Atlantic Antic 2011

Regular readers have heard about the Atlantic Antic, Brooklyn’s largest street fair (biggest in NYC, I believe) and right outside our front door. They close Atlantic Avenue (our street) for the day and it’s a mile long. They say a million people come to this fair.

To me what makes this street fair great is that the local bars and restaurants come out. Atlantic has some great bars and restaurants with crazy ethnic diversity, so it’s not just the typical NYC street fair food.

It’s also very kid friendly, which works well for us.

We like to start the day by taking a stroll before it actually opens. My girls love the fact that they can walk on the street, so we head out around 10:30 am to check out things getting set up. This is what it looks like. The fair goes farther than you can see in this picture.

The NYC Transit Museum is just off Atlantic and they block off a side street for a block and bring in a bunch of old buses. This is fun because it’s open before the rest of the fair starts cranking.

They also provide arts and crafts for the kids, making buttons and cardboard buses.

Since at this point the Antic hasn’t even started yet, we head home (picking up some corn on the cob on the way) to pick up my wife for the real eating.

For me it’s all about the food. Among the things we ate:

• Jerk Chicken
• Alcapurrias
• Empenadas
• Pulled Pork
• Bratwurst
• Italian Sausage and Peppers
• Mozzarepas

Not to mention some great beers and sangria along the way.

Of course, for the kids it’s all about other things. Face painting:

Random kid stuff (this guy actually lives in our building):

Random kids games:

And we all love the music. About every other block a band is playing. This was a great blues band.

On the way home we saw these street dancers/acrobats literally in front of our building. I really should have taken video of these guys.

It was a truly great day. And it reminded us what a great age our kids have hit. We were out from about 10:30 am until 5:00 walking with our 4 and 8 year olds (almost 5 and 9). No issues. Taking our kids places has become easy.

And fun.