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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Saturday Afternoon at Floyd Bennett Field: The Kings County Fair


After teaching David Foster Wallace's
"Incarnations of Burned Children" to our wonderful BMCC Short Story class which meets on the Brooklyn College campus, we had a quick lunch at the Junction and took the Q35 bus to Floyd Bennett Field for a supposedly fun-filled afternoon at the Kings County Fair.

It was at the complex of Aviator Sports, which pretty much rescued the old airport, New York's first municipal airfield, from being, well, not much in use by people even though it was made part of Gateway National Recreation Area when it was created in the early 1970s. We grew up around here and know Floyd Bennett Field really well (we are 1962 graduates of P.S. 203, the Floyd Bennett School), and remember watching planes take off here back when it was a Naval Air Station.

There were NYPD helicopters and air shows and in the early days of National Park Service auspices, in September 1975, we participated in an amazing New York Avant-Garde Festival here. (Here's the invitation letter from Charlotte Moorman.)

But the today's Kings County Fair seemed pretty avant-garde to us.





























Wow. Surreal. As we did, you can get $2 off the $7 admission with this coupon. The Kings County Fair is open until May 23: Monday-Thursday 5pm-11pm, Friday 5pm-1am, Saturday noon-midnight, and Sunday noon-11pm. Take the dramamine and kids; leave the lysergic acid diethylamide.

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