A new venue in Brooklyn is set to bring large-scale cultural events to an industrial area of the city.
Announced Tuesday (May 21), Brooklyn Storehouse is a 104,000-square-foot warehouse that's been taken over as a venue for culturally-spanning programming that includes fashion, art, music and more — with an emphasis on online events.
Brooklyn Storehouse is a collaboration between two long-time independent supporters: New York-based Teksupport, founded by Rob Thomas and has created electronic music events in pop-up (and often industrial) venues around the city since 2010 and Broadwick Live. Founded by Simeon Aldred in 2010, Broadwick Live is a UK live events company that manages 30 venues and venues, including the Drumsheds and the former Printworks London. Housed in a former Ikea newsprint unit and a converted newspaper respectively, Drumsheds and the now-defunct Printworks London fit right in with Broadwick Live's focus on repurposing industrial buildings.
Together, Teksupport and Broadwick Live have leased the Brooklyn Storehouse from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with the warehouse space located within a 300-acre industrial waterfront complex. The building was first used for shipbuilding during the First and Second World Wars and its structure retains its original industrial aesthetics. Much of the Navy Yard is currently being developed for industrial use by clean energy and climate solutions companies. As such, the area is unlikely to be built up with housing, allowing Brooklyn Storehouse more room to produce live (and often late-night) events.
“One of the problems we have in the UK is that almost every site we open, two years later someone is building flats right at our back door, and there's constant pressure,” says Aldred. “One of the things that is very attractive about the Navy Yard is that it is protected for jobs and will be for a long time.”
The founders—who started the effort with “50/50 of our own money,” says Aldred—launched Brooklyn Storehouse last September with a Ralph Lauren fashion show. The venue can accommodate up to 7,000 people.
Brooklyn Warehouse
Philip Reid
The partnership brings Teksupport's strengths as a producer — “promotions, marketing, bookings, licensing, opening doors, splitting operations, community outreach,” says Toma — along with the company's ability, Aldred says, “to immediately supercharge this [space] with 30 to 40 performances”. In the coming months, Brooklyn Storehouse is set to host shows from Justice, Charlotte de Witte, Dom Dolla, John Summit, Swedish House Mafia, Alesso, James Hype and Meduza and four parties from Ibiza-based brand CircoLoco later this year.
Toma adds that many of these artists “come to us because we're not just focused on selling tickets at the dance floor. They know that the spaces we do are related to fashion [and other cultural programming]and they know that's what it is.” Toma also says that artists are attracted to performing in special locations, with the Brooklyn Storehouse thus providing “an advantage over our competitors.”
Toma adds that the key to making the space work is “the balance of not just programming in terms of cold hard tickets. It's more about figuring out how to position it in a way where we also bring in a lot of different industries, from film to fashion.” The founders hope it can be a space where orchestras, musicians and other groups can establish extended creative residencies. It will also be used for corporate gatherings.
The Brooklyn Storehouse is the first of several venues Broadwick Live and Teksupport plan to operate in the United States, with the partners also looking at former industrial spaces in Boston, Miami, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“In America right now we have 25 to 30 [conversations ongoing]” says Aldred. “Five to 10 of them are in the money part of the speech, so they get pretty real.”
In these industrial spaces, the partners see a particularly timely opportunity for expansion, with Aldred predicting that many such facilities will open as the power grid transitions to clean energy.
“These spaces were used for kind of dirty work,” he says. “In the next 5 to 10 years, you're going to see them come offline because they're dirty and developers don't know what to do with them. You're not going to destroy a hundreds-year-old power station with stunning architecture. It's not easy to retail them. It's not easy to put a roof over them.”
But as we hope with Brooklyn Storehouse, parties, fashion shows and DJ sets will fit right in.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/business/touring/new-brooklyn-cultural-venue-dance-music-shows-justice-1235689160/