Many New Yorkers are happy to welcome bars doubling as arcades (Barcade), cupcake stores featuring live bands (Cake Shop), or grocery stores that are actually bars (Arlene's Grocery). Brooklyn's weekly McCarren Pool parties fill an unlikely hole in this need for unlikely establishments. Brooklyn's most famous drained public pool is now the borough's go-to venue for live indie rock music, cult-movie screenings, and drunken daytime socializing.

Brooklyn kids one and all apply SPF 60 and take to the party in summery earth tones and cutoffs, leaving, in most cases, their early '90s T-shirts, fanny packs, and baggy neon pants at their six-artist crash-flat. And for all their overheated labors hauling over to the park, pretty tweens and they're prettier boyfriends are rewarded with the likes of Illinois, Manman, Erase Errata, TV on the Radio, Neko Case, and a host of others, who in turn take to the stage and perform through crackling speakers while onlookers sip warm, overpriced beers. But this is not to say it's solely an annoying, overbearing steam bath. For all its presumed posturing, the event's remarkably free of the many exhausting social tendencies of the look-to-see-who's-looking Williamsburg set.

Still, if you're out to prove yourself an exceptional badass, you can sign a waiver, take off your shoes, run down a concrete runway littered with broken bottles and Parliament Lights butts, and dive fully clothed down the slip 'n' slide. Just don't expect any applause from the jaundiced masses—unless of course you're a 300-pound man wearing a floral half-shirt, tight orange shorts, and a pink backpack. In which case you can expect extensive photo-blog coverage.—Elizabeth McKenna