bushwick – Page 3 – brooklyn spaces

silent barn

oriana on 9 Feb ’11

neighborhood: bushwick | space type: music space | active since: 2005 | links: website, facebook, twitter, myspace

update spring 2013: The Barn is back! Now in Bushwick, and bigger, more diverse, and more ambitious than ever. Read my profile of the new space here.

update October 2011: In July, the Silent Barn was completely ransacked. About $15,000 worth of equipment was stolen, and the space itself was violently sabotaged. But demonstrating the indomitability and resilience of the NYC DIY music scene, the people who run the Barn launched and completed a Kickstarter campaign in September, raising an incredible $40,000 toward a new space.

photo from Showpaper

Silent Barn is an all-ages music venue. It’s also a living space with a rotating cast of roommates, the walls feature dozens of murals by local artists, and there’s an intricate recording system with mics scattered throughout the house. Silent Barn is also home to a zine library with over 700 books, and the DIY videogame arcade Babycastles. It’s one of Todd P‘s many go-to venues.

This one is kind of a cheat, I know, because Ridgewood is of course in Queens. But Silent Barn is barely in Queens, literally across the street from Bushwick, and anyway, it really exemplifies the kind of space I started this blog to cover: relatively unknown, DIY-great, creative and fun and unique. Plus it turns out that one of the bookers (Jordan Michael, who is also the editorial director of the DIY music listings publication Showpaper) is a friend of a friend, and he was happy to let me poke around and take pictures, and he graciously chatted with me while setting up for the night’s show, plugging in mics, digging through buckets full of cables and wires, telling sundry band members where to load in, and arguing with other Silent Barn folks about who’s worse at setting up PAs and which bands have made the latest unreasonable demands. Interview below!

Juiceboxxx, photo from Fiddle While You Burn

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space?
Jordan: It was started six years ago by this band Skeletons. They lived here and used it as a practice space, and they started playing shows and having their friends play shows. Over time there’s been dozens of people who have moved in and out, and lots of people who get involved don’t actually live here, like myself. This isn’t really my project; it doesn’t really belong to anybody, it belongs to the community.

brooklyn spaces: How did you get involved?
Jordan: Me and Joe, who lives here, work together on Showpaper, which is basically a publication about DIY music spaces like this one. I also work with comics and zines, and I started the zine library here. About a year ago I curated some workshops with the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, they came here and did some workshops on making indie comics. Then I did a benefit show for the zine library where if people donated a zine they could get in for free, and that went really well, and I just realized I liked and was good at organizing bands. Organizing bands in a space like this is kind of like marbles. You know the game marbles, where there’s a circle that’s like a wall, and the marbles all just roll away on their own momentum out of the wall? It’s kind of like that.

brooklyn spaces: Is it always the same kind of music?
Jordan: No. Tonight’s show is indie-rock-punkish music, and the show I have Saturday night is all chiptune, and the last show I did was a mixture of hardcore punk and local hiphop, and the show before that was folk. So I’d say it’s just all good music. I don’t know, everybody’s called me a music snob my whole life, but now I’m a curator.

brooklyn spaces: You mentioned that there’s a system where all of the rooms are recorded, not just the show space. What’s that about?
Jordan: That’s Lucas’s project. He’s a cassette artist, and he’s in the band Woods. It’s a recording of the entire space at the same time, not just a recording of the bands that play. So on a Friday, you hear the Dominican restaurant next door playing bachata music and people screaming at each other.

brooklyn spaces: And it’s used for what? Just to have?
Jordan: To record. To survey.

Team Robespierre, photo from Brooklyn Vegan

brooklyn spaces: Since this is a blog about Brooklyn, do you have any opinion about whether a space like this could have happened somewhere other than Brooklyn?
Jordan: Yeah, it could have happened in Ridgewood! I mean, there’s tons of spaces like this, all over. One of my favorite things about doing this is getting to meet all the people that are participating in places like this from all over the world. They all have their different things, but they’re all similar. There’s a place in Bushwick called Shea Stadium, their sound booth is an actual recording booth, on their website they have professional recordings of all their live shows. There’s a place called the Rhinoceropolis in Denver that’s a lot like this, there’s The Smell in LA, there’s Whitehaus in Boston; in every city there’s a place like this. It’s normally run by people who are in bands and can’t get anybody to book them, so they just have their friends come over and play for them, and then their friends want to play, and then people who came to their friends’ show want to play, and it just becomes a thing. It can totally happen somewhere other than Brooklyn. Actually, I’d say one of my major pet peeves is when people talk about Brooklyn like it’s this wonderful Oz place, the only place where things like this can happen. There are tons of cities, like Athens, that have a much more historical independent music scene than New York. I don’t really think New York’s all that special, to be honest. I’m way more impressed by Philadelphia or Baltimore. All the people in Baltimore are doing cool shit all the time, and they’re in a lot more danger than we are here. This isn’t a great neighborhood; it’s not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not great. But Baltimore is horrible.

Wham City, photo from Hyperallergic

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you want to tell the world?
Jordan: Yeah, don’t hang out outside the doors. We’re not BYOB, don’t bring in your own beers. And don’t be a dick about it when I try to take your beers away from you; it’s my friend’s house, I can take away your beer. And I want to stress that we really don’t let kids drink here. And don’t smoke upstairs, people live here. Smoke downstairs! We let you smoke inside, just go downstairs, stop being a dick about it.

brooklyn spaces: So generally stop being a dick?
Jordan: Yeah, stop being a dick.

***

Like this? Read about more music spaces: Shea Stadium, Death By Audio, Dead Herring, Fort Useless, Bushwick Music Studios, Newsonic Loft

trees not trash

oriana on 20 Jan ’11

photos by Maximus Comissar

neighborhood: East Williamsburg / Bushwick | space type: community space; guerilla garden | active since: 2004 | link: website, facebook

Who says a space has to be enclosed by four walls, or even have a roof? Trees Not Trash is a guerilla gardening group run by Kate and Cory, a wife and husband team, who are two of the nicest, most dedicated people I’ve ever met. Over the past seven years they’ve appropriated four abandoned outdoor spaces, working to turn plots of land that were hideously overgrown or dense with years of garbage into lovely community gardens and urban oases.

They’ve also requested and received over two thousand trees from the NYC Parks Department, which have been planted throughout Bushwick, and they’ve further beautified neighborhood blocks with dozens of planters that they made from found tires and wood. Kate and Cory involve volunteers throughout the community, including hipsters, of course, but also many neighborhood children, to whom they teach the fundamentals of gardening, often sending the kids home with fresh herbs and vegetables.

brooklyn spaces: Give me a run-down of the spaces.
Kate: There’s four: the little garden by the Morgan Ave L train stop, the big community garden on Bogart, the Jefferson Street garden, and the new one at the Bushwick Library.

brooklyn spaces: What inspired you to start this project?
Kate: We’d been working with the city to get trees put in for awhile, and we’d been thinking about the abandoned lot on McKibben Street. Then someone contacted me and said, “Hey, I rescued these four evergreen shrubs. Can you help me plant them?” I was like, “Yes! We need to do this garden now.” So we climbed over the fence and just started pulling weeds and digging up the soil. It was dirty, dirty, nasty work. The weeds there were taller than most people. We went in there with machetes and did the jungle thing.

brooklyn spaces: Were you worried about getting in trouble?
Kate: I made the assumption that everybody was going to be in support of what I was doing. I figured it would be very difficult to tell somebody not to clean up garbage and plant trees and flowers. I just wanted to improve the neighborhood I was living in. I think that’s one of the things guerilla gardening is all about.

brooklyn spaces: Was it hard to get people in the neighborhood involved?
Kate: We had this incredible group of people who would dedicate their entire Sunday to getting really disgusting and dirty. Even on days when we were going to be touching twenty-year-old garbage, everybody was like, “Yeah, I want to do that!” This is where you live, you know? It was like-minded people coming together and doing something,

brooklyn spaces: How about local kids?
Kate: The Jefferson Street garden became their hangout. All of the kids adopted a tree, and they totally made that garden their own. It’s their stomping ground. Every Sunday at 1:00, there’s kids banging on our door, wanting to plant and stuff, saying, “When are we gardening today?” We grow food there, which was huge for them, because none of them had ever grown food before.

brooklyn spaces: What kind of events do you have in the spaces?
Kate: At the library garden we’re working on doing a reading series, where it’s really beautiful and shady. We’ve really made a little oasis there, at that terrible intersection. Bushwick and Seigel is so oppressive. It’s hot, tons of traffic, no respite from anything, and with projects all around. Which is actually cool, because as we’re working, people from the projects can see what we’re doing, that this revolting little space that was strewn with garbage and filled with rats is now turning into this oasis, and they can go and sit in it. At the community garden, we’ve had garden parties where dressing up is required, and we play badminton and things. We make big pitchers of Pimm’s cocktails, using stuff from the garden, like cucumbers and lavender. We actually got married in that garden.

brooklyn spaces: Did you set out to be a guerilla gardener?
Kate: No, I didn’t really have any idea of it being guerilla gardening when I started. It was selfish as well as community-minded. I really wanted trees, and I wanted other people to want trees. But I never really had a plan, like, “I’m going to wear a bandanna and do this in the dead of night.” It just became that way.

***

Like this? Read about other community spaces: Bushwick City Farms, #OccupyWallStreet art show, Trinity Project, Time’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Body Actualized Center, No-Space

bushwick project for the arts

oriana on 3 Jan ’11

photos in this post by Rachel Lefkowitz

neighborhood: east williamsburg | space type: art & event space | active: 2009–2011 | link: website

Update May 2011. As many know, Bushwick Project for the Arts was also an experiment in radical living environments: all the artists were housed in reclaimed trailers. Though the trailers were meant to be kept under wraps, it became something of an open secret within the artistic community—and the legal one. As was perhaps inevitable, BPA became a target of local law enforcement, and was shut down this spring (in a pretty shitty way) by the city.

Don’t worry about the artists, though; they’re still at it, elsewhere in Brooklyn, coming up with plenty more crazy ideas for repurposing their space, and throwing great shows and parties while they’re at it.

***

The Bushwick Project for the Arts—affectionately (and often pejoratively) known as the Bushwick Trailer Park—is a collective of mostly visual artists, housed in a former nut-roasting factory in an industrial corner of East Williamsburg. The cavernous interior space—an ever-changing work in progress—is used for all different kinds of events, including parties, plays, film screenings, classes, art exhibits, and more. Tucked into corners are a silkscreening studio, a metal and wood shop, a ceramic studio, and even a couple of kilns.

Bushwick Project for the Arts is around the corner from Shea Stadium, Werdink / Ninja Pyrate, 3rd Ward, The Archeron (which used to be Bushwick Music Studios), and House of Yes, among other great spaces.

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Swimming Cities, The Schoolhouse, Monster Island, Hive NYC, Silent Barn

bushwick music studios

oriana on 3 Jan ’11

neighborhood: east williamsburg | space type: music venue | active: 2009–2010 | links: myspace, facebook

Bushwick Music Studios was an underground music venue in the heart of the East Williamsburg Industrial Park. It was totally unfussy—just a tiny bright blue windowless room in a nondescript warehouse, with a handmade balcony for the soundboard, DIY lighting, and a makeshift bar selling Four Loko and PBR. But during its yearlong run, it became one of the staples of Brooklyn’s underground music scene, packing in over a hundred sweaty kids on most nights. BMS’s early shows were block-wide, all-night affairs, with music blasting from several adjacent unoccupied warehouses.