Stiff new backpacks. Kids posed on stoops for the Day 1 photo. Whole families scrambling across the bridge, beaming and a little out of breath. We knew school was starting again. We just weren't ready to see it everywhere at once.

Now Open / Coming Soon — Radisa is back, Häagen-Dazs scoops on Smith Street, plus a Curated Pick: 4th Avenue fluffy egg sammies

The Big Story — The Butler Street venue and scene the city and a public real estate company both just paid to replicate in their own spaces

Things to Do — Drag and burlesque at Littlefield, a Saturday block party at Public Records, comedy at Bell House and Union Hall, and what's worth planning ahead for

The Local — A seasonal lot bar on Smith Street that never once pretended to be anything but a place to drink a cheap beer outside

Development Watch — Two new filings, on 3rd Street and Hoyt Street

Quick Hits — Atlantic Antic returns September 27, Hey Clay Foundations course, plus a VR trip through the Prado

Radisa Osteria Is Open Again
Osteria Radisa
241 Smith Street
The team behind Williamsburg's Balera took over the kitchen and wine program in August, keeping the Radisa name but rebuilding the menu around handmade Romagnolo-style pastas, a wood grill, and a bar built on the classics. The new chefs hail from Rimini and Romagna themselves, and it shows in dishes that don't turn up anywhere else in Carroll Gardens. Open nightly from 5pm.

Häagen-Dazs Is Scooping on Smith Street
Häagen-Dazs
180 Smith Street
The chain's first-ever brick-and-mortar opened on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights back in 1976, so there's an argument the brand never really left the borough. Its newest outpost is at the Smith and Warren corner, scooping daily from 11am to 11pm, until midnight on weekends.

The Corner Cafe Running on Fluffy Eggs and Fresh Pastries
Root Hill Cafe
262 4th Avenue
The eggs are the reason people keep coming back, fluffy, never dry, usually stacked into a breakfast sandwich worth the short wait. The pastry case turns over daily, and the gluten-free morning bun somehow still tastes like butter. It's also one of the rare spots on this stretch of 4th Avenue where you can sit with a laptop for two hours and nobody minds.

Public Records
233 Butler Street

In April 2019, Erik VanderWal, Francis Harris, and Shane Davis took over a derelict 1910s ASPCA building on Butler Street and turned it into Public Records, a vegan cafe by day, one of the more serious sound systems in New York by night, and one of this editor’s favorite places in the neighborhood. Esquire named it one of the 27 best bars in America the following year. Six years later, the formula is going citywide.

Public Service, the creative studio the founders run out of Public Records, is now designing and programming two more spaces. The first, in partnership with the city's Economic Development Corporation, is a 1,000-person venue inside MADE Bush Terminal, Sunset Park's newest waterfront redevelopment, expected to open by the end of this year. The second is a partnership with Seaport Entertainment, the publicly traded company that runs Pier 17, to revitalize a historic building in the Seaport district by 2027.

Neither expansion changes anything about the original room on Butler Street. But it's worth noticing what's actually being exported here. It isn't a brand or a drink menu. It's a specific feeling and aesthetic that turn a building nobody else wanted into a design-forward cultural space. That's the exact bet Gowanus made on itself over the past decade. Now the city and a real estate company are both paying Gowanus's own team to run it back for them. The neighborhood's export isn't retail. It's this.

Joe Dombrowski at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sat Sep 12 · 8:30pm
The last of three sets closing out a two-night residency. Come for the late show if you want the room a little looser than the early ones tend to be.

Block Party Brunch with Stretch Armstrong at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sat Sep 12 · Noon
Stretch Armstrong spins outside in The Nursery starting at noon, which is either an ambitious start time or the only sane one depending on your relationship with Saturday mornings.

Switch n' Play at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sat Sep 12 · Doors 7pm, show 8pm · 21+
Brooklyn's longest-running queer variety show turns up the sequins for a night of drag and burlesque. They've been doing this since before it was a marketing bullet point, and it still shows.

The Nursery: Benji B, Nabihah Iqbal at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sun Sep 13 · 3pm
Two serious radio DJs playing an outdoor set in the middle of the afternoon, which is a strange enough combination that it works.

Steve Martin Presents with Andrew Dismukes and Michael Good at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sun Sep 13 · Doors 4:30pm, show 5pm · 21+
Despite the name, Steve Martin is not involved. SNL's Andrew Dismukes and comedian Michael Good run the show themselves, with a rotating cast of guests filling out the bill.

Liza Treyger Presents: Show & Tell at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sun Sep 13 · 7:30pm
Treyger hosts a rotating lineup for this one, which means the bill changes and the format stays the same: no act, no bits, just what actually happened.

The Moth StorySLAM at Bell House
149 7th Street
Mon Sep 14 · 8pm
Ten names go in a hat, ten strangers tell true stories with no notes, and the audience scores them like it's the Olympics. Somebody always cries. Somebody else always thinks they didn't.

Grim Tidings: B.K. Borison in Conversation with Iman Hariri-Kia at Bell House
149 7th Street
Wed Sep 16 · Doors 6:30pm, show 7:30pm · 21+
The Ripped Bodice brings its romance-novel launch circuit to Gowanus for Borison's new one, about a runaway grim reaper who teams up with a skeptical Guardian to save a life. Every ticket comes with a copy of the book, so technically you're getting homework.

Gangstagrass at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sat Sep 19 · Doors 6:30pm, show 7pm · 21+
A band that plays bluegrass instruments over hip-hop verses, which sounds like a bit until you actually hear it. The theme song from Justified is theirs, for reference.

Taylor Tomlinson: Tries Out New Ideas at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sat Sep 19 · Doors 7pm, show 7:30pm · 21+
A former late-night host workshopping new material in a room that seats a couple hundred people, an odd kind of intimacy for someone who was just on network television. Running multiple nights this week if this show sells out.

Josh Sharp at Bell House
149 7th Street
Sun Sep 20 · 3:30pm
An early slot for people who'd rather be in bed by ten. Sharp is the kind of comic who gets a whole room to admit something uncomfortable and somehow makes it feel like a group activity.

Spell Checc: A Spelling Bee Gameshow at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sun Sep 20 · Doors 6:30pm, show 7:30pm · 21+
Real comedians, real spelling bee rules, and a studio audience waiting for someone to choke on a word they should know. It gets more unhinged than the premise suggests.

Gowanus Yacht Club
323 Smith Street

What makes Gowanus Yacht Club work is what it refuses to do. No craft cocktail list. No seasonal small plates. No design concept beyond an outdoor lot, some tables, and a grill. In a neighborhood where every new bar arrives fully art-directed, the total absence of pretension has become its own kind of statement. Shirt and shoes required. Dogs encouraged. That's the whole pitch, and it's worked for twenty years.

There's no yacht, obviously, and no water within several blocks unless you count the canal. What's actually there is a fenced in lot at Smith and President with string lights overhead, a half-barrel grill going most nights, and enough mismatched painted furniture to make the place feel more like a backyard party than a bar.

It's been here since roughly 2005, well before this stretch of Smith Street filled in with wine bars and design-forward everything. The order hasn't changed since. Canned beer. Bockwurst and burgers off the grill. One bathroom down a narrow staircase, and nobody's ever complained, because nobody comes here for the bathroom.

The catch is that it's seasonal, open roughly May through Halloween, and regulars treat the reopening every spring like the first warm day of the year. That also means the clock runs the other way now. We're deep into September, the nights are getting shorter, and the lot closes for the year before most people notice. If you've been meaning to go, this is the actual deadline, not a suggestion.

Ailanthus Plans for 400 Units at 424 Hoyt Street
Developer Ailanthus is planning for a 400-unit residential building at 424 Hoyt Street. No architect or completion timeline confirmed yet, but a filing this size would be one of the larger additions to the pipeline this year.

125 3rd Street Enters the Pipeline
Details are still thin, as is the lot, no unit count or developer confirmed yet, but it looks like one of the last parking lots in Gowanus at 125 3rd Street will be filled in.

Atlantic Antic returns Sunday, September 27. Brooklyn's oldest and largest street festival turns 51 this year, running the length of Atlantic Avenue from Hicks Street to 4th Avenue, noon to 6pm. Past editions have pulled in something like 450,000 people. More as the date gets closer.

Hey Clay’s fall Foundations course is open for registration. The 8-week beginner pottery course at the Gowanus studio caps classes at seven students, and two of the six fall sessions are already waitlisted.

The Prado comes to Gowanus, sort of. Powerhouse Arts hosts the US premiere of a 30-minute virtual reality walk through five Museo del Prado masterpieces, including Velazquez's Las Meninas and Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, narrated from the perspective of a security guard on his last shift. Runs October 1 through December 20.

Whatever's on your list this weekend, do it outside while the weather still lets you.

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