Smorgasburg!

This. This is why New York is the most amazing city on earth. While I'm a fan of the theory that you should have a very limited amount of exclamation points to use up in your life (like, say, 30), as I find them infuriatingly overused, I will gladly use up a majority of them when talking about Smorgasburg. (!!!!)

The abandoned, roofless former tabaco warehouses under the Brooklyn Bridge become infiltrated with food stalls on Sundays for Smorgasburg. It is foodie heaven.

Many of the vendors have cult followings, and much buzzed-about specialties.

My friends and I scattered to the four corners of the warehouse, and met back with all sorts of goods to share.

Fried chicken, really interestingly filled spring rolls, an amazingly melting porchetta sandwich, a Moroccan meatball slider, a schnitzel sandwich on breztel. Probably not the most hot day friendly food, but it was balanced out nicely by shaved ice, people's pops, and pie shakes. If you must be bad, you must be very, very bad. Bathing suit season is OVER!

Plus, I had not been to the revamped Brooklyn Bridge Park yet. It's a wonderful place, and a great place to find a shady lawn to lay down for food-coma nap.

What fun to be had with an insect-eye view of the world.

Fo: Quick and Dirty Cardigan

Nothing I'm really proud of, but I whipped this up in the time it took for the sun to go down and for a chill to set in. I love little cotton sweaters in summer, but I hate working in cotton, so I usually just go out and purchase said sweater. Cotton yarns feel ropey and tough and inflexible in my hands, and some cottons are better than others. This was not one of the better ones.

It used up about 600 yards of heavy-ish cotton yarn. It took it forever to dry when I blocked it. It's just an easy, throw-on sweater with 3/4 sleeves.

Pictures of New York

I hate taking pictures on hazy days. Sometimes, you just can't help it though.

Back to Brooklyn

I find it amazing that Brooklyn has been such a marketing buzzword power lately. Even in Maine, there was "Brooklyn Bakery" and a few other odds and ends of Brooklyn culture seeping in. "Brooklyn", as both a dining option and a hipster style, is huge right now in Paris. It's bizarre. I feel like I will never escape the borough's siren call. I wonder if anything has ever been successfully marketed using Staten Island? No?

It also leaves me wondering if the borough will soon get its own syndrome named after it. What do you mean, not everyone here has a rooftop garden and is making their own cured sausages with free-range pork? This is not what I expected at all!

Even when it was so gross and sticky out where I remembered how much summer time can really suck, I re-discovered ice coffee, and all was right with the world.

Plus, from Brooklyn you get a view of the world that you just can't get in Manhattan.

It will cost you though...the days where Brooklyn was considered a cheaper alternative to Manhattan are long gone.