Saturday Evening in Dumbo: Walking Around at the Dumbo Arts Festival

Like the Brooklyn Book Festival or other gigantic events, the Dumbo Arts Festival is really too much for our age-impaired senses to take in at one time.

We have limited time this fall, what with running for Congress and teaching seven college classes (including a new class for us, Science Fiction) at four campuses six days a week, and so by Saturday afternoon when we get home from Brooklyn College, we're pretty wiped out. But we love walking around the streets of Dumbo at regular times, so we figured strolling around during the Arts Festival weekend would be fun.

We got to Dumbo around 6 p.m. via the J train from Williamsburg one stop to Essex/Delancey and the F train two stops to York Street, where we saw the folk singer Elizabeth Rogers, whose beautiful voice kept us listening through several songs from her new album, Breathe and Begin.

There were lots of people on the streets and not all the art was in the galleries, of course.

A big crowd was watching the amazing Lorenzo La Roc at this corner. We'd never seen an instrument like the clear violin he was playing.


At the foot of Main Street, by the entrance to the park, Moses Josiah was playing "My Way" on his mystical musical saw.

This band was playing "I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream" as we approached the corner of Main and Water Streets.

Inside the powerHouse Arena, there was a terrific juried photo exhibition, Capture Brooklyn, which had opened Thursday night.

There were about a hundred artists represented, with fantastic and diverse takes on Brooklyn.

Here, as at the galleries we went to later, there were crowds looking at the artworks.

We thought this was the best photograph of Marty Markowitz we'd ever seen.

Here is just a small sampling of the many photographs that captured Brooklyn in all its diversity and quirkiness:




It began getting too dark around 7 p.m. for us to take pics outside, and we just wanted to enjoy the festival anyway and not take any more of our crappy pics inside.

We went around enjoying for another hour or so before we finally headed to the High Street/Brooklyn Bridge subway stop to catch the A and G trains and the G shuttle bus from Bed-Stuy back home to Williamsburg. The Dumbo Arts Festival is just amazing, and we wish we'd had more time but are grateful we got to see a smidgen of it.