The beer garden in Queens (Astoria)
Hundreds of people, relaxing, conversing, laughing, with a cold beer, chicken wings and potato dumplings, under a breezy canopy of mature trees under a black sky (sorry, no starry skies in New York City.) That was my evening (minus the wings and dumplings) in New York City’s only outdoor beer garden, the aptly name Bohemian Hall.
By day it’s welcome for kids and parents with a full Czech restaurant menu, and by night it’s abuzz with gen xers and yers, accompanied by live bands on some weekends. Notice the atmosphere isn’t ruined by the cheap sodium vapor street lights that casts everything in yellow – lighting makes a major difference in effusing a humanistic glow.
The best quality of this third place was that it didn’t feel like a commercial desination, but a neighborhood respite.
What’s your opinion of a neighborhood beer garden? Speak your mind below…
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Neil,
New York’s only “German” biergarten? OK, but try the garden at dba.
BTW, we were at dba again Friday night, after a couple of hours in Tribeca. The Tribeca zip code now has the highest average income in New York, and it was noticable that the crowd there all looked like youngish, after-work Wall Street, while the crowd at dba was much funkier.
john