred years being the kind of place where nobody built anything delicate. That's still paying off, for us, in more reasons to stick around after work, and for the neighborhood, in more reasons for someone new to get off the train here and stay a while.

Wide Open Works Summer Festival at iBeam Brooklyn
168 7th Street
Sat Jul 18 · 7:30pm
Three sets closing out the festival: Caroline Davis, Grey McMurray, and Qasim Naqvi at 7:30, a Marty Ehrlich/Tim Berne/Matt Pavolka trio at 8:30, and a tribute to Joseph Jarman's music at 9:30. iBeam doesn't do loud. It does serious.

Jon Glaser: Live Special Taping at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sat Jul 18 · 7pm
Jon Glaser has been in Parks and Recreation, made the deeply unhinged Delocated, and generally been a comedian's comedian for two decades. Tonight he tapes a live comedy special, and the audience is part of the recording. Laugh loud, you might end up on the special.

Nabihah Iqbal, Jamie 3:26, and More at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sat Jul 18 · 7pm
The Sound Room lineup: Nabihah Iqbal, Jamie 3:26, Ayanna Heaven, Mike Grant, and vikmatic. Public Records built its whole reputation on taking sound seriously. This is that reputation, in practice.

Lil Sábado with Michelladonna at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sat Jul 18 · 8pm
A Latine variety night hosted by Michelladonna: comedy, burlesque, and prizes worked right into the show. You might end up part of the act before the night's over.

Shaunak Does Improvised Standup at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sat Jul 18 · 10pm
Fully improvised standup, no set list, no safety net. Bocce courts upstairs if the crowd needs a palate cleanser between sets.

Puppeteers For Fears: Robopocalypse the Musical at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sun Jul 19 · 7:30pm
A puppet musical about a robot uprising exists, is playing two blocks from the canal, and is staged by a company that had the nerve to name itself Puppeteers For Fears. We read that sentence back three times and it's still real. Puppets. Robots. A full apocalypse. A musical.

The Nursery: Love From The Sun at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sun Jul 19 · 4pm
The outdoor Sunday series keeps going with Specter, Noshaluv, and JADALAREIGN. Different names each week, same reliable draw: daytime, outside, and the best sound system in the neighborhood.

Fourth Annual Queen of Cortelyou Pageant: Trailer Park Royalty at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sun Jul 19 · 7pm
Four years running now, old enough to commit to a theme, and this year's is trailer park royalty. There is a crown involved. We're told there are also judges.

Clowns Anthology Book Party at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Mon Jul 20 · 8pm
Michelle Tea hosts the launch of Clowns, a new anthology from Dopamine Books, with readings from several contributors. A Monday night that doesn't feel like a Monday night.

Slate Presents: The Creator Revolution at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Tue Jul 21 · 7pm
A live taping of Slate's ICYMI podcast, on how online influence keeps mutating. Bring opinions or just let the hosts have theirs.

Climate Town Town Hall at Bell House
149 7th Street
Thu Jul 23 · 7:30pm
Climate Town, the YouTube channel that makes climate policy funny without making it small, brings its live town hall to Bell House.

Black Mountain Wine House
415 Union Street
Daily 6pm–1am
More at blkmtnwinehouse.com

Somewhere around 2008, a building on the corner of Union and Hoyt decided it wanted to be a hunting lodge. It had already been a pharmacy, then a bakery, then briefly an art gallery, and none of those seemed to stick. Then it became Black Mountain Wine House, and the rough-hewn wood and the wood-burning fireplace and the Adirondack chairs on the sidewalk arrived, and the building finally settled on an identity: a mountain cabin that took a wrong turn out of the Catskills and ended up in Gowanus.

Jim Mamary opened this one. He's the same restaurateur who put Patois on the map on Smith Street back in 1997, a scrappy French bistro that many people credit with starting the whole Smith Street restaurant scene. It ran for eleven years at a starting rent of about $900 a month before closing in 2009, but by then Mamary had already opened Pacifico, the Gowanus Yacht Club, and eventually this one. Patois and Pacifico are both gone now. Black Mountain is one of the ones that stuck.

The list runs past 30 wines by the glass, and the daily "Shane's Pick" rotates in something worth trying for $6.50, a small gift from the house to anyone willing to take the recommendation. The small plates, charcuterie, fondue, cheese boards, are built to complement the wine rather than compete with it, which is the correct order of operations for a wine bar and one that a lot of wine bars still get backwards.

What makes Black Mountain worth writing about in year eighteen isn't the wine list, though the wine list is good. It's that the place has never once tried to modernize itself into something else. No small-batch cocktail program bolted on, no menu redesign chasing a trend. It found its bit, cabin in the city, and it has been doing that bit with total sincerity since before "cozy" was a marketing strategy.

On a cold night, with the fire going, it's easy to forget the canal is two blocks away. In July, the patio does the same trick from the other direction, Adirondack chairs turning a Gowanus sidewalk into something that looks suspiciously like vacation.

Baltic House Now Fully Leasing
556 Baltic Street, the 11-story, 92-unit building, closed its affordable housing lottery back in February. The building is now actively leasing its market-rate units, with two months free on 14-month leases.

264 Butler Street's Plan Is In
Back in Issue #10 we told you demolition was nearly done at 264 Butler Street with no building plan filed yet. That plan has now landed: 8 stories, 95 units, 85 feet tall, on the former Wafels & Dinges and A&H Candy warehouse site between 3rd Avenue and Nevins Street.

Restaurant Week is back. NYC Restaurant Week returns July 20 through August 16, with $30/$45/$60 prix-fixe menus at restaurants across the city. Local favorites French Louie, Aromi, Barbalu, and more are participating.

Sal Tang's is closing. Final service is Saturday, August 1. Sal Lamboglia is keeping the Hicks Street space, and Eater reports he's already got a new concept in the works.

Hungry Thirsty is expanding. The Michelin-noted Thai spot on Smith Street is opening a Chelsea sibling, Hungry Spicy, at 114 8th Avenue, this Thursday, July 23. The Carroll Gardens original stays put.

Quiet streets, hazy skies, and somehow still enough happening to fill an issue. Get outside while the parking's good. See you Saturday.

If something's happening out there, we want to know about it. Email, photo, neighborhood gossip — we'll take it.
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Exploring Gowanus · Every Saturday