Bastille Day 2013 on Smith Street in Brooklyn
La Fête Nationale brings petanque and pastis to Boerum Hill
The French invaded Brooklyn’s Smith Street again on Sunday for the eleventh annual Bastille Day celebration, bringing crowds to dance to French music, eat bistro food, drink apéritifs, pose in the guillotine and enjoy a game called petanque, played on sand.
Brooklyn’s Smith Street event is said to be the biggest Bastille Day celebration in the U.S. French restaurants, shops and patisseries in Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens contribute food and joie de vivre to the festival. (The tacky commercial vendors so common to New York City street fairs are nowhere in sight.)
The annual petanque tournament transforms the northernmost end of Smith Street into a number of courts, with 12 cubic yards of sand spread over the asphalt by the Quadrozzi Concrete Company. Another branch of the celebration unfolds on DeGraw Street.