Bay Ridge has called the last weekend of September its biggest weekend for years, and the math has always been simple: Saturday for the Ragamuffin Parade, Sunday for the Third Avenue Festival, both days entirely the neighborhood's own. This year the math changes. The Third Avenue Festival lands on Sunday, September 27, the same day as the Atlantic Antic, Brooklyn's largest street fair, running the same afternoon over on Atlantic Avenue. For the first time in recent memory, Bay Ridge's signature Sunday has to compete for its own crowd.
That's not a complaint about scheduling. It's useful information if you live here and are trying to figure out how to spend three specific weekends in September, because the answer isn't the same for all three.
A Saturday Nobody Has to Choose
Start with the one date that has no competition anywhere in Brooklyn: Saturday, September 26, when the Ragamuffin Parade marks its 60th year. The parade steps off at 1 p.m. from 76th Street and Third Avenue, passes the main stage at 90th Street, and finishes at 92nd. Day-of registration runs from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Angels on 74th Street off Third, with judging squeezed in right before the march begins.
The parade traces back to 1966, when Our Lady of Angels parishioner Clifford Scanlon organized neighborhood kids from different parishes into a march, at the suggestion of Father James McKenna, who remembered similar parades from his own youth in Manhattan. Sixty years later it's still run by a volunteer committee, and this year's honoree is Bay Ridge Cares, the local nonprofit behind the neighborhood's food distributions, pancake breakfasts, and community cleanups. Parade president Allison Greaker has pointed out that Ragamuffin remains the only children's parade of its kind in New York City, which is part of why nobody schedules anything against it. There's nothing else like it to compete with.
That's the calm part of the weekend. The complication starts the next morning.
The Sunday Bay Ridge Now Shares
The Third Avenue Festival runs Sunday, September 27, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., organized by the Merchants of Third Avenue under president James Vavas. It's the event that traditionally closes out Bay Ridge's biggest weekend, the one where the avenue fills with stages, food stands, and vendors after Saturday's parade energy carries straight through.
This year it shares its date with the Atlantic Antic, which runs the same hours over on Atlantic Avenue through Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Boerum Hill. One is Bay Ridge's own institution. The other is the borough's biggest and oldest street fair, pulling from all of Brooklyn. Both are free, both run the full afternoon, and neither is a version of the other. If you've historically treated the last Sunday in September as a given, you're now choosing between two different kinds of Sunday, not confirming one.
Here's how the run of dates actually lays out:
| Date | Event | Location | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Sept 19 | FAMChella on Fifth | Fifth Avenue, 68th to 81st Streets | 3 to 6 p.m. |
| Sat, Sept 26 | 60th Ragamuffin Parade | Third Avenue, 76th to 92nd Streets | Steps off 1 p.m. |
| Sun, Sept 27 | Third Avenue Festival | Third Avenue | 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
Three weekends, three different commitments, and only one of them asks you to pick a side of the borough.
FAMChella Was Built Not to Compete With Anything
The week before all of this is FAMChella on Fifth, running its second year on Saturday, September 19, from 3 to 6 p.m., closing off Fifth Avenue between 68th and 81st Streets. It's hosted by the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District together with Brooklyn Bridge Parents, and it's built at a different scale entirely: a family dance party, a bounce house, water play, arts and crafts, LEGO building. There's no stage lineup competing for headline space and no borough-wide event scheduled against it.
The contrast is worth sitting with. FAMChella works precisely because it doesn't try to be Third Avenue's festival or Ragamuffin's parade. It's smaller, younger, and positioned on a Saturday with nothing else happening in Bay Ridge or beyond it. That's not an accident of timing so much as a different approach to what a neighborhood event is supposed to do. Not every Bay Ridge gathering needs to be the biggest one on the calendar.
What's New Along the Route
Whichever Sunday you land on, the corridors involved have new reasons to stop along the way. A handful of openings this year sit directly on or near the festival routes:
- Feria Cafe, at 7221 Third Avenue, opened this year with specialty coffee, morning pastries, and a full brunch menu, right in the stretch the Third Avenue Festival runs through.
- Caffe Negroni, on the corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue, opened last fall and has since built out a full menu that includes a prosciutto scramble, lobster toast, and cheese ravioli with brown butter and sage.
- Tous Les Jours, a Korean bakery on 86th Street, opened with a menu of French and Asian pastries, cakes, and sandwiches.
- Iguazu Bar and Bistro is on its way to 9226 Fourth Avenue, from the same owners behind Sarava Brazilian Bistro on 68th Street, bringing a second Brazilian spot to the neighborhood.
- Schnitzel Haus spent 18 years at 7319 Fifth Avenue before closing that location last fall. Owner Fred Urban has been working to reopen at 114 Bay Ridge Avenue, the former home of longtime Spanish restaurant Casa Pepe, and had the new space on track for a spring opening.
None of these are festival vendors. They're the places that'll actually be open on the sidewalks you're walking whichever Sunday you choose, which matters more than another food truck lineup once the stages pack up.
The Real Decision Isn't Which Festival, It's Which Sunday
The useful takeaway here isn't a list of dates. It's that Bay Ridge's reputation as a neighborhood with a reliably packed fall calendar is true, but the calendar itself has gotten more complicated to navigate this particular year. Saturday, September 26 is settled. The Ragamuffin Parade has no competition and 60 years of momentum behind it. Sunday, September 27 is not settled in the same way. Third Avenue and Atlantic Avenue are both asking for the same afternoon, and picking one means genuinely missing the other, not catching the tail end of it later.
If you've always treated the Saturday-Sunday combo as one automatic weekend, this year it's worth deciding in advance which Sunday version of Bay Ridge you want: the one on your own avenue, or the one that means crossing into Brooklyn Heights and Boerum Hill for the borough's bigger stage. Either is a good afternoon. They're just no longer the same one.
If you're new to the neighborhood, or thinking about what a fall like this looks like from a home you're not renting for one season, the team at GAMA. Team knows these streets well enough to walk you through what a Bay Ridge September actually feels like, block by block. Reach out anytime you want a local's read on the neighborhood.
