coworking – brooklyn spaces

freecandy

oriana on 5 May ’15

[I’ll be counting down to the release of the Brooklyn Spaces book by doing one mini-post per day, sharing teasers of some of the places you’ll find in it.]

neighborhood: clinton hill | space type: art gallery & coworking | active since: 2009 | links: website, facebook, twitter

A few years into its stride, Freecandy has become a malleable space for independent creative individuals to convene and showcase their work. By day it’s used for coworking, with creative types building apps, miximg music, managing bands, and designing streetwear; by night the space morphs into an art gallery, music venue, black-box theatre, or whatever the situation calls for.

all photos by Alix Piorun

Founder Todd Triplett’s goal is for Freecandy to bring all different kinds of people together in what he calls “directed serendipity” to see what develops. Todd, whose grandfather was a jazz musician, believes that art and music have the power to change the world, and he wants Freecandy to carry on the cultural legacy of Bed-Stuy, Clinton Hill, and Ft. Greene. “The vibe of this place, the bones, it’s just so authentic,” Todd says. “It’s exactly what I envisioned when I was moving to New York.”

Want to learn more about Freecandy, and 49 other incredible Brooklyn Spaces? Buy the book!

uniondocs

oriana on 27 Feb ’14

space type: movies, event space, nonprofit | neighborhood: williamsburg | active since: 2005 | links: website, facebook, twitter

UnionDocs is a center focused on documentary art in all its facets. They put on about 100 events a year—primarily screenings, but also workshops, panels, radio-listening events, photography lectures, discussions, and more. These events have an “intensive” model, bringing together a gathering of people around a certain film, genre, topic, or theme, and are intended to encourage lively dialogue and critique. Some are collaborations; UnionDocs has worked with a wide variety of partners, from Harvard’s metaLab to the Northside Film Festival. And for those who can’t make the presentations, UnionDocs also engages critical writers to do essays and articles about the work they show.

all photos from UnionDocs

Another big part of UnionDocs is the CoLAB, a collaborative studio fellowship program that brings together twelve artists per year, six from the United States and six international, to produce short documentary works around a specific theme. These films often go on to the festival circuit, and have been shown at the Tribeca Film Fest, BAM Cinemafest, Doc NYC, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, and many more. At this point more than 70 media artists have come through the CoLAB program.

CoLAB fellows, 2013

Finally there are longer-term productions, which come in different forms. The latest is a multi-year project called Living Los Sures, a “collaborative web documentary” about South Williamsburg. UnionDocs describes the project as “part omnibus film, part media archaeology, part deep-map and city symphony.” That project will be finished later in 2014, and there will be screenings, activities, and many other events to celebrate it.

Living Los Sures screening

Be sure to keep an eye out for that and all the other incredible work UnionDocs has to share—but first read my Q&A with Christopher Allen, UnionDocs founder.

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of how this all got started.
Christopher: I actually moved into this building in 2002, and in 2003 a few close collaborators and I took it over and started turning it into an art collective. In 2005 we became a nonprofit, focusing primarily on the intersection of politics and art, which led us into documentary work. In 2007, most of the original people involved were heading in different directions, including myself, so we all moved out of the building and set up a sort of residency model. And then, a bit later, in 2009 I came back and make this my full-time venture with a proper staff.

Color Series and Veils

brooklyn spaces: What would you say is the theme or mission statement of Uniodocs?
Christopher: We present and produce documentary art, and we’re interested in taking our audience on a journey through a variety of different subjects. We basically use documentary as a starting point to a broader conversation that can engage many different disciplines and areas of expertise, and hopefully get people excited and aware about things happening in the world.

Hybrid Forms of Documentary

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about a couple of your favorite UnionDocs events.
Christopher: Let’s see. Pretty early on we had an event with the artist Christo and the documentary legend Albert Maysles, which was incredible. It was a real surprise that we were able to get Christo here, and I think he liked it a lot. In 2007 we did an event with Laura Poitras; she’s an amazing filmmaker with an incredible vision, and she’s so tough and daring. Laura was the key person to break the Snowden story, so she’s a big inspiration for us. It’s amazing to be able to look back and say that before Laura Poitras was a global name, she was here talking with an audience of like forty people. One really different favorite event of mine was very recent, it was curated by our director of the CoLAB, Toby Lee, all around the idea of the “uncanny valley.” It was a series of films and lectures about things that appear to be real but are not, and what happens as they get closer and closer to being real. In addition to films, there was a performance by a master puppet artist and a talk by a scientist. It was a wide-ranging discussion that took people on a real intellectual journey. Our events are really geared toward a conversation, and often we have an audience that really shares and dives into deep questions with the filmmakers. There aren’t so many spaces where people can articulate their opinions in public in the flesh, so there’s something about that, that ritual, even if it seems anachronistic, that’s kind of a vital thing.

Megapolis Audio Transmission

brooklyn spaces: I’d love to hear some more about the Southside documentary project Living Los Sures. What was the inspiration for that?
Christopher: It started four years ago, when we were given a disintegrating copy of this incredible documentary film that was shot in this neighborhood in 1984 by Diego Echeverria. What we’re doing is making the original film accessible to people in many different ways, like restoring and annotating it, and working with the community to mine it for other stories and populate it with other memories. A lot of the people in it are still in the neighborhood, and it’s great to look back at the work and try to understand it, and also to update it and challenge it and work with it in different ways. Diego has been very generous with us; he’s overjoyed that the film is being restored, that there’s a group of young artists who are re-engaging with the ideas in it. A whole set of short documentaries around the same ideas have come out of the CoLAB as well, like Toñita’s, which investigates one of the last remaining Puerto Rican social clubs in the neighborhood, along with a whole cast of characters there, including the matriarch of the club who’s been keeping it going all these years.

summer backyard party

brooklyn spaces: UnionDocs clearly has a very involved and nuanced relationship with the neighborhood and community. Can you talk a little more about that?
Christopher: We’ve always tried to find ways to connect with the people in our neighborhood, but the Living Los Sures project has been really successful because we’ve been able to meet residents where they’re at; we’ve done screenings in church basements and schools and other community institutions. This project is a way for us to use our interests and talents to help preserve the legacy of this neighborhood, to create new relationships between neighbors, and to try to have a greater sense of place here. Lots of people think of the Southside as just a part of Williamsburg, but it has a very distinct history and population. This project is really devoted to celebrating it.

brooklyn spaces: It seems also like a really crucial cultural history. Are there other records to draw from? If people wanted to learn more about the history of this neighborhood, where would they go?
Christopher: There’s not that much that’s been written. A lot of organizations that are doing great work, they haven’t had a lot of time to document it because they’re out there making things happen. But there’s an effort toward cultural history now. The housing organization Los Sures HDFC is interested in starting a museum, and El Puente has been working on a sort of people’s history of the neighborhood. We’re trying to work with both of those organizations however we can.

Radio Boot Camp

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on working and making art in this part of Brooklyn right now? Do you think the Southside is in danger of being overtaken by gentrification?
Christopher: I’ve always liked the energy here, it’s always felt very vibrant and exciting. The wave of new businesses and new residents is not stopping, but I don’t think the long-standing community will be pushed out in the same way that has happened in other places, largely because the community is organized, and many people own their property. I have a lot of hope for this area; the development is not all good, but it’s inclusive in some ways. If new residents can be open to the people who helped to preserve this neighborhood when it was bombed out and the landlords weren’t paying attention, then I think there’s a lot of positive things in the future for the Southside.

Views from the Water

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of UnionDocs?
Christopher: We’re looking to continue to do exciting events that are cross-disciplinary and bring lots of voices into the conversation, and we’re trying to do more with the community we’ve brought together. I don’t think our vision is to become bigger and bigger and bigger; it’s more about improving the quality of what we’re already doing. But there’s also the possibility of taking the model we’ve established and doing it in other locations. There’s been a lot of interest from folks who have come through our collaborative program, especially the international folks; they go back to Turkey or Peru or Paris or Tijuana and want to do something like this where they’re from, so we’re thinking about how that could operate and what it would look like.

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Like this? Read about more theatres: Spectacle Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Clockworks Puppet Studio, South Oxford Space, Cave of Archaic Remnants

brooklyn lyceum

oriana on 5 Aug ’13

space type: performance venue | neighborhood: park slope | active since: 1910 | links: website, facebook, twitter

This is by far the oldest space I’ve written about. It was built in 1910 as a public bathhouse, boasting 100 showers and the largest indoor pool in the country. You can still see evidence of its past on the façade: etched onto the top are the words “PVBLIC BATH,” and there are two entrances, one each for men and women. In the late 1930s, as part of a WPA project headed by Robert Moses, it was closed down, and then reopened in the early 1940s as a gym, which it remained for about two decades. After that it changed hands several times, going from a mattress warehouse to a transmission repair shop, among others. Then in 1994, Eric Richmond bought it to turn it into an arts center.

an early sketch of the Lyceum

In its current incarnation, the cavernous Lyceum plays host to an astonishing array of artistic events, from plays and performances to fitness classes and sprawling galas. Some highlights from the past two decades: performances from Fiona Apple, Polyphonic Spree, Yo La Tengo, Upright Citizens Brigade, Amanda Palmer, and Black Dice, plus festivals like KingCon Brooklyn, Oxheart’s Canvas, NY Zine Fest, and the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

The Lyceum also has a daytime marketplace for coffee and local products, and soon there will be coworking space available during the days as well. And the building is available for rental, so if you’re looking for a really unusual place for that’s steeped in Brooklyn history for your shindig, you’ve probably found it. In the meantime, check out my Q&A with Eric Richmond.

brooklyn spaces: What’s it like being the caretaker of such an immense old space?
Eric: We got involved with the property in 1994, and we’re just constantly working on fixing it up. We’ll fix something, have some events and shows to generate more revenue, then fix something else, then have more events and shows, like that. Most of the basics are done by now, but there’s always more work to be done.

Holiday Craft Market, pic from Markets of New York

brooklyn spaces: What was the area like when you got here?
Eric: This wasn’t a good area, not even close. There were gang members on the stoop, people getting shot in the subway. When we first started working on the building, we went out into the neighborhood and talked to as many of the older residents as we could, to try to get them excited about what we were doing. By and large, the response was, “It’s a beautiful building, but I want nothing to do with it.” There had been such bad things happening on this block for four or five decades that everyone would avoid it. I heard from one woman that some kids had died in the building; they cut a hole in the fence of the balcony and dove in the pool, which was only about two feet deep at that end.

pic from Cabalaza

brooklyn spaces: So what did you have to do to get the older people to start coming here?
Eric: Oh, I never got them. I made the effort, but it never worked. But then things started changing in the neighborhood anyway. In 1998, a bunch of kids across the street tried to build a bomb and blow up Atlantic Terminal. It hit the news big-time, the Feds swooped in, and the city started making a serious effort to clean up the neighborhood. There were drug busts two or three times a week for about six months. A retired policemen once told me that the area around Union St and 5th Ave had one of the highest concentrations of crack dealers in the city. So they had to root out that kind of stuff.

at Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Carlos Henriquez

brooklyn spaces: Wow. 1998 wasn’t that long ago.
Eric: Right. So all I did was hang on long enough, you know? I mean, I cleaned up the best I could in the meantime, but for a long time, 4th Ave was just a dumping ground for everything. There were times when car doors would get thrown over our fence, bumpers, giant piles of concrete rubble, even a wardrobe. One time, about two dozen huge red plastic letters showed up inside our fence. So I played Scrabble with them, and what did it spell? Associated Supermarket. I walked up the block, went into the store, and said, “You guys just dumped your old shit in my yard. Come deal with it.” They said, “We didn’t dump it!” I had to lay out the letters and show them.

hoop meditation class

brooklyn spaces: So are you seeing positive effects of the huge influx of new people in the neighborhood? Are you getting more foot traffic?
Eric: It’s hard to tell because the café is on hiatus. Now there are six places around here where you can get a great cup of espresso, so we have to figure something else out. We’re going to be opening a fairly large coworking space in a couple of months, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

from Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Nicole de Waal

brooklyn spaces: Do you have some favorite events or performances that have happened here?
Eric: We had a rock musical early on that was really tremendous, it was based on David Bowie. About a decade ago we had a Broadway dancer choreograph the musical On the Town with songs about New York. That was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. A year or so ago we had a Rocky: The Musical workshop here; they took over the whole space, built a ring, did all their rehearsals and some performances, and then went off to Germany to perform there. There have been some amazing music acts, too: Fiona Apple, Yo La Tengo, stuff like that.

Civilians theater company, pic by Adrian Kinloch

brooklyn spaces: Are there some lessons you’ve learned from doing this for so long?
Eric: Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re trying to accomplish, and working toward being more intentional. It’s important to make the events conform to the building, instead of trying to force the building to conform to the events.

from Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Ralph Andre

brooklyn spaces: So are there particular things you’d like to have more of?
Eric: We’ll probably be reloading the music and performance end of what we do. I mean, I love music, I love bands, but loud band just don’t work here. When a DJ comes in, you can tell him all you want about sound level limits, but he won’t pay any attention. People always say “Why can’t it be louder?” Well, because you’re not in a club in Chelsea. I don’t have eighteen-inch brick walls, we’re not in an abandoned warehouse, you’re not going to piss off my neighbors. That limits some of the higher-profile events, but that’s fine. We’re not trying to get Jay-Z to come play here; I’d rather have more Bar Mitzvahs.

Juste Debout dance contest

brooklyn spaces: Are there other things you want to talk about about your experiences here? You’ve been doing this a long time; you’re part of old-guard Brooklyn.
Eric: That’s a sad thought, but probably true. The only thing I can say is that Brooklyn’s changing. It’s changing like wildfire, and it’s good to see.
brooklyn spaces: It’s nice to hear that. When I talk to people in Williamsburg or even Bushwick, the feeling is, “It kind of sucks; we’re about to get priced out.”
Eric: Well the problem is, they didn’t buy. People who are in a space temporarily don’t tend to think about being part of the infrastructure. They have an itinerant arts ethos and style that has to up and move all the time. You’re going to see them in Brownsville next, and then East New York, and then Ocean Hill.

upper floor of the Lyceum being used as a gym

brooklyn spaces: Yeah, and then Detroit. Because we’re running out of places to go.
Eric: Well, it’ll take a long time. I go to Williamsburg and see all the people there, all the development, it’s unbelievable. I remember getting held up a couple times in Williamsburg; now it’s got athletic facilities and tens of thousands of people milling about every weekend. I think it’s a good thing. When I go to Bed-Stuy and see Dough, the best doughnut place in the city, right next to the projects, how is that wrong?

Face the Music, pic by Kaufman Center

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Like this? Read about more historic buildings: Brooklyn Historical Society, Bushwick Schoolhouse, Breuckelen Distilling Co., Broken Angel, South Oxford Space, Trinity Project

no-space

oriana on 14 Jan ’13

space type: activism | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

No-Space is the current workshop for Not An Alternative, an art-and-activism collective that works to affect politics and culture through organizing, education, and partnering with community groups. The group is led by Beka, a progressive-nonprofit strategist, and Jason, an artist and video-production specialist. Not An Alternative’s old home, Change You Want to See Gallery, was an activism hub in Williamsburg in the mid 2000s, where the group hosted film screenings, lectures, workshops, and production meetings, as well as a rotating cast of collaborators, including the Yes Men, Reverend Billy, and members of the Barcelona activist collective Yomango.

all photos from Not An Alternative

The new space, in industrial Greenpoint, has coworking desks in the back and a production facility in the front. The group and the space have been very active in Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and many other Occupy and activist permutations. A large part of NAA’s disaster-relief contribution has been designing and producing visual symbols for the movement, such as vests, magnets, patches, and “way-finding” signs, to clarify and make physical the incredible work that Occupy Sandy has been doing since the superstorm hit. This work has been done in conjunction with Occupy Town Square, Pratt’s Disaster Resilience Network, and the Wise City.

Not An Alternative is always seeking coconspirators and collaborators, so get in touch to join in with their work. But first check out my interview with Jason!

Jason

brooklyn spaces: How did Not An Alternative come about?
Jason: It was created in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention in 2004. People had realized that reenacting tactics they’d seen in the sixties wasn’t going to work, so we had to think of different ways to affect transformation. Our space became an organizing and production hub. Every week we would hold a production meeting for a different group, and we would connect them with curators or people with space or materials, and just sort of help the whole thing get under way. After the convention and the election, we realized that we’d created an important thing. We were trying to decide how to continue it, and the next thing we realized, our neighborhood was under this massive rezoning. So we jumped into that, because it was really all the same thing. This is politics, this is globalization on a local level.

Change You Want To See Gallery

brooklyn spaces: So it evolved into a general gathering spot and workspace for creative activism, which became the Change You Want to See Gallery.
Jason: Yeah. We started hosting events around the same things, activism and technology theory. So it was brainstorming, theory, discussion, presentations, and workshops, and then production—taking all those ideas and putting them into practice with community groups, social movements, different campaigns.

brooklyn spaces: Are there community groups or campaigns that were particularly inspiring to you, or that you felt really worked?
Jason: We did some work with Picture the Homeless that I think was really good, after the crisis of 2008. We partnered with them on an action where they put up a tent city in a vacant lot. We pretended to be a film crew: we drove in with forty people, set up one of those white tents with tables and bagels, and shot a fake music video while our “stagehands” were in the back cutting down the fence and setting up the tent city. By the time the police came, the whole thing was erected. It got great media attention, we even had a story in the New York Times. There was a lot of pressure on Bloomberg at that moment, because he had just announced the results of a five-year plan to end homelessness, which had ended in an abject failure.

brooklyn spaces: What were some great presentations or workshops?
Jason: There were so many. Reverend Billy did the closing of the space, which was great. We had a great series called “Symbols, Branding and Persuasion,” where we had designers, activists, and people involved in branding talk about their practices. We had a friend of Beka’s who basically led the design team for Obama, we had someone who ran focus groups, we had the creative director of Interbrand, which is the largest branding company in the world. Activists are largely very alienated by advertising, it kind of suggests manipulation, but we tried to break those things apart.

brooklyn spaces: And Change You Want to See Gallery ended right before Occupy Wall Street, right?
Jason: Yeah, just a month before. By the time we left we no longer made any sense in Williamsburg anymore. We were across the street from the Knitting Factory, the Commodore, down the block from all those new restaurants; the whole scene was just completely different. We used to be outside on the sidewalk with table saws, and all the neighbors would send their kids over to learn how to make stuff. By the end we had people knocking on the door all the time going, “What kind of store are you?” So we got the new space in September, and then OWS happened, which thoroughly consumed us for a year. We even took over a second space downstairs that we used for production for awhile.

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk about the work you guys have been doing with Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Our work with Sandy is a continuation of the work we were doing with OWS. We saw Occupy as being fundamentally about the contestation of space, and we tried to focus that idea so it was clear to people. If you can articulate something, you can understand it. And if you can see it, if it has a material form, it can be reproduced. Zuccotti Park had a material form and was able to be reproduced in other cities. So for Sandy, we made construction vests that say “Occupy Sandy” on them, and we also made way-finding signs, which direct people to distribution centers where they can get medicine, lawyers, food, shelter, tools, information, or anything else. And then we went out and put up all the signs as if we had the authority to do so, right in front of the police and the National Guard. They let it happen because they know there’s a need for it, so it turns out that we do have the authority. This stuff is functional in terms of helping people find a location or a person who can help them, but it also affects the symbolic landscape in terms of making the Occupy network more visible. It transforms the relationship to power around the symbol, and around a certain kind of visual language code.

brooklyn spaces: And it certainly has echoes of branding, and of making sure there’s a public acknowledgment of who’s doing this. People outside of New York don’t realize how much of the relief work has been done by Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Although we do so much work with advertising, we’ve made a conscious decision not to describe what we do as branding. I rather think that we’re occupying the vocabulary of the public, the symbolic language that discusses public use of space. We’re not introducing a new “brand”; we’re inhabiting an existing vocabulary. That’s the way we talk about it.

brooklyn spaces: Got it. So having experienced the transformation of Williamsburg, and now the industrial edge of Greenpoint, do you feel that has had any effect on the way you organize or the way you run your space?
Jason: For sure. When we worked on the Williamsburg rezoning, our focus was on organizing the hipster community, because they were the least organized, due to all the things that make hipsters hipsters. The fact that they can’t self-identify as hipsters makes them unaware as a class, so unlike the Dominican or Latino communities who are like, “This is what we are, you can tell because we all have this tattoo,” the hipsters are like, “I have this tattoo and that means that I’m not part of any community.” But the neighborhoods we’ve been working with are also very creative, and we try to see how far we can push them toward becoming a creative political class.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Jason: We would like to destabilize authority to the point that it becomes a question as to what was done by activists and what was done by a “legitimate” or existing authority. And I think that can actually happen. Our politics are about shifting culture, or shifting politics through transforming culture. I feel like this space is serving a very important role to social movements and community groups in terms of what we provide and what we’re modeling, ways of engaging in politics. So I would like to see it continue to grow.

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Like this? Read about more activist spaces: The Illuminator, OWS art show, Bushwick City Farm, Books Through Bars, Time’s Up, Trees Not Trash, Brooklyn Free Store

pickett furniture (pier 41 workshop)

oriana on 23 Aug ’12

space type: coworking maker space | neighborhood: red hook | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter, tumblr

Pickett Furniture is huge. The massive coworking space—in an old import / export warehouse right on the water—is home to a dozen woodworking companies, a couple of industrial designers and prototypers, and the screenprinting company Lunacy Design. In addition to “machine alley,” the vast corridor filled with all manner of industrial saws and giant sanders and other baffling tools, there are individual “bays” for each company, finishing rooms, a full photo studio, and offices. It’s an incredible space.

The whole thing is presided over by Jeremy, owner of Pickett and landlord to all the other small companies. He told us to arrive in the early evening so we could catch the sunset over the water from his window, which was excellent advice. In fact, I kept getting distracted during the interview by all the ships floating in and out of view, as well as the great weird music Jeremy played for me (an eighties record called “Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat“) on the incredible stereo console he built himself.

brooklyn spaces: What’s the craziest thing you’ve built lately?
Jeremy: Probably this stereo console. There’s a company in Chicago called ECP Audio, they build high-end equipment for the audiophile community out of tubes, and I’ve been doing their casework for the last few years. Last summer we started talking about doing one of those old fifties-style retro stereo consoles but with audiophile equipment. We created the tube amp together, the tube phono stage, the speakers, and the digital stage, so you can stream your iTunes from anywhere in the room. I also worked with Planet 10 Hi-Fi on the speaker design. The really great thing about the console is it’s only got a five-watt amp. Modern stereos, they all have are like 5,000 watts of power. The really muddy way to create sound is to give it a lot of power but not pay attention to the circuitry or any of the parts and components, which are usually all solid-state. So we took the Pickett Furniture philosophy of really simple furniture and applied it to the electronics, and we were able to create something that outperforms just about any modern stereo.

brooklyn spaces: What are some other crazy things you’ve built?
Jeremy: There are a lot of things that were hard but don’t look it, like the chair you’re sitting on. It looks like an art project, but it’s incredibly comfortable, which took a lot of trial and error. These stools weren’t hard to build, but the wood is from the Staten Island Underground Railroad, so that’s pretty crazy.
brooklyn spaces: Whoa.
Jeremy: Yeah, a friend of mine has a carriage house in Staten Island, which was a safe house in the Underground Railroad, and these black locust trees in her backyard were part of it too. They had little markings in the bark that indicated “danger,” “safe house,” whatever. The trees fell down in a big storm a few years ago, so I went out there and brought back as much as I could.

brooklyn spaces: Does that kind of thing happen a lot?
Jeremy: We do try to be very conscious of the materials and processes we use, and we like to be able to tell the story of our wood, from where it grew up to where it was harvested and reused. The oak for the coffee table we’re building right now came down from the John Jay Homestead property up in Westchester, and it’s the same story: these 230-year-old trees fell down in a storm. I used to be in the music business, and I toured Japan quite a bit, so getting exposed to shintoism and the Japanese way of life has really shaped my business. We try not to waste. A lot of our furniture is made out of solid, local woods, and everything’s hand-cut and assembled here. There’s a book called The Art of Japanese Joinery that’s like our bible.
brooklyn spaces: Is it okay to share the name of the book? I don’t want to give away your secrets.
Jeremy: Oh, it’s fine, it’s totally unprofitable to do it this way. But we want to make products that will have a really long lifespan, heirloom pieces that will be auctioned at Christie’s or bequeathed in people’s wills. We think that’s one of the best ways to be green, to create products that won’t wind up in a landfill. People in mixed-use neighborhoods usually don’t like manufacturers, they feel like it decreases property values, pollutes the water, the land and air. But I want to be able to make and manufacture our products here, in the neighborhood where I live, and the only way to do that is to be a good steward of the neighborhood. We donate our sawdust to community gardens for mulching, we sponsor a night at Red Hook Flicks film series, we really try to let people know that we value the neighborhood and aren’t a threat. There are a lot of areas, like Gowanus and Greenpoint, that were plagued by industries that didn’t care what they did to the neighborhood. The factories were owned by people who lived somewhere else, and they trashed the neighborhood and then left.

brooklyn spaces: And we’re still cleaning up their messes.
Jeremy: Right. We try to do things carefully, and hopefully that comes through in the furniture, hopefully people who seek out our pieces would rather have a something built by a local craftsman than something made by Ikea robots in a far-off factoryland. My family ancestry is a long line of craftsman, weavers and woodworkers. So there’s a lineage I want to honor.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Jeremy: I just want this to be a place where small companies can continue to work and manufacture. This is such an expensive city, but by all of us pulling together, we can afford to do it. And it’s really nice having other people in the shop and seeing other projects. It adds a real energy and perpetual motion.

brooklyn spaces: Does being in Red Hook impact your business?
Jeremy: Oh, I love it here. We share this building with Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies, which is amazing because the smell always comes in. There’s other great businesses in the neighborhood, like Stumptown Coffee, Baked, Red Hook Lobster Pound. The Dustin Yellin galleries just opened up in an old record storage warehouse. The Red Hook Crit is out here. Often small tours come through; yesterday like fifty people came by with Open House New York, and once in a while Made in Brooklyn brings groups in. There’s very little housing in Red Hook, so you get to know lots of people in the neighborhood. It really feels like a village, and everybody partakes in activities as a village. It’s a fantastic community. Once you find this place, you never want to leave it.

sunset off the pier

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Like this? Read about more makers: Twig Terrariums, Ugly Duckling Presse, Metropolis Soap, Gowanus Print Lab, A Wrecked Tangle Press, Breuckelen Distilling, Arch P&D, Bushwick Print Lab