Great day for the festival, sunny and temperature in the 60′s. Good chili from about 30 local establishments. I was told the winner this year was “The Lehigh Pub”.

Spring has finally arrived!!!

Easter Sunday Spring Blossoms

Easter Sunday Spring Blossoms

The information about the places we visited was taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. All pictures were taken using my phone camera, sorry, they may not be the greatest

Chelsea Market is an enclosed, urban food court and shopping mall in New York City. It was built within the former Nabisco factory complex where the Oreo cookie was invented and produced. The 22-building complex fills two entire blocks bounded by 9th and 11th Avenues and 15th to 16th Street. In addition to the retail concourse in the structure east of 10th Avenue, it also provides standard office space for tenants, including media and broadcasting companies such as Oxygen Network, Food Network, Mr Youth, MLB.com, EMI Music Publishing and the local New York City cable station NY1. Also, more recently, Google has moved into some of the second and fourth floors.

Chelsea Market Water Fountain

Chelsea Market

Flushing, founded in 1645, is a neighborhood in the north central part of the City of New York borough of Queens, ten miles (16 km) east of Manhattan.

Flushing was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island. Today, it is one of the largest and most diverse neighborhoods in New York City. Flushing’s diversity is reflected by the numerous ethnic groups that reside here including people of Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, European and African American ancestry. It is part of the Fifth Congressional District, which encompasses the entire northeastern shore of Queens County, and extends into neighboring Nassau County. Flushing is served by five railroad stations on the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington Branch, and the New York City Subway Number 7 subway line has its terminus at Main Street. The intersection of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue is the third busiest intersection in New York City behind only Times Square and 34th Herald Square.

Flushing (Brooklyn)

Coney Island is a peninsula, formerly an island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City, USA, with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The neighborhood of the same name is a community of 60,000 people in the western part of the peninsula, with Seagate to its west; Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach to its east; and Gravesend to the north.

The area was a major resort and site of amusement parks that reached its peak in the early 20th century. It declined in popularity after World War II and endured years of neglect. In recent years, the area has seen the opening of KeySpan Park, home to the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team.

Coney Island

Coney Island Beach

The Coney Island amusements

Coney Island footage from the 1940s

Between about 1880 and World War II, Coney Island was the largest amusement area in the United States, attracting several million visitors per year. At its height it contained three competing major amusement parks, Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park, as well as many independent amusements.

Today the major parks are the late Astroland,which closed in late 2008, Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park (a successful family owned park with over 20 rides located directly on the Boardwalk), 12th Street Amusements, and Kiddie Park. Also, the Eldorado arcade has its own indoor bumper car ride. The Zipper and Spider on 12th Street were closed permanently on September 4, 2007 and dismantling begun, after its owner lost his lease. They are to be reassembled at an amusement park in Honduras.^[19] Astroland closed September 7, 2008

Coney Island Amusement Park (Closed)

Brighton Beach

The 1950s brought with it a neighborhood consisting mostly of second generation Jewish-Americans and a number of concentration camp survivors. Establishments included Diamond’s, a small clothing store owned by the parents of Neil Diamond. Other notable restaurants were Irving’s Deli and the New Deal Chinese restaurant. The summer would bring crowds of subway riders enroute to the Coney Island beaches.

Today, the area has a large community of Jewish immigrants, who left the Former Soviet Union between 1970 and the present day, along with some non-Jewish immigrants, such as Armenians and Georgians, also settled in Brighton Beach and the surrounding neighborhoods, taking advantage of the already established Russian-speaking community.

Brighton Beach

Empire Sate Building