Brooklyn Ice Cream and Revs Sighting – Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA

Brooklyn – Ice Cream and Revs Sighting
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Prior to my short trip to Brooklyn, NY, I had been reading and examining the nytimes.com as though I was a local, paying attention to what the new trends on the street were, watching documentary videos of recent real estate developments, and engrossing myself in cultural developments in the city. When I arrived, I was happy to see the whole cowboy boots trend that had been featured in the nytimes, happening all around me and I thought this is so cool. My friend who is from Brooklyn met me at Penn Station and we had planned a day of eating in Chinatown, walking the Brooklyn Bridge, and visiting the new MOMA to see a photo exhibit and then she was going to show me her Williamsburg. As I waited for her, I got to squeeze in a good half hour of people watching to further realize you couldn’t find this eclectic mix of people in Atlanta or Chicago. It was something specific to NYC. I saw an anorexic grandmother is leotards and heals, half naked skinny models, a middle-aged man with his shirt off sweating and panting off somewhere, an Indian grocery owner hauling his sodas, suburban kids from Jersey in clubbing clothes at noon, and J. Crew types that had gone artsy.

The Revs in Steel Sighting

For all that we had planned, I tried to squeeze in two more things recommended by another friend from Queens that was into food, which was to stop by the Brooklyn Ice Cream factory and then to get the best muffins and croissants in New York at some French bakery on Spring Street. Since I didn’t know the other half of the address, the second recommendation was out of the question. However, my friend and I did manage to get ourselves to the Brooklyn Ice Cream factory located at the end of the Brooklyn waterfront. When we arrived we caught a newly wed Chinese couple performing the action sequence to their wedding video running towards the filming cameraman while holding hands. Although you are not allowed to sample the ice cream, and the prices speak of its all natural ingredients, we found that it was most economical to share a triple scoop, three flavors for the price of one when we split the cost. As we ate our Brooklyn ice cream, on the Brooklyn waterfront, looking out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought to myself, I could definitely live in Brooklyn minus the corny wedding video shenanigans.

After a long day of going back and forth on the subway, it was time to hit the night life of Williamsburg getting off at the Bedford Avenue station. Our first must see stop was to a thrift store that had free buttons of a baby’s head wearing black glasses called Beacon’s Closet. As we were leaving the store, I witnessed another sighting that footnoted back to the nytimes.com and a thousand times more satisfying than seeing girls in their cowboy boots. In addition to the boots, I had read earlier of a graffiti artist called Revs that had now moved on to sculpture graffiti which he created throughout the city without ever publicizing its location, so you just had to encounter it. I thought wow, that could take years of living in the city and you’d have to keep a sharp eye out for that matter. As I was casually walking out with my button, on the wall of the building next to the thrift store I came upon, to the bewilderment of my friend, the dreamed of Revs in steel sighting. The piece comprised of the word Revs done up in graffiti letters made of painted black metal that blended in with the buildings metal sidings. I took a photograph and raved about this being a famous graffiti artist at which point my friend had spaced out and waited for me to be done with it.

Unknown sidewalk artist, beneath the Revs in Steel

As we walked around seeing hipsters (as my friend describes as skinny people with asymmetrical haircuts) and the correlating cafes, bars, and restaurants to go with them in a semi run down area, it reminded me of certain bohemian areas of Berlin; in particular, as I sat in a hipster bar and looked out onto a graffiti ridden boarded up construction site, this juxtaposition of two different cultural realms, one being a chosen lifestyle and another being the result of the economy, just shouted Berlin. Our bar man was Irish and our DJs were hipsters. We had a light late night dinner at an Italian fusion café owned by a young hippie Asian. Then we walked to a small rocky lookout point along the river where about three other couples where making out or enjoying the view and thus ended my day in Brooklyn/Manhattan.