Places You Wouldn’t Think to Visit in Brooklyn but Totally Should
- C. Dianne Zweig
The Streets Surrounding the Brooklyn Flea, Fort Greene
While Fort Greene’s Brooklyn Flea is not to be missed on a Saturday afternoon from April to November—as it’s essentially an one-stop shop selling every desirable piece of clothing, jewelry, furnishing, decorative item and antique for anyone resembling a J. Crew or Anthropologie mannequin—you should take your time getting to it. Locals along surrounding brownstone-lined streets (Lafayette, Vanderbilt, Washington, etc.) occasionally use the prime shopping hours to unload a few of their own belongings while off-the-cuff vendors take advantage of the eager crowds without having to go through the official application process of becoming official Flea peddlers. It all makes for some cheaper buys along the way. On Lafayette, walking from Myrtle Avenue, I bought one of my all-time favorite dresses for $4. (Granted, it has a sizable hole in the skirt seam, oops, but $4! The price is a fraction of what something similar would’ve cost once inside the Flea’s gilded gates.)