As the Brooklyn Eagle reported, John Lindner Jr. runs Landi's Pork Store on Avenue N with his cousin Dan Gorga, four generations removed from John Landi, who established the business in 1928 and opened the current storefront in 1959. Lindner's grandfather took over running the store in 1969 and started stringing lights over Avenue N in the early 1980s, a streak Gorga says held for more than 40 years straight. Then the pandemic hit, and the streak broke.
That's the part of the story that doesn't make it into most "things to do in Flatlands" roundups: the traditions people assume are permanent fixtures of the neighborhood are actually held together by a handful of specific people who keep choosing to do the work. When those people step back, even for a year, the thing stops. It doesn't restart on its own.
That's the real shape of fall in Flatlands. Not a season that arrives. A season that gets built, on purpose, by named organizers, at three places you can actually visit: a 178-year-old church on Kings Highway, a library branch that just got more room to hold events, and a stretch of Avenue N where the lights only came back because two neighbors decided to bring back what the pandemic paused.
The Lights Almost Didn't Come Back
The Avenue N tradition runs along the stretch from East 58th Street to Ralph Avenue, on the border of Flatlands and Old Mill Basin, and it's been part of the neighborhood for more than four decades. Landi's Pork Store was one of the businesses that started it, and Gorga is blunt about what changed: the lights went up every year, consistently, until the pandemic broke the streak.
Last December, the neighborhood didn't just switch the lights back on. Donna Salta, owner of Perception Travel Ltd., and Michael Trotta, president of the Bergen Beach Civic Association, built something bigger around them: for the first time, the annual lighting became a full community celebration. They organized nearly two dozen businesses and civic groups to split the cost of the rental, brought in a zeppole truck from Events Carts, the same company that works the feast in Little Italy, and got the Knights of Columbus and the Kings Plaza-Canarsie Kiwanis Club to help bring Santa to the corner of East 59th Street and Avenue N. Kids danced to holiday music from DJ Ross.
Whether it happens again this December depends entirely on whether Salta, Trotta, and the same two dozen merchants decide to do it again. That's not a knock on the tradition. It's the actual mechanics of how a neighborhood keeps something alive once the automatic version of it stops working.
A Church Older Than the Country, Throwing a Party Anyway
Flatlands Reformed Church has stood at 3931 Kings Highway since long before there was a United States to be part of. The congregation traces back to 1654, and the current Greek Revival building dates to 1848. As the Brooklyn Eagle reported, for the past two autumns, it's also been the site of the neighborhood's Fall Harvest Fest, an event church administrator Jillien Torres-Glover built specifically to give the season something other than Halloween.
"They need community, a sense of belonging," Torres-Glover told the Brooklyn Eagle, describing what she hears from the families who show up. "They need to know that they're not by themselves even though things are not what we want them to be in our world."
"The mission and the vision were always about building community," Torres-Glover told the Brooklyn Eagle.
Her husband, Pastor Paul Glover, came to Flatlands Reformed 13 years ago after serving at Bethany Reform Church in Manhattan. Last year's Harvest Fest ran from noon to 6 p.m. and paired the usual pumpkin patch and apple cider with something new: a Harvest Day Music Concert featuring six acts, among them the Faithful Harmonizers Juniors of New York, the Flatlands Reformed Church Choir, and the father-son duo of Robert Wilson Jr. and Robert Wilson III. A rotating crew of volunteers, people like Deacon Sally Bennett and Elder Sharon Plowden, ran the pumpkin patch and games. None of it requires church membership to attend.
The choice to build a harvest festival instead of leaning into Halloween wasn't incidental. It was a specific decision by specific people to put something positive on the calendar in a season that, in a lot of neighborhoods, defaults to whatever's easiest. Flatlands got a homemade version instead.
The Library Finally Has Room for This
For years, if the Flatlands branch of the Brooklyn Public Library wanted to host anything beyond a small reading group, it ran into a wall: the only available meeting space held 16 people. That changed with a recent renovation, funded by Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein, that added an 800-square-foot conference room and increased the branch's publicly available space by 25 percent.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting room capacity | 16 people | 65 for a lecture, 35 for a group session |
| Children's programming space | Shared with adult meetings | Dedicated space |
That extra room is what made it possible for the branch to host Brooklyn Borough Historian Emeritus Ron Schweiger for a talk on the Battle of Brooklyn, the kind of local history programming that simply couldn't have happened in a room built for 16. BPL President and CEO Linda Johnson called the new space a place where "the possibilities for programs are countless." The library itself has a longer history worth knowing: it opened in 1949 inside the old Prudential Savings Bank building on Flatbush Avenue, then moved into its current structure in 1955, becoming the first library built in Brooklyn under the Beame plan. It remains a focus site for Inclusive Services programming, with a Braille materials collection.
None of that shows up on a generic events calendar. It shows up if you check the branch directly, because the schedule changes month to month and depends on which speakers the branch can bring in.
What Connects All Three
Look at what these three places have in common. A church that decided against the path of least resistance and built its own harvest tradition instead. A library that spent years unable to host a real crowd until public funding gave it the room. A lights tradition that lost its 40-year streak to the pandemic and only came back as a full celebration because two people organized nearly two dozen businesses to make it happen.
None of this ran on autopilot. Every piece of it required someone to notice a gap and close it: the church building its harvest festival, Weinstein funding a room the branch didn't have, Salta and Trotta rebuilding what the pandemic interrupted. That's a different story than the one most neighborhood roundups tell, where fall in a place like Flatlands sounds like it just happens because it's autumn. It doesn't. It happens because specific people keep deciding it will.
If you live here, that's useful to know for a practical reason: these things need participants, not just an audience. A festival that depends on volunteers needs more volunteers. A lights tradition that depends on two dozen merchants splitting a cost needs merchants willing to split it again. A library program that depends on a borough historian's schedule needs people showing up when he's booked.
A few ways to actually plug into what's building this fall:
- Check the Flatlands Reformed Church's public calendar directly for this year's Harvest Fest date, since it isn't fixed to the same weekend every year
- Watch the Flatlands branch's monthly adult programs calendar, posted through Brooklyn Public Library, for the next local history talk
- Keep an eye on Avenue N in the weeks before Thanksgiving. If the Holiday Celebration returns, the same merchant network that pulled it off last year will be the ones organizing it again
None of this is a reason to move here. It's just what's actually happening in the neighborhood right now, built by name, not by default. If you already live in Flatlands, this is the season to notice who's doing the building and maybe lend a hand.
If you're thinking about Flatlands for a different reason entirely, whether that's buying, selling, or figuring out what a specific block is really like to live on, the team at Claudette Rolling knows this neighborhood the way its residents do. Say Hey and book a free consultation. Let's talk about what you're actually looking for.
