The Lost Horizon Night Market In Bushwick, Brooklyn

On Saturday, a caravan of 30 box trucks parked along an industrial stretch of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood for the third-ever Lost Horizon Night Market.

There wasn’t much to see on the street, but a different mini-world was hidden inside each truck.

Revelers slurped udon and miso in the Noodle Truck. They played Ouija and did their nails in the Junior High Slumber Party Truck. They fired paint balls at a guy in a chicken suit in the Shoot the Freak truck. And at the Sleazy Motel truck, a pair of red-uniformed bellhops took reservations and checked clients into either of two grungy bedrooms.

Other trucks invited visitors to lie in a coffin for their own funeral rites, sing karaoke, get conned by fake scammers, watch a vaudeville show, act in a silent film, sip tea, smoke a hookah or sprawl on a patch of grass sod under a projection of a starry sky.

The Lost Horizon Night Market is a sporadic guerilla event organized by co-conspirators Mark Krawczuk and Kevin Balktick. Admission is free and none of the volunteer-run trucks charge for goods or services (though they do take tips to cover costs). The number of trucks and visitors has doubled at each event since the first Market happened in September.

Hundreds of people had gathered by the time the Market closed at 2 a.m. this Sunday. They dispersed by taxi, foot and bicycle, splattered with paint, full of noodles, carrying complimentary pregnancy tests from the motel truck.

Once they had gone, the trucks drove away.