Back in the mid-1980’s when I lived on the Northside of Williamsburg, I happened upon the Giglio Festival on Havemayer Street. I didn’t know what I was seeing but I could tell it was a tradition that had gone on for many years. There were so many mysterious and interesting things about Williamsburg and Greenpoint back then.  I used to spend hours just walking, thinking how exotic that neighborhood was. Most people spoke Polish, Italian, Spanish. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And I loved it. It was very visual — the domed church, the aluminum siding, the low industrial buildings, McCarren Park, the bright lights on the baseball field.

This is way before it became a groovy place to live. When I lived there, Bedford Avenue had a bodega on North 6th (still there) a Salavation Army, Polish butchers, Polish bars, and a place to get pastry.

Gowanus Lounge took pictures of the annual "Dance of the Giglio" at the Giglio Feast on Havemeyer Street
on Williamsburg’s Northside took place on Sunday. He writes:

The Giglio Feast, now
in its 113th year, is sponsored by Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and
parish priest Fr. Tom Conti called the Giglio Dance, in which dozens of
men hoist the three-ton, five-story statue and carry it up and down
Havemeyer Street–also turning it and lifting it up and down–"as
Brooklyn as it gets." Fr. Conti, the Bishop of Brooklyn and a brass
band rode on the platform as it was carried down Havemeyer through a
huge crowd.

One of those great New York things. I must have seen it more than 20 years ago, when it was just 93 years old.  How time flies.