Brewed in Brooklyn Tour -  by Urban Oyster
Milwaukee. St. Louis. Brooklyn?!? Yes Brooklyn was once a great beer city too and is becoming one again with breweries once again growing and putting Brooklyn on the beer map. On this tour we toast our way through the past and present of beer brewing in Brooklyn including a private tour of one of Brooklyn‘s three present day breweries complete with extensive beer tastings, an exploration the streets of what was once a German neighborhood where some of the old brewery buildings still stand today, and a meal with plenty of food to pair with all of our beer. Along the way, you‘ll learn about how beer is made, how to taste beer, how the industry built up the neighborhoods, and what impact the choice of drinking local vs. national beer has on neighborhoods like Williamsburg. After taking this tour you‘ll be full, a little tipsy, and lot more likely to drink your local craft beer when you get home.

Sat 6/26 Noon – 3pm (2 tours)
Sun 6/27 Noon – 3:30pm (2 tours)

Price: $49 – advanced reservations necessary – click here)

When asked on the registration page, please indicate that you heard about the tour through Williamsburg Walks by entering “Williamsburg Walks.”

Fermented NY – Craft Beer Crawl by Urban Oyster
The revolution will not be televised. It will be poured into a pint glass and savored. We are living amidst an amazing revolution in beer. For decades beer selection was limited to light beer and lighter beer. However, with over 1,500 breweries operating nationwide, choosing and appreciating beer has become an art form and has begun to rival wine is some of the finest restaurants in NYC. Are you looking for looking to explore the wonderful world of craft beer? Join Urban Oyster for a stroll through Williamsburg, Brooklyn where we’ll visit a variety of craft beer bars, as well as a brewery and beer store, and hear the stories of their businesses while sampling their wares. We’ll learn about how the beer is made, what goes into serving it, how to distinguish between different varieties of beer, and how to fully appreciate beer the way professional tasters do. This is a pub crawl with a purpose. After taking this tour, you’ll be able to dazzle your friends with your new expertise and liberate them from the grips of Bud Light and Stella.

Sat 6/26 12:30pm – 3pm
Sun 6/27 12:30pm – 3:30pm

Price: $55 – advanced reservations necessary – click here)

When asked on the registration page, please indicate that you heard about the tour through Williamsburg Walks by entering “Williamsburg Walks.”

Williamsburg Ethnic and Artisanal Food Tour by Zach Aarons, CEO of Travelgoat
Williamsburg, Brooklyn is a wonderful melting pot of foods, both ethnic and gourmet. Many communities have passed through this dynamic neighborhood over the course of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries and left their mark on the culinary scene. Join New York City tour guide and Travelgoat CEO Zach Aarons on a gastronomic walk through Williamsburg, entering places both historic and contemporary. Locations may include: Mast Brothers Chocolate, Fette Sau, Bedford Cheese Shoe, Fortunato Brothers, Radish, El Diablo Tacos, Second Stop Coffee, and more…

Duration: 1.5 Hours

Price: Free (but food costs along the way will be the responsibility of attendees)

RSVP Required. RSVP to williamsburgtweets@gmail.com

Flaneurs of Williamsburg
In the 19th century, Charles Baudelaire and his company raised the act of urban idling in Paris to an art. These “flaneurs,” creatives inspired by quotidian street scenarios, became some of our most enduring artists. One jaunt down Bedford Avenue on a weekend afternoon proves that the spirit of the flaneur is alive and well in Williamsburg. This project aims to document your musings about the neighborhood around you. With recorder as your quill and moleskin, narrate the route provided. As you walk, talk about your perceptions and imaginings, memories and predictions, wisdom and gossip. Whatever strikes you today will be valuable information (or entertainment) to your friend who visits next weekend. What will you want him/her to know about the neighborhood? Or, use this record as an opportunity to enjoy Williamsburg from away when you find yourself streetsick on the beach. In the words of famed tour-guide, Speed Levitch, “tourism springs from the understanding that we are all tourists all the time and we are touring each other and the tour never ends.”

Recordings from this weekend could be included in a long-term project in which multiple voices will narrate an audio-tour podcast. Future ear-plugged flaneurs will be able to take a tour of Williamsburg that is fragmented, poetic and essentially urban. The neighborhood belongs equally to its experts and its amateurs. Vive la flanerie!

Ongoing throughout the weekend

Price: Free

Arborvita: Scott Piscitelli
The Arborvita is a freestanding garden sculpture that has edible fruits and vegetables growing on it. This piece brings the seemingly impossible to life: a beautiful garden on the sidewalk. Throughout the event Piscitelli will lead two to three workshops on making your own recycled bottle planter during the event.

Chrysalis: Future Archeology
Future Archeology will be making “a series of cocoons built from found sticks and twigs, refuse and organic matter from the natural areas that border Williamsburg.” Within each cocoon there will be a small “electronic ecosystem”, this project draws on the natural environment that used to exist in Williamsburg to encourage the community to rethink their “silicon and carbon based” lives.

Contrail: Anna Muessig, Teresa Herrmann, and Pepin Gelardi
As a way to map social interactions and the way we move through our space on bicycles the Contrail project marks the path of bikers. The Contrail system puts chalk onto the wheels of bicycles the chalk is then transferred to the pavement wherever the bike goes. This project brings attention to the paths that bikers use by making them visible, in the hope that cars will become more aware of these paths. The Contrail at Williamsburg Walks will take place from Berry St. to N. 9th St., then down Driggs Ave. and across Metropolitan Ave.

Garden Party: Anna Muessig, Teresa Herrmann, and Pepin Gelardi
Through their Garden Party project Muessig, Herrmann, and Gelardi plan to reclaim Bedford Ave. as “a place to slow down and greet your neighbors.” For this project the artists will place a 15-foot by 15-foot square of sod on the street. This square will have a small white picket fence on its border. There will be blankets and chairs, lawn games and a parasol on the lawn to encourage use by the event goers. As you enter the space you will be greeted with a cool glass of lemonade and a hostess who will encourage conversation between the partiers.

Guerilla Theater: Garry Lee Pelletier
Garry Lee Pelletier will quite literally be showing people how they can “share and respect” their public spaces through a series of scripted productions that will be on-going throughout the duration of the event. This project is called Guerilla Theater and it will highlight how people engage with the spaces around them, with each other, and with a car-free Bedford Avenue.

I Just Wanted to Say: Yen Trinh
This project explores the idea of priority seating for people who just want to have a conversation. For the project Tren will place signs in public spaces where people typically gather and sit that will designate those spaces as conversation areas. Event goers will be encouraged to move the signs or put up new signs throughout the event. This will hopefully shed light on where the community would like to have conversation priority seating in the future.

Stay Awhile: The moveable front porch dialogue system by Lindsay Kinkade of Little Giant Design
Stay Awhile takes back the sidewalk as a civic and social space.  The project uses  moveable front porches, or stoops, that can be set into various environments to suggest a space to sit, to stay awhile, to connect with one other. The graphic system that accompanies the stoops suggests overlapping interests and potential connections. The project works well in a variety of urban locations. The stoop system can move periodically, but always leaves a mark that suggests the conversational space can continue. In one configuration, stoops have been separated by the gulf of the street; in other locations, they will be in conversation with one another, face to face. The front porch stoops can also be placed so that they become one, as a stand of bleachers. This project aims to add to the streetscape by outlining new and flexible physical places of social exchange

Street Scopes: Anna Muessig, Teresa Herrmann, and Pepin Gelardi
In an effort to highlight the beauty that lies in Williamsburg’s bustling sidewalks the Street Scopes project consists of two parts: a home made telescope and a large Plexiglas panel. The telescope will be placed on the roof of a building above Bedford Ave. and N. 7th St. and will look down at a graffiti mural of a girl. The Plexiglas panel will be placed facing NW on Bedford Ave. just above N. 6th St. and will have a sign on the ground asking viewers to “stand here.” Viewers will then look through the panel, which will be etched with details and designs that mark the historical significance of the street. This diptych celebrates the distinctive aspects of the Williamsburg community.

Timeaus: Christina Justiz, Allyson Parker, Dane Rex, and Chris Roush
Timeaus is the title of one of Plato’s dialogues. “The work puts forward the speculation of the nature of the physical world. It begins by making a distinction between the physical and eternal world, stating that the physical world is the world that perishes; “Therefore, in a description of the physical world, one should not look for anything more than a likely story.”’ This project will consist of an 8’ by 8’ wooden box on wheels that will act as a roaming garden that viewer can enter. The Timeaus juxtaposes a synthetic world with a natural world, asking the viewer to rethink their surrounding.

Tree Sleeves: Jocelyn Oppenheim and Andrew Ghadimi
The Tree Sleeves project addresses the problem of the damage done to trees caused by people chaining their bicycles to the trunks of trees. The Tree Sleeves are going to be made out of donated burlap coffee bags that will be decorated and sewn around the trees during workshops let throughout the Williamsburg Walks event. Not only will this project protect the trees lining Bedford Ave. but it will also raise awareness about the harm that simply locking your bike to a tree can cause.

Where You Wait to Go: Andres Ramirez
“Where you wait to go” addresses the contested essence of place in the context of mobility and transportation.  Howare these spaces interpreted and defined? Bus stops are portals more than they are places in themselves; as such they can distort our perception of time and space. The project is a time-lapse video study, which is grounded on observational reasoning. The installation of the video sequence presents time as a determining factor and enabler of place, raising awareness through the indirect exchange between transit riders, pedestrians, and others driving by. The experiment is meant to surprise passers by, to stimulate their curiosity, and to generate meaning.