A Brooklyn Street Art Tour in Photos
Little known fact about me: I love street art. I feel like street art exalts itself above other creative expressions to tell a story about a destination, neighborhood, artist, and culture that a photo, video, and writing simply can't. If a photo is worth a thousand words, then a piece of street art is worth a million words. Okay, so maybe I have such a respect for it, too, because I'm so bad at it, getting a C-minus in high school art, largely in part because the clay fountain I made was supposed to be a clay bowl.
But it's street art that makes Brooklyn one of my favorite neighborhoods in America. Brooklyn has a gritty, edgy atmosphere to it that extends far beyond skinny jeans and its other hipster stereotypes. And many of those same adjectives are used to describe street art. So it seems only appropriate that Brooklyn and street art go hand in hand for me.
So on my latest trip to New York City, armed with an hour and a half of daylight, my DSLR, 20% iPhone battery, and a challenge from a friend, I hit to the streets of Brooklyn to find as much street art as I could. And I don't think I've ever seen such a high concentration of street art.
Most people will likely tell you to head to Williamsburg and Bushwick for street art in Brooklyn. This street art tour of Brooklyn, however, focuses predominantly on Williamsburg, and then a little bit in Red Hook, which spoiler alert, is my favorite Brooklyn neighborhood. It was primarily a radius of a few blocks within these areas:
- Conover and Coffey Street in Red Hook. Bonus points for being directly beside a great cocktail bar (Botanica), distillery (Widow Jane), and chocolatetier (Cacao Prieto).
- North 10th and Union Street in North Williamsburg (Near McCarren Park).
- Grand Street Subway at Grand Street and Bushwick Avenue in East Williamsburg (Predominantly on industrial buildings behind Grand Street Campus High School).
