On Sunday afternoon in Williamsburg, Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez and New York State Senator Julia Salazar sat engaged in an important summit: multiple rounds of dominos atop a custom pink-painted table set up in the middle of Grand Street between Driggs and Roebling. It was a serious face-off—brows were furrowed—and after an hour or so, Velázquez, an avid dominos player, emerged victorious. “I won seven out of nine,” she told Hell Gate with an impish laugh. They had been flanked by about eight tables full of players, mostly focused-looking viejos, in yellow T-shirts, all vying in a tournament for one of four, very tall red trophies. “They take it very seriously,” said a pokerfaced, pierced-and-bleached young woman named Toni who was helping her grandfather keeping the official score for el Torneo de Dominó Oficial.
The revelers had all come to celebrate Maria Antonia “Toñita” Cay, on the 50th anniversary of Toñita’s Caribbean Social Club, the historic home, party palace, and familial meeting point for Southside Williamsburg’s Puerto Rican community that she founded and still runs today. In honor of its half-centennial, a stretch of Grand Street in front of Toñita’s was transformed into a classic block party to kick off the summer, complete with live music, DJs, food tents, and a hoops-shooting set-up courtesy of the Brooklyn Nets. Lines—to enter Toñita’s for its famous $3 Medalla Light or to pick up a mini-empanada and cup of chinola for free from Titi’s—stretched down the block, but were quick and amiable. The crowd was diverse in age and majority Latine, but everyone was wearing their first-block-party-of-New-York-City-summer best; elders sat on beach chairs up and down the block, parade-style, while teenagers gabbed excitedly and snapped cute Instas of their friends.