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Here are some smokers’ paradises

By Aaron Short
The Brooklyn Paper

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Starting on May 23, city law bans smoking in public parks. But state law allows it — meaning that our borough still has plenty of places where you can light up. Here’s our guide to flouting the city ban:

East River State Park

Tomasos Restaurant

Kent Avenue at N. Eighth Street in Williamsburg

Features: Stunning views of Manhattan’s skyline, home to boisterous indie rock summer concert series, site of prominent religious rituals involving the casting of sins into the river.

Fun fact: Smoking-friendly neighborhood where even state troopers try to bum a loosey off of you!

Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park

Main Street at Plymouth Street in DUMBO

Features: Even more stunning views of Manhattan’s skyline and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, site of a historic 19th century customs center for inspecting tobacco, its grassy knolls once inspired Walt Whitman to consider smoking.

Fun fact: It’s home to the Tobacco Warehouse, fer chrisakes!

Floyd Bennett Field

End of Flatbush Avenue in Marine Park

Features: Stunning views of JFK Airport, site of several record-breaking circumnavigational flights including those by Howard Hughes and Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor who played Hughes in The Aviator, home to campers who missed their flights to Burning Man.

Fun fact: Voted best place to illegally drag race your motor vehicle in Larceny Magazine’s Summer 2008 edition!

©2011 Community Newspaper Group

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Reader Feedback

Claude Scales from Brooklyn Heights says:
If you check, you'll find that Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park was turned over to the City over a year ago, and is now part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. While BBP is not run by the City Parks Department but rather by its own Corporation, and technically is not subject to the ban on smoking in City parks, the Corporation intends to amend the Park's rules to ban smoking, thereby being in conformity with parks under control of the Parks Department.
May 22, 2011, 1:12 pm

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