neighborhood: crown heights | space type: gallery | active since: 1999 | links: website, facebook, twitter

“Everyone in the neighborhood knows, if you need something, come to FiveMyles,” says Hanne Tierney, founder and artistic director of the Crown Heights gallery, performance venue, and community gathering space. Hanne opened the 1,500-square-foot nonprofit gallery, which is dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging, under-represented, and minority artists, in a former garage in 1999. FiveMyles presents six formal exhibitions each year, and close to half the artists shown are African American. “We’ve always stood with Africa, East Africa in particular,” Hanne says. “And it’s very exciting for the kids in the neighborhood to see contemporary work from Africa.

pix by Maximus Comissar

This year, a 172-unit luxury condo will open two doors down from FiveMyles, which Hanne fears could mark the end for the community. But she continues to fight for her neighbors: screening documentaries, hosting talks, writing letters to Albany about police harassment, and, of course, curating more and more exhibits, showing the work of more and more artists. “Hanne is so important to this community,” says Francelle Jones, whose work has been featured in the gallery. “She brings people together, and she allows people who live in this neighborhood to feel as though they’re still part of something. That’s so important.”

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

Pioneer Works is huge. It’s around 27,000 square feet with 40-foot ceilings, which is just truly, absolutely enormous. The building dates back all the way to 1866, and for more than a century was home to Pioneer Iron Works, one of the largest machine manufacturers in the country.

Prominent Brooklyn artist Dustin Yellin bough the building in 2010. As he told the New York Times, “My crazy dream is to create a kind of utopian art center.” And Pioneer Works is something pretty close to that dream. The nonprofit has several elements, including a massive exhibition gallery and event space (one of the biggest in the city), classes and workshops, a science lab with a powerful photographic microscope, artist residencies, institutional residencies (currently the Clocktower Gallery), a radio show, and a modern art periodical called Intercourse Magazine.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

The events range from open studios to lectures (“How to Fake Your Own Death” is popular and recurring), from Hackathons to concerts, with musical acts like Spiritualized, Ariel Pink, and Omar Souleyman. And the classes are equally varied—some recent examples include “Physical Storytelling,” “The Alchemy of Light,” “From Tesla to the Transistor,” “Homebrew Kimchi,” “NY Theremin Society Workshop,” and “Lock-Picking and Open-Source Security.”

So get out to Red Hook and learn something! But first read the Q&A with David, Pioneer Works’ Director of Education.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a bit about the history of this building.
David: Okay! I know this because we had a Red Hook history class here recently. It was built in 1866, then in 1871 it burned down, and it was rebuilt in 1872. It was originally Pioneer Iron Works, one of the biggest iron works in the country. After that it was a tobacco-drying warehouse. Then they were doing something manufacturing until the 1950s; whatever they were making was super heavy, so they had this system to move it all around in here, and rollers set into the floor to roll it out the door. And then since the 1960s it was used to store financial records. When Dustin bought it, there was no heat, no running water, minimal electricity. The windows were all bricked up, the floors were wrecked, the staircases were terrifying. It took about a year of heavy work to get it into shape.

brooklyn spaces: I love that uniquely artist vision of walking into a completely decrepit space and saying, “I can see what this is going to be.” It’s like that quote about sculptors, how they look for the piece within the marble and then let it out.
David: Exactly. Dustin was like, “All right, this building is my next piece of art.”

Dustin Yellin sculpture

brooklyn space: How did you become involved?
David: I was teaching high school and really wanted to quit, so when Dustin presented me the opportunity to start a teaching program here, I thought I’d give it a shot. So we started, and it went really well in the summer, and then it went really well in the fall, and then Hurricane Sandy happened, and it just totally knocked us out. This whole building was like shoulder-deep in water. We tried to keep doing classes even though we had very little power and no heat—I bubbled in the classroom, like in ET, just encased it in plastic curtains, and we put in as many heaters as we could without blowing the circuits, but it was still so, so cold. We didn’t get heat until March, so that’s when we finally started doing classes again. Since then, we’ve just been growing and growing and growing.

brooklyn spaces: How would you classify the different kinds of classes offered here?
David: They’re pretty different, but it’s basically stuff that’s either really new or really old. We do cutting-edge stuff like microcontrollers and 3D printing and upgrading the firmware in your camera; those are for artists, designers, software developers, to demystify the process of new technologies that everyone wants to know how to use. And then we do old stuff, like paper marbling, or wet-plate or tintype photography, which is Civil War era. It’s to a similar aim as the newer stuff: giving artists a new vocabulary and a specialized practice.

brooklyn spaces: Do you come up with an idea for a class and then go out and find a teacher? Or do people bring you ideas?
David: Both. The lock-picking class, which is super popular, came about because I saw a lock-picking tent at Maker Faire—although tracking down someone who picks locks for a living was really hard. Then on the other hand, a woman came by the other day who wants to do a bread-baking class. We were like, “But we have no ovens, we have no flat surfaces, we don’t have anything.” And she was like, “It’s okay, we can make it work. How about we cook the bread on sticks over a fire?” We’ll try basically anything if it seems cool and the teacher seems competent.

brooklyn spaces: There seems to be a strong movement in Brooklyn for these kinds of classes and skillshares, as evidenced by the extreme popularity of places like 3rd Ward and Brooklyn Brainery. Why do you think that is? Do people just want to have more hobbies?
David: I think it’s deeper than that. Demystifying processes is so enabling. There’s a huge movement of open-source hardware and software in the tech world, and I think part of that is because we’re so controlled by the companies that make the technology we use. The fact that you can’t just open an iPhone and replace the battery is a conscious choice on their part. It’s not because oh you might do it wrong; it’s to keep you under their control. The open-source movement puts the power back in the hands of the individuals, and I think people are used to that idea now, so by applying that model to education, we’re unlocking it a bit. And I think it’s going to continue to grow.

brooklyn spaces: With so many choices, do you think they’re beginning to overlap? What makes Pioneer Works’ offerings unique?
David: I mean, maybe there’s some overlap with what 3rd Ward was doing, but we have something that they didn’t have.
brooklyn spaces: Integrity?
David: Oh yeah, well there’s that. But also we’re a nonprofit and they were a for-profit, which makes a huge difference. We’re an arts institution; it’s just a very different kind of space. Plus we have the nicest building. Once people come here once, it’s not hard to get them to come back.

brooklyn spaces: Do you think being in Red Hook has had an influence on how the space has developed?
David: Sure. There’s such a strong community here, and a real neighborhood feel, like I’ve never experienced anywhere else in New York. We’re trying to find ways to use this space as more of a community center. At the end of April we did a twenty-four-hour hackathon that was Red Hook themed. Business owners from the neighborhood gave us challenges, and all the tech people competed to make apps to address those issues. Pizza Moto catered the event. I love those guys—after the flood they came down to Van Brunt Street when nobody had any power and just started cooking pizzas for free, out on the street under the police lights.

brooklyn spaces: What are some of your future goals for the space?
David: We’re building a lot of relationships with terrific groups like Invisible Dog and Generally Assembly and Fractured Atlas. We don’t know what we’re going to do with them yet, but we’re kicking around ideas. We’re also starting to collaborate in a bunch of ways with Brooklyn Museum, which is perfect because they want to be linked to a gallery and we want to be linked to an institution. Obviously we don’t want to be a museum, but the way they’re organized and the integrity they have, I think it’s a really great model for us.

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Like this? Read about more skillshares: Brooklyn Brainery, Exapno, Time’s Up, Ger-Nis Culinary Center, Lifelabs, UrbanGlass, 3rd Ward

Founded by husband-and-wife composers Lainie and Jascha, Exapno is a coworking space for the musically minded. For a very low monthly fee, musicians (primarily “new music” composers) can rent desk space, giving them a quiet place to work on their music, network with other musicians, and give and attend performances. It’s built on the concept of a writers’ space, inspired by Paragraph in Manhattan, where Jascha was once a member.

Qubit performing; photo by Lainie

Interestingly, Exapno is just one of myriad small businesses currently residing in the fascinating Metropolitan Exchange building. The massive MEx—a 45k-square-foot, seven-floor former bank—is owned by designer Al Attara, who is striving to make it a creative startup hive. Attara has owned the building for more than three decades, but for years it was on the city’s “urban renewal” chopping block, meaning that it could be reclaimed and torn down at any time. About six years ago the building came off the list, and since then Attara has invited in a wide universe of creatives, from avant-garde furniture designers RockPaperRobot to bio research lab Genspace. The sixth floor is all architects; the fifth floor has several food importers, from chocolate to tea to fish; and the fourth floor is media-oriented, with groups like Seed Magazine and Good News Planet, a website that only prints good news. (To read more about MEx, check out this New York Times piece from back in 2011.)

MEx fifth floor, photo by Maximus Comissar

Working within this amazingly diverse community of creative entrepreneurs, Exapno is thriving—as much as it can. With a cap of around 20 musicians monthly, and restrictions such as the inability to leave instruments overnight or to put up walls or soundproofing, Exapno may have reached its growth capacity. Ultimately they may relocate to a space where they can have more control and freedom, but in the meantime they’re happily staying put. Exapno, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is always seeking donations, and the group is open to new members—find out more on their site. But first, read my Q&A with cofounder Jascha and musician member James.

Jascha & James on left, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What does Exapno mean?
Jascha: My wife Lainie is a huge Marx Brothers fan, Harpo in particular. In his biography, Harpo talks about how when he toured Russia in the ’30s, he would see posters advertising his show, with his name written in Cyrillic, and it looked like “Exapno Mapcase.” I think we’ve only ever run into one other person who got the reference.

brooklyn spaces: How did the space get started?
Jascha: Since at least the early 2000s, Lainie had been wanting to create a performance space that was cheap to rent out, and that could function as a community nexus, a meeting place for young musicians, a way to get into the scene. Eventually we met Al, the wonderful man who owns this building. He’s incredible; instead of turning this place into condos or office space and making millions of dollars, he has filled this sort of ramshackle building with startups and indie businesses and nonprofits, just because that’s what he believes in. Anyway, Al agreed to rent us the space for whatever we could pay, so it’s sort of by his good graces that we’re here at all.

Wet Ink, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What’s it like being a member here?
James: It’s an amazing resource and access to a great community. All musicians needs space where they can make noise or quietly write music that will one day become noise, and it’s awesome to be able to get that for such a low monthly fee.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What connects all the members? Does everyone write or make a similar kind of music?
Jascha: We rapidly discovered that with a really cheap rehearsal space, we had to find artful ways to deflect requests from garage bands or that sort of thing. That’s what’s nice about “new music”: occasionally it’s a little loud, but usually it’s like a string quartet, or a vibraphone and singer. It’s much more manageable in terms of neighbors.
James: It’s somewhat self-selecting. You can’t leave equipment here, you can’t make a lot of loud noise, so that disqualifies, say, a punk band that wants someplace to rehearse every night. Plus almost everyone I know in the “new music” community tends to be project-oriented, as opposed to in a definitive group. Which is why a resource like this is so important: we don’t have a whole band where each member can pitch in $20 a month for a space.
Jascha: There are a lot of things about music and musicians that are really quite antisocial—making lots of strange noise, leaving stuff everywhere, taking up lots of space with pianos and drum kits—so we’ve had to modify things. There’s a lot more we could be doing if we had a space we could control, but then we’d have to pay an awful lot of money. And actually, it feels like the people who mainly used the space two or three years ago are starting to move on to other things. Now I feel like the people who need the space are people we don’t know, so we need to work on getting the word out.
James: I’ve noticed a lot of new younger composers here. Suddenly there’s this new generation of really positive, spirited people doing all sorts of weird stuff, and a lot of it’s happening here.

String Noise, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any famous alumni?
Jascha: Within the modest world of the New York new music scene, sure. Dither is quite well known; they’ve been around for years and get props from major composers. They do an event every year called the Dither Extravaganza [this year’s is on October 26th, at the Gowanus Loft]. Our artistic advisory board also has some heavy hitters in it, like Morton Subotnick and Paul Lanksy.

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship to the neighborhood?
Jascha: The location is awesome, it’s a great hub for music. Brooklyn Academy of Music has been here forever, and recently two major venues moved in around the corner: Roulette and ISSUE Project Room. But we’re proud to say we beat them here.

Sweat Lodge, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being an artist in Brooklyn these days?
Jascha: Well, when we started this space, Lainie and I were living in Chelsea, but most of our music friends lived in Brooklyn, and increasingly the concerts we were going to were in Brooklyn too. The center of gravity for our scene—and so many other artistic scenes—has been shifting here more and more. Brooklyn is incredible right now; there’s just so much creative activity here.

Exapno rooftop, photo by Maximus Comissar

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Like this? Read about other coworking and skillshare spaces: Time’s Up, Pioneer Works, Bushwick Print Lab, Arch P&D, Urbanglass, 3rd Ward, Brooklyn Lyceum, No-Space

Listen, I’ve been to a lot of wacky spaces through this project, but Acme is one of the wackiest. It’s just teeming with the wildest array of things—figurines and furniture and statues and taxidermy and instruments and tchotchkes of all shapes, sizes, and hues. Even the bathrooms are like tiny stuff galleries! And the most amazing part? It’s the most organized chaos I’ve ever seen.

photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

Acme is a one-stop shop for your film and photo needs: run by industry veterans, they can do everything from designing and custom-building a set, to supplying a dizzying array of props, to shooting the whole thing. And they certainly have done all that, for increasingly high-profile clients, from Missy Elliot to Zac Efron to Heidi Klum. They shot the David Cross cover for Brooklyn Magazine, hosted the secret premier of season two of Girls with HBO and Flavorpill, and throw fabulous fundraisers for the Burning Man camp A Cavallo. And they also hold benefits, parties, lectures, classes, and more, and are always open to new ideas for fabulous uses of this fabulous space. So hit ‘em up with your ideas, and go check out an event or two! But first read my interview with operations manager Brian Colgan.

"Girls" screening, photo from Acme's tumblr

brooklyn spaces: How did this all come about?
Brian: It was started by Shawn Patrick Anderson, a set designer and prop stylist. He had a storage and workspace down by the Navy Yard that was full of all this crazy stuff, and people kept wanting to do photos and videos there. He had a series of kind of high-profile shoots there, like Sonic Youth and the band Chairlift, and finally he was like, “What if this could actually be a thing?” Most studios are just a big empty white box with a cyc, that big curved white wall that you do the photo shoot in front of. They’re totally sterile and boring, and you have to bring everything in with you. So the beauty of Acme, what Shawn realized people were responding to at his studio, is why not have a crazy amount of stuff in the studio that people can use in their shoots?

brooklyn spaces: So are you guys actively amassing more stuff?
Brian: We’re always amassing more stuff. There’s so much stuff! It’s really a question of deciding what makes sense to keep, which is always tough.

brooklyn spaces: Especially when you’re trying to impose order on such an eclectic collection.
Brian: Exactly. For instance: we have a lot of taxidermy, which is hard to get in the city, because it’s really expensive and fragile. So we were like, “Okay, let’s be the taxidermy people.” Now we’re always looking for more. There are definitely holes we can fill in the New York City prop world.

brooklyn spaces: I had no idea there even were prop shops, let alone so many that you have to make an identity for yourself among them.
Brian: Oh yeah, there’s a bunch of places. A lot of them specialize in modern, clean, white stuff, because so many people want that. We’ve decided we want to have the most unique, weird things. When someone’s like, “Where can I get a furry armchair?” someone else will tell them, “You’ve got to go to Acme.” I get the craziest requests. Like, “Do you have ten person-size Mountain Dew cans?”

brooklyn spaces: What?! Do you?
Brian: No, but I usually know who does. The film and photo community in New York is small but growing, because the city seems to have realized that there’s a lot of money in this. If you go out to LA, there’ll be a guy whose entire operation is, like, John’s Life-Size Mountain Dew Cans. But in New York, with real estate at such a premium, no one can afford to store all that. Someone called the other day to see if we had a log cabin. An entire cabin! It’s definitely a wacky world.

brooklyn spaces: If a band comes in here and is like, “We want to use the life-size disco ball, that taxidermied deer head, and the paint-covered inflatable baby,” would you be like, “Ooh, Sonic Youth used those same props”?
Brian: Nah, we’d just let it go. Even if things get reused, the application is going to be different or the lighting is going to be different or whatever. And anyway, if you brought twenty people in here and had them pick the coolest object, they’d pick twenty different things. We’re all inspired by a different taxidermied animal.

dressing room

brooklyn spaces: Who are some of your favorite clients you’ve had or favorite projects you’ve worked on?
Brian: It’s always fun to travel, which we do a fair amount. We just did probably our biggest job ever, a Diet Coke commercial down in Nashville with Taylor Swift. As for things we’ve done here, one of our most ambitious projects was building a huge multi-level snow cave for a Heidi Klum fashion project. When Heidi got here, she was like, “This place is crazy!” She made her mom come, she told her friend to cancel her flight, and they all just stayed and hung out. All types of people come in here and are like, “Whoa, this is so amazing! You have the coolest job ever!” and I’m like, “Oh, right, I do.”

Heidi Klum set, photo from Acme's tumblr

brooklyn spaces: And you guys have other kinds of events here as well, right?
Brian: We do. We have this awesome space, and so many people need space, so I’m really excited to share it. We’re open to anything, for the most part. Well, I do get a lot of calls where people are like, “Okay, we’re gonna have sixteen DJs, five bars, and six thousand people!” Which: no. None of that. But we’re pretty open to reasonable things. We had a writing group in here recently, like fifty folks writing in total silence. We’ve had swinger sex nights, we’ve done underground dinner parties, we had a big Ethiopian coffee ceremony with Bunna Café. After Hurricane Sandy, Observatory, the event space in Gowanus, got flooded, and they called and were like, “We’ve got this lecture coming up, the speaker is on a plane from London right now, and we don’t have a space.” So we had that here, which led to Observatory scheduling other things here, including some taxidermy classes. Basically, we have this cool space, so why the hell wouldn’t we share it?

wood shop

brooklyn spaces: I love that! That seems like such a Brooklyn ethos. What are your thoughts about Brooklyn these days, especially this hyper-gentrifying part of Williamsburg?
Brian: When we first opened Acme three years ago, we got a lot of resistance from people about shooting in Brooklyn, but now celebrities want to come here, sometimes more than Manhattan. Not to knock studios in Manhattan, but why would you want to shoot there? Just trying to load things in is impossible. And this is such a thriving area; right on our block we’ve got Mast Brothers, the Brooklyn Art Library, About Glamour, and there’s new stores opening all the time. I definitely love being in Brooklyn. The creative class has absolutely moved over here, so it seems like a natural place to do creative things.

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Like this? Read about more film industry spaces: Film Biz Recycling, Running Rebel Studios, Factory Brooklyn, Bond Street Studio

G&S Glitter Ball, NYE 2013 (photo by Linus Gelber)

For ten years, Gemini & Scorpio have been throwing huge, immersive themed parties, consistently positioning themselves at the forefront of the NYC underground art-party world. Along with a few other beautifully creative affairs—Rubulad, Dances of Vice, Shanghai Mermaid, Cheryl, various Winkel + Balktick shindigs—Gemini & Scorpio curate the most creative, daring, and over-the-top events that Brooklyn has to offer. Whether it’s jazz bands in a Russian banya, a steampunk Burning Man fundraiser, an old-meets-new electro-swing dance party at Lincoln Center, or a New Year’s Eve glitter explosion, Gemini & Scorpio bring together dancers, music, and performers around lavish themes to create unforgettable occasions, party after party after party. And that’s not all: G&S also curate a weekly events listing that is second only to NonsenseNYC for finding the most fantastic things to do any day of the week. Sign up here!

After years of being nomadic, Miss Scorpio found a permanent home for G&S in a repurposed Gowanus woodshop. Now, in addition to lavish monthly parties, the loft hosts lectures, dance classes, plays, photo and video shoots, and more. And after spending months on demolition and build-out of the new space, Miss Scorpio reached out to the community she has provided with so many fantastic experiences to ask for help with the next stage of development of her space—and successfully raised more than $32k through Kickstarter. In the short term, this will mean new floors, walls, and ceiling for the loft, and in the long term it will allow G&S to keep bringing us all the best, most magical affairs—the uniquely beautiful experiences that make Brooklyn the most spectacular place to be.

photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

brooklyn spaces: Let’s start before this space: tell me how you became one of New York’s most creative party mavens.

Miss Scorpio, photo by Linus Gelber

Miss Scorpio: It was a pure accident that started with a website about online dating. This was ten years ago, when online dating was mostly considered weird and sad, but Miss Gemini and I wanted to show people that it was actually this fabulous thing, like eBay for dating. We thought you should never just do dinner and a movie with your online date; you should do something interesting, so that even if the date sucked, at least you’d have had a cool night. So every Friday we put out a list of unique things to do with your online date, and then we started throwing “singles parties that don’t suck.” Well, they didn’t suck to such a degree that we couldn’t keep couples out! We started with a Valentine’s Day party, then we did one for Halloween, and another one for New Year’s, and now it’s ten years later and this is all I do.

brooklyn spaces: What elements are necessary to make a Gemini & Scorpio party?
Miss Scorpio: First there has to be a theme, something a bit off-beat and unexpected that gives people an excuse to dress up. Live entertainment is another factor that’s really important: there’s generally a whole evening of programming curated to the theme. A G&S party isn’t one you drop into casually on your way to something else; our ideal party guest is one who leaves the house knowing that they’re coming to see us, dresses to the theme, and stays with us for the whole night.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of your favorite parties.

banya party, photo from G&S

Miss Scorpio: I always enjoy the Lost Circus steampunk party, and also the banya parties, which we’ve been doing since 2006. A fantastic recent party was a sci-fi mashup called Cantina at the End of the Universe. It was a Star Wars Day party—I’ve been wanting to do that party for four years, but I had to wait until May 4th fell on a Saturday. One of the headliners was Big Nazo, this incredible alien monster funk band. They played the Masquerade Macabre Halloween party that I co-produced with Rubulad in 2010, which had one of my favorite moments of any party I’ve ever done. Big Nazo was onstage being joined by the five-piece Raya Brass Band, and I was leading a parade from our other party location, headed up by Extraordinary Rendition, a fifteen-person brass band. Big Nazo and Raya were supposed to be done when we got there but they weren’t, so we had like thirty people onstage jamming, along with these enormous alien monster puppets, and the crowd just lost their shit. It was beautiful. [Video of the madness here.]

Big Nazo, photo from G&S

brooklyn spaces: Who are some other favorite performers you’ve worked with?
Miss Scorpio: There’s definitely a family of performers that I book again and again. Sxip Shirey is an absolute genius composer and musician, and every time he plays I’m excited to hear it, especially when he performs with the incredible beat-boxer Adam Matta. The Love Show dancers are wonderful, they combine classical dance training with a cabaret attitude and fantastic costumes. Shayfer James is a terrific dark rock musician who deserves a much bigger audience than he’s getting. Sometimes I take on artists as a personal cause, and keep booking them until people realize how incredible they are.

G&S piano

brooklyn spaces: Have you ever had someone get so big that they outgrow your parties?
Miss Scorpio: Yes! After I booked the Hot Sardines for my Lincoln Center Midsummer Night’s Swing two years ago, their career has exploded and they are now booked constantly. That’s happened with a bunch of circus people I used to book as well. But it’s a good problem to have. I’m very proud of my talented friends.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, let’s talk about this space. How long did you spend looking for it, and what shape was it in when you found it?
Miss Scorpio: Four years of constant searching, and in the end it was a random Craigslist find. The moment I walked in, I knew this was it, even though it was completely wrecked. There was plywood over all the windows, the floor was rotted in multiple places, there were strange pipes everywhere, the ceiling was half rotted out, there were signs of a recent fire. It was terrible.

a few months after move-in

brooklyn spaces: How long did it take you to get it into shape?
Miss Scorpio: First there were two months of just demolition. Everything you see, all the walls, we did it all. We re-laid much of the floor, using wood repurposed from other parts of the space. Once we got bathrooms up—with walls—I knew I was ready to let people in. The first party we did here was Swing House, one of my 1920s remix parties. Everybody loved it, but it was a party in a construction zone.

fixing the rotted floors

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the non-party events you’ve had here.
Miss Scorpio: We’ve hosted a few lectures in conjunction with Observatory that have been great fun. We had one called “How to Trespass” with Wanderlust Projects, and another with my boyfriend, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, called “Sex in Dictionaries.” We just had a storytelling event, “I’m Tawkin’ Here,” which was all New Yorkers and New York stories. Brooklyn Swings does a weekly swing-dancing class. We hosted an immersive, participatory version of Midsummer Night’s Dream staged by Shakespeare Shakedown. I’m always looking for people who are doing innovative, interesting things and could benefit from having access to an affordable art space.

Meet Me in Paris Cabaret, photo by Binnorie Artwork

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship like within the rest of the underground arts community? I feel like, of everyone I’ve interviewed, you really know every single person in the creative class in Brooklyn.
Miss Scorpio: It’s an extremely tight-knit community. It’s not just me; I think we all know each other. But because I do the event listings, I have a good sense of what everyone is up to. Even if I don’t know someone personally, I can tell you what arc their work has taken over the last ten years.

G&S rooftop view

brooklyn spaces: Last year when you and I were doing Occupy Sandy volunteering together, you told me you once did the listings on your phone from Paris.
Miss Scorpio: Oh yeah. Another time I did them from a tethered connection in an RV on the way to Burning Man. Everywhere I’ve traveled, I’ve brought the listings with me. I consider it my community service, a way for me to give back to the people who trust me and honor me with their presence at my events.

G&S rooftop art

brooklyn spaces: What advice would you give someone who wanted to do what you do?
Miss Scorpio: I’d say definitely don’t get into it for the glamour! Ninety percent of what I do is spreadsheets and emails. Maybe by 11 or 12 on a party night I’ll finally get to get into costume and have a few hours of fun, but for the most part it’s a job like any other. For me the payoff is conceiving something and then seeing it become a reality.

brooklyn spaces: What are your plans for the future—ten more years of this?
Miss Scorpio: Oh gosh, I don’t know. It does seem like I’m pretty committed to the New York cultural underground, but I couldn’t tell you what will happen in my life in the next ten years. I hope it’s big and exciting.

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Like this? Read about more underground nightlife: Rubulad, the Lab, Red Lotus Room, Newsonic, House of Yes, Gowanus Ballroom, 12-turn-13

For most of its run, Dead Herring—an apartment that sometimes doubled as a DIY music and occasional theatre space was fairly averse to any sort of press. That’s just part of the fun of running an underground apartment venue—some measure of paranoia is often called for. But Dead Herring closed Feb 1st, 2013, right after an amazing commemorative closing show, featuring the Immaculates (a band that was formed at a Dead Herring party), Moonmen on the Moon, Man (who broke up and then reunited just for this show), Necking!! (one of the Dead Herring creators’ band), and special secret guests.

Cuddle Machines, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Read my interview with housemates Liz, Nicki, Jeff, and Andrew, which took place on the eve of the end of Dead Herring, below. For more pix from Nicki, there’s a terrific six-year DH photo retrospective at Impose Magazine. And be sure to check out their new space in North Williamsburg, Cloud City!

show posters, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a quick history of how this all got started.
Jeff: Liz and I went to college together in California, and we both lived in this co-op called Cloyne Court Hotel in Berkeley that used to have shows in the kitchen, in the basement, wherever. The first time I went there Nerf Herder was playing, and I was like, “Whoa, this place is awesome! I’m moving in here next year!”
Nicki: My band played there once, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were kegs in the quad, there was a room no one could go into, there was the most disgusting bathroom I’d ever seen in my life, it was covered in graffiti, and just everyone going crazy and hanging off pipes. It was so cool.
Jeff: And then years later I wound up living across the hall from Liz and Nick in the McKibben Lofts.
Liz: Nick and I are the ones who started Dead Herring. We had a couple of shows at McKibben, and when we heard about this space, we thought it would be great place to continue to do that. Nicki moved in six months later, and Jeff moved in in 2008, and Andrew moved in two years ago, in 2010.

Bare Wires, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What was the first show?
Nicki: It was Maneguar, Pterodactyl, Golden Error, Marvel & Knievel, and Nonhorse.

brooklyn spaces: Do you all book shows?
Liz: I don’t. Nicki books all the music now, Jeff does the variety shows, and Andrew has brought some plays in.
brooklyn spaces: Nicki, is there a succinct way to characterize what kind of music you book here?
Nicki: No, not really. We used to have a lot more experimental noise shows when Nick lived here, because he was into experimental noise music and he booked that. I’m more into punk and rock and indie pop. I don’t know, it just depends on what comes together. If there’s a band coming through that we know, we’ll book around them. Or if we see a band we really like we’ll tell them to come play here. It used to be easier for bands to find us when we used the MySpace page, but that just became too much, we were getting like fifteen emails a day. None of us is a full-time booker, you know? When I have ten minutes I’ll IM people, like, “Hey, you want to play a show?”

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me either the coolest or weirdest thing about living in a place where there are shows.
Nicki: A funny thing is that people don’t realize that we live here. People come here for shows and then they’ll come over for a potluck and be like, “Oh, wow, it looks so different. I didn’t know you had a couch.”
brooklyn spaces: I think that’s part of the charm of these spaces, that you know while you’re watching this band you’re sitting on the roof of someone’s closet or washing your hands in their kitchen sink.
Jeff: Did you read the article about the new Silent Barn in the Village Voice? They were saying how most DIY spaces are illegal, like no one can talk about it, which has kind of been our thing. But now the Silent Barn is like “No, this is completely legal.” They’re going to get a liquor license and whatever. One of our old roommates, Joe, who’s part of Showpaper, he lives there now.
Andrew: I had a lot of conversations with Joe when he lived here about this whole thing, about how all these spaces are somewhere along a continuum, like how much are they a house, and how much are they a venue? Silent Barn has always been basically a venue, even though people live there. We’re really a house that has shows once in a while.

Golden Error, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Nicki: We have to tell people all the time that they can’t have their birthday party here, or their mud-wrestling party. We’ve gotten a lot of weird requests over the years. But overall it’s fantastic, this house pretty much made my life in New York. I met all these people, I found something to do and a community to be in. I had no idea there was a music scene that was this small and this amazing here. You have these moments where you realize this is happening in your life and you created it and you’re a part of it. It makes me so happy. It’s so great when you have a whole bunch of bands come in at the beginning of the night, you’ve never met any of them before, and at the end of the night they’re all giving you giant hugs and saying this was the best show they’ve ever played. It’s so amazing that we had the opportunity to do this.
Jeff: People really appreciate us just trying to make an awesome, fun night, and when everybody’s stoked on it, it’s a good feeling. It’s great when really talented, amazing people have a great time performing here.
Andrew: We just had a theatre show that did a three-night run, and It was like we were living in this little theatre that everyone was a part of. I don’t know if you could achieve that in any other setting.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you think that being in Williamsburg has affected the space?
Nicki: I really like that Death By Audio is so close, and 285 Kent, and Glasslands. It’s nice that there are still a few really good spaces around here. And I feel like living off the L and the J is convenient, a lot of people can come out to shows here. I don’t always want to go all the way to Bushwick, but people seem happy to come all the way out here, which is awesome. Jeff’s shows get put up on the Nonsense NYC list sometimes, and people come here from wherever because they’re like “Oh, I know where that is, I can get there.”
Andrew: For a performing arts venue it really makes a difference if it’s in a part of town that people want to go to.

Teenage Nightwar, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: And it’s nice to see that there are still places like this in Williamsburg. A lot of people think that all the creativity is gone from this neighborhood, but that’s not true. It’s just a little harder to find. Anyway, tell me about some of your favorite shows.
Nicki: My favorite “I can’t believe I actually pulled this together” show was when Forgetters played here, Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker’s band. So many people I know have loved his music since we were like sixteen years old, and he played in my living room! And we had this band called Leg Sweeper come, they played with our friends’ band Sleepies, and they were so excited about playing here, and we were so excited about having them play, and after the show we all hung out until 5 in the morning, and everybody slept over, and we made waffles in the morning, and it was magical. Or another one, after The Men played, we had a limbo contest with the guys in the band, which was so ridiculous and fun. I think the craziest show we ever had here was Calvin Johnson and Chain and the Gang. When I introduced Chain and the Gang, everyone just freaked the fuck out.
Liz: That show was my teenage dream come true. I was so thrilled, I couldn’t believe he was in our house. He got here early, and we were trying to set up, and our old cat was sitting on the bar, and he sang a song to the cat! It killed me. My other favorite moment was when Social Studies, our friends’ band from San Francisco, played last year. Right before they started to play my favorite song, someone cut in and said, “We just found out the Giants are going to the World Series.” The whole crowd was full of people from California, and everyone was so so so excited.

photo by Maximus Comissar

Andrew: I’m from Minneapolis, so when our friends’ theatre group came from Minneapolis to do their play, it was really exciting for me to get to share this space with them. They used to live in a space like this in Minneapolis, and one of them had a space like this in Baltimore before that where my theatre troupe performed, so being able to return the favor was really gratifying.
Jeff: I like all the variety shows, I guess. Oh and Reggie Watts, that was awesome. And Corn Mo.
Nicki: And the ventriloquist! And the magician who sawed a woman in half! And the guy from Cirque de Soliel who took all his clothes off and climbed all over the entire audience! And the lady who juggled with her feet! I know it sounds like we’re making this stuff up, but we’re not.
Jeff: Yeah, we’ve had some crazy stuff.

Hunters, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What advice do would you give to other people who want to do something like this?
Nicki: Be nice. That’s something we try really hard to do. Now we’re friends with all the bands and performers and other DIY spaces in the city. That’s why we’re not super nervous about going into the new space. We feel like we’re not going to be alone, because all these other people are going to support us. All the DIY spaces are kind of in it together.
Jeff: Yeah, it sounds cheesy but we really feel like we’re part of a community. And we’re good at welcoming people in and having a positive vibe about everything.
Nicki: That makes it a lot more fun for everyone. We want to have fun too!

***

Like this? Read about more apartment performance spaces: Silent Barn, The Muse, Cave of Archaic Remnants, The Schoolhouse, Greenroom Brooklyn, Newsonic, Jerkhaus

Vaudeville Park is a plucky arts venue with wildly diverse programming. It sits right on the borderline (at least, the current one) between Williamsburg and Bushwick. Run by experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist Ian Colletti, Vaudeville Park has shows nearly ever night, including all kinds of music (from synth to neo-chamber to ladies of experimental music), literature, film (from Noir Night to avant garde), dance and performance art, gallery shows, comedy, discussions, workshops (from yoga to circuit bending), and more. The space has been active for almost four years, and is now starting to get a lot of attention from the media, including regular mentions from the likes of Time Out New York, Brookly Vegan, Artcat, and Rhizome. Ian is one insanely busy guy who is also incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about the work he does. Check out my interview with him, and then please, go see something amazing at Vaudeville Park!

Ian Colletti, photo from Vaudeville Park's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: How did you get started with all this?
Ian: I’m from New York, born and raised, and I’ve been an artist and a musician pretty much my whole life. It felt like the early 2000s were a dark time for counterculture in Williamsburg. I mean, there was a lot of cool stuff going on for artists, but that was when groups like the Strokes and Interpol and Ambulance LTD, and really high-fashionisa galleries were huge. It was an appropriation of mainstream, cookie-cutter ideals into counterculture. It was like everyone who was in a band really just wanted to be a model in a Levi’s ad. Now artists have a chance to really represent themselves through their own savvy with the internet, but at that point there were just a few labels and magazines that promoted musicians. I was living with this guy from Fader magazine, and he was like, “Man, if you want to start your own weird art collective, you have to kiss these people’s asses.” I was like, No way. I just didn’t want to be part of this phony, arrogant, silver-spoon kind of thing. But I was really worried about the culture here, so in 2007 I stopped playing shows and performing, saved up as much money as I could, and turned my recording studio into an arts venue. The first show we had was Dreamtigers, by Brian Zegeer, who’s one of my best friends. He just headlined the Queens Museum “International 2012,” along with two of my other good friends, Ben Lee and Rachel Mason, both of whom have been really involved here. There’s an extreme synergy here that’s really important.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Was it a nonprofit from the start?
Ian: Well, it was always nonprofit in its mission. We’re sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts now; they picked Showpaper two years ago and they picked us last year. NYFA is good people, but we need our own 501(c)3, which we just went for, and we need to get larger grants.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How do you pick your programming? Are you the only one who directs it?
Ian: Yes. Basically the mission of Vaudeville Park is to represent underrepresented artists of high craft. My goal is to pair the best minds and artistry and craft in music to the best visual and performance art. I really feel that people’s eyes have gotten bigger from constantly looking at things, but their ears have gotten much smaller. People don’t listen to records, they don’t really put effort into making records, and if they do it’s just ear candy, it’s less performance-based, there’s less heart and soul, it’s not as evolved. So I wanted to have a venue for counterculture music, like dark wave, coldwave, post-whatever, and new chamber and post-classical music. I felt that if I put the music in a gallery context, it would up the ante, like, “This music better be pretty damn good because these visual artists are so good.”

art by Alexander Barton, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: So all the shows are music plus visual art plus something else?
Ian: Well, no. We have several different programs, and sometimes we combine them. There’s a gallery art program, with one show a month, either a group show or a few specific artists. Then there’s an archival film program, which includes one of our most famous shows, Noir Night. We’ve also had cartoon carnival stuff, we’ve had optics, we’re now working with the curators at Millenium Theatre and Anthology Film Archives, and we’re starting to have closer ties with the Kitchen. Then we have a TV program on Manhattan Neighborhood Network with my good friend Scott Kiernan, who does ESP TV. Then we have a performance art program. There are only four galleries and art spaces in New York City that host performance art. We’ve done a bunch of performances in the past, recently Esther Neff and The Penelopes and Performancy Forum. And finally we have the music program. We do workshops too, we’ve hosted a lot of extremely successful workshops, the biggest one that everyone constantly asks for is the electronics in music workshop for circuit bending. But we just can’t do it again without funding.

circuit-bending workshop, photo from Vaudeville Park's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What about your own art? What kind of music do you play?
Ian: I do a lot of stuff, I’m a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer. I was the first featured soloist in the Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in November, and I made all these crazy handmade instruments and soundscape synthesizer stuff. I’ve done a lot of film scores, dance scores, music for fashion. I mostly do new works for chamber. The music that I’m doing now, the best way to put it is the orchestral coldwave height of pop that was never made. It’s like post-romantic coldwave blitz with eighteenth- to nineteenth-century post-classical music, and also a lot of Latin jazz and obscurities.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of your favorite shows here.
Ian: One of my favorites was a Crystalline Flux installation, because one of the things I want to push for Vaudeville Park is doing something totally new, something that’s almost like a trip back to Bauhaus, or Kaprow’s Happenings, which were installations and events where a whole art space was transformed into a stage full of specific performers. So a bunch of my friends—Ben Lee of Beta Copperhead, Brent Arnold, Anthony Johnson, Caleb Missure, and Naomi Rice, who’s in a band Next Wave Festival—we transformed the whole space into a stage that would specifically fit one performer, kind of like a static music video. That was one of the most special art events I’ve ever been to. Also Noir Night is one of my favorite ones, I really think it works with the intention of the space. And I really like the Dreamtigers and Avatar Atavistic, and Myra Brim’s gallery show “April Sky,” and Christy Walsh’s dance piece, this flamenco classical guitar thing. I like pretty much everything here, it’s kind of a blur.

[below, from Ladies of Experimental Music: Leah Coloff, Meaghan Burke, and Valerie Kuehne; photos by Maximus]

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk a little more about the neighborhood. Do you feel like being here on this weird cusp between Bushwick and Williamsburg affects the space?
Ian: Vaudeville Park is not a Williamsburg space, I’m not trying to make it “Williamsburg-y.” It’s the gateway to Bushwick arts, since we’re on the first block of Bushwick. During the last Bushwick Open Studios, the L train was down and we were the first place people saw. That’s a great festival, Arts in Bushwick works really hard.

brooklyn spaces: You’re getting a lot of attention from the media lately, but ultimately, this is a small space. Is there any worry you’ll get too well known?
Ian: No. Lots of shows here are really packed, but I’m trying to only do things that make sense in a smaller space. This is an arts venue, it’s done with no money but with the best programming and art possible. And by being good to people and treating artists well and believing in this community, you can go a long way. People who have run spaces like this, they do it for a couple years and then give up, and they have every damn right to, because it can be really hard and really frustrating. But what happens if you don’t give up? What happens if every time you think, “This is as far as I can go,” you’re like “Let’s go further”? What happens if we just keep expanding more and doing better? I’m really excited and happy to be doing this and to have all these special people involved. I’m really lucky.

***

Like this? Read about more arts venues: Chez Bushwick, Gowanus Ballroom, Bushwick Starr, Monster Island, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Fort Useless

Update, spring 2015: Last winter, Vice magazine took over two adjoining buildings on the Williamsburg waterfront, evicting several underground spaces in one fell swoop: Death By Audio, Glasslands, and the Muse, which actually got pushed out due to construction before the end of their lease. Undaunted, the Muse family Kickstarted more than $60,000, and in April 2015 they reopened an enormous new space in Bushwick.

***

The Muse is an aerialist performance and workshop space in South Williamsburg dedicated to fostering experimental creativity, and giving artists the space and time to try out new things. It was founded in late 2011 by Angela Buccinni, a dancer, acrobat, and aerialist, and Yuval Oz, a musician and acrobat.

Angela as a reindeer in Hot Frosty (photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted)

The space is a former garage for Domino Sugar, which Angela and Yuval built out from scratch—in only two months they did the living space with six rooms on two floors, an elevated stage, a bathroom, and a kitchen, as well as put in rigging points throughout the main performance area. They’ve gotten an outpouring of help from Williamsburg artists, and have a close partnership with Karen Fuhrman’s aerial dance company Grounded Aerial, of which Angela is also member. In addition to performances, the Muse offers classes and workshops in hand-balancing, acrobatics, silks, harness, trick ropes, kudayo, and lots more.

I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Muse for the dress rehearsal of Grounded Aerial’s first annual holiday show, Hot Frosty. I got to hang out with Karen, Angela, Yuval, and the rest of the incredibly happy and nice cast, plus Angela and Yuval’s collection of wonderful dogs.

Hot Frosty cast shot

brooklyn spaces: Karen, can we start with a quick run-down of Grounded Aerial?
Karen: Grounded does three things. We do corporate events, for companies like IBM, Microsoft, and H&R Block—the bigger the better. That tends to fund the second thing: our theatrical ventures, like Insectinside, which is an evening-length piece, equal parts dance, theatre, and aerial, and Hot Frosty, which is little scenes peppered throughout the evening, singing, dancing, aerial, over here, over there, above your head, on the stage, on the wall—it’s happening all around you as you’re hanging out drinking cocktails with your friends. The third thing we do is classes, which everyone should come out and take. They’re not only for dancers; anyone could put a harness on, even my mom. It’s an amazing workout, and it’s really empowering.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What’s the link between Grounded and the Muse?
Karen: We support each other, we love each other. There’s a beautiful aerial community in Williamsburg, and Angela and Yuval having this space will really reinforce that community. It’s going to be an outstanding force.

brooklyn spaces: Angela and Yuval, what was your motivation for starting the space?
Angela: I think one of the main problems with trying to create art in New York City is that it’s so hard to survive financially that people can’t invest time in the creation process, to actually sit in your work, soak in it, develop it. With Grounded we do that a lot, we play with things, we improv, we throw things out, we get new things, we merge ideas. So part of the whole concept behind the Muse is that we want to support that kind of creation process, to ensure that there’s a place for people to do that.
Yuval: We really want to create an atmosphere for taking time for creation, for experimenting, a place when you can do everything and try everything. I think this is part of doing art.
Angela: We want it to be comfortable here, like you’re sitting in a living room, with no sense of judgment. We want that sort of calm energy, where it’s safe to go into the process and get lost in your art and feel okay, and to actually work off of the other things and people in the space.

brooklyn spaces: So tell me a quick history of the space itself.
Angela: That’s a long story. I had an outdoor dance studio in my backyard in Bushwick called Studio 43. We produced a few shows and then, do you remember the tornado we had last year? Well, it ripped up a tree from the lot next door and crushed everything. Around that time I was offered a tour that took me to Israel. One day while I was rehearsing there, this beautiful dog wandered into the theatre, and I jumped off the stage and just started hugging him. And Yuval came in looking for Shesek and found me. I think he had actually told Shesek, “Go fetch that girl.”
Yuval: That’s your version!
Angela: So Yuval and I hung out while I was doing the tour, and then I stayed in Israel. We almost opened the Muse in Tel Aviv; we were really looking, but we ultimately decided to raise some money with a Kickstarter and then come back do it here. A friend told us about this space, we came and we looked at it, and that was it. It’s amazing. There’s nothing in the cards to say we should be able to do this right now, but somehow we’re doing it. We have a long way to go, but it’s in motion. Whenever we don’t have enough money for the next thing, we have a show or a party to raise money. We had a ’70s disco party in November to pay for a hot-water heater.

Join the Circus Day (photo from The Muse’s Facebook)

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved?
Angela: At least thirty, thirty-five people have popped in once or twenty times or a million times. It’s all artists, it’s like a big community. And it’s normally a social event; we cook together and then we build. Or I melt down and everyone hugs me and then we build. There’s a lot of that too.
Yuval: It’s a great way to discover new friends and good people.
Angela: We’ve had complete strangers come help us. People tease us that we’re basically building an artists’ kibbutz. And we’re always looking to expand it!
Yuval: Also we’re always searching for trades. People can come help us and then get free classes in hand-balancing, harness, silk, bungee, anything.

brooklyn spaces: Are you involved in the larger aerial and dance community in Brooklyn? Are people coming from House of Yes or Big Sky Works or Streb?
Angela: A lot of aerialists are involved, a lot of freelance artists. Yuval and I just received a grant from Streb to produce one of the pieces for his show. In my experience, aerialists are all allies, it’s not competitive or nasty.

brooklyn spaces: How has it been going with the build-out?
Angela: Demolition was a little harder than we thought.
Yuval: A lot of people ask us, like, construction is crazy, why don’t you just pay professional people for this? And we’re like, it’s not that hard. I mean, okay, it is hard, but it’s not that complicated, you just have to go step by step by step. Actually, we’re both glad that we didn’t know everything we would have to do before we get started, because we would have never done it.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Do you think your creativity or your process is influenced by being in Williamsburg?
Angela: I think it’s more supportive here than it was in Bushwick. There’s more like-minded artists. I can call someone with an idea, and they’ll feed on it and fuel me. Or we know we’ll have the audience we need to fill the space.
Karen: Absolutely. Williamsbug just has a zest to it, a roughness, a rawness, a curiousness, a youthfulness that people feed off. It’s an amazing community. It’s really unique.

***

Like this? Read about more aerial and dance spaces: House of Yes, Big Sky Works, Chez Bushwick, Cave

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit letterpress printing and bookbinding studio with a pretty long and fascinating history, which you can read about over on their site here. In the late nineties the Presse was a zine called Ugly Duckling, and in 2000 the group started 6×6, which was put together in various living rooms and printed at a tiny Manhattan Valley letterpress shop whose primary business was making church newsletters. Since then UDP has lived in three states, four countries, the Nest Space in Dumbo, near a pier in Red Hook, and now at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. They’ve got twelve editors and have printed over 200 beautiful handmade books, not to mention dozens of broadsheets, tons of chapbooks, and all kinds of paper ephemera. They’re beginning to explore ebooks too, and they even have a podcast!

this & all photos in this post by Maximus Comissar

One of the cool things about a volunteer-run press is the amount of opportunities to let the community in. If you sign up for the UDP mailing list, you’ll get invited to their headquarters every couple of months for bookbinding, hand-stitching spines, letterpressing covers, and all manner of classy, functional arts and crafts. Maximus and I went by for a visit to help bind copies of the chapbook “Mr. Z., Mrs. Z., J.Z., S.Z.” with thick twine, met some lovely interns and volunteers, got to see the antique-looking machines in action, and hung out with Matvei, the Presse’s founder.

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?
Matvei: When I moved to New York in the late nineties, a bunch of my writer friends started making one-of-a-kind books for each other, little artist projects, simple things. Then we started to print larger runs of things like chapbooks, hand-bound books, zines, stuff like that. We started 6×6 in 2000, and just before that, we’d started putting Ugly Duckling Presse on the spines of all our little books, even though Ugly Duckling Presse wasn’t a place, it was just our living rooms. But it stuck. We wanted to publish our peers and poets we admired. There was a lot of labor involved, hand-stamping and rubber-banding and binding, so we already had that sense of making stuff, of zine culture and collage and hand-pasting and book arts and things like that.

brooklyn spaces: When did it become more a more formalized press?
Matvei: In the early 2000s, we moved in with a bunch of other arts organizations in a large space in Dumbo called Nest Space for eighteen months. We all got to be there practically for free; all we had to do was clean it up and build some walls. It was one of the early Two Trees buildings, and of course it was part of their plan, to bring in arts people to make the neighborhood more desirable and drive up the real estate values. Now there’s a crazy expensive boutique where our little workshop was.

brooklyn spaces: That’s so depressing.
Matvei: Well, it was fun. And there were lots of other arts groups there, some of whom we’re still in touch with, like Collapsible Giraffe, NTUSA, Paul Lazar Big Dance Theatre, Brooklyn Underground Film Festival. We had a huge common space that we used for events and performances and crazy parties, which was really inspiring. It helped people to know who we were and also helped us bring a certain kind of energy to poetry. Poetry’s really versatile, you can listen to it in a library in a stiff chair or you can go to a reading in some underground place and have it performed with crazy music. It was a very vibrant scene at the time, and that really influenced the way we wanted the to press work. It wasn’t just a publishing house, it was a place for people to come together, and to learn how to make books.

brooklyn spaces: Was it hard to leave that scene?
Matvei: In Red Hook we were holed up in one of the buildings near the Coffey Street pier, and it was a little lonely. But that’s when we were really making the press into something serious, so maybe we needed that kind of focus. And then we came here and became part of the Can Factory community, which has been really great. Issue Project Room is here, Rooftop Films is here, there’s a letterpress studio upstairs, Swayspace, they do beautiful work. There’s other publishers here too, One Story, Archipelago, and Akashic. There’s great energy, it’s a wonderful environment for us.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any favorite books, or books that were a particular pleasure to make?
Matvei: We’ve done some very labor-intensive accordion projects, like 5 Meters of Poems, which really is almost five meters long. There have been a number of projects that I’m really proud of, like The Drug of Art by Ivan Blatný. He’s a multilingual poet who wrote in a lot of languages at once. Ana and Veronica, who edited that book, they put together pretty much a critical edition, with solid editorial backing, annotations, footnotes, all of it. It’s something that even a university press isn’t necessarily going to take on these days. And then on the other hand, we just did a chapbook called “Surprised by French Fries” by Joe Dailey, which is totally irreverent and funny, it just sings in a particular, ephemeral, non-serious way.

brooklyn spaces: I also noticed one called “Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane.” That’s a great title.
Matvei: Yeah, I love that one, that’s Lawrence Giffin. We’ve working with him for years. We published his work in 6×6, then we did a chapbook of his poems, and we’re going to do a full-length book of his next year. That often happens. We like to have longer relationships with writers.

brooklyn spaces: Is there any overarching artist statement that unites all of the Ugly Duckling Presse books?
Matvei: Aesthetically we’re very eclectic, but some of that has to do with the structure of the collective. Each editor really has to want to do whatever they’re going to publish, and also it’s their choice; it’s not democratic, we don’t vote on which books to do. But we all come from similar sensibilities. We all want to publish books that no one else is doing. And there’s of course the handmade aspect. We’re not luddites by any means; sure, we’re a letterpress shop, but we also have two computers and we’re doing online books, exploring things that you can’t do in a print book. We just really believe in the book as a technology that works and that hasn’t been exhausted yet, one that is still interesting and immediate, and that it’s important how you make the book, not just what’s in it. I think we’re okay with the idea that we publish things that aren’t commercially viable, but we’re still engaged in cultural activity. It’s possible that our books will be read fifty yeas from now, and it’s possible that they won’t. But it continues an idea of culture that probably isn’t part of the general American or even global notion of what culture is anymore.

***

Like this? Read about more books and book art: A Wrecked Tangle Press, Central Booking, Books Through Bars

The Print Lab is deep in the bowels of Gowanus. It’s a nice stroll from the train, unless you happen to visit during a freak blizzard Halloween weekend like I did, in which case it’s kind of a cold, wet slog. But totally worth the trip! The space is huge and comfy and inviting, with great art on the walls, studio members hard at work at the many tables and machines, and incredibly friendly teachers and staff. I was invited to take the Intro to Screenprinting class, which (thankfully) covered all the basics, and though I’ve got no drawing eye whatsoever and had never even touched a screen before, I totally made a shirt that I’m not at all embarrassed to wear.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

The intro class is only one of many offered at the Print Lab; there’s printing classes for skateboards and posters and stationary, digital classes on Photoshop and Indesign and website-building, there’s classes for kids, classes for DIY weddings, they even had a class on how to jailbreak your iPhone. Of course, they could also do everything for you, offering all kinds of large-format and specialty-ink printing services for fancy projects. Or if you already know what you’re doing and want to DIY it, you can become a member, gaining access to all the tools, paints, supplies, computers, machinery, and anything else you could possibly need. So go print something! But first click through for my interview with Amy, the lab’s marketing director.

screens

brooklyn spaces: What are some of your more unusual classes?
Amy: There’s lots. We have one on printing in repeat, for making fabric or wallpaper, we have a specialty inks class where you get to use flocking and foils and glitter, we have digital classes that are geared toward helping you make your designs appropriate for screenprinting, all kinds of things.

sinks

brooklyn spaces: There are also events here, right?
Amy: Yup. Last weekend we had a Halloween event, where kids got to have characters screenprinted on their clothes. We also do collaborative events; we did a party with Sobe and a craft night with Etsy. About once a month we have an opening reception for the new art exhibit.

screens

brooklyn spaces: Is the art done by Print Lab members?
Amy: Sometimes, but this one was curated by the art collective Six Betweens. Next month we’re doing an exhibit with the Graphic Artists Guild, and after that is a student show called “The Art of Rebellion.” Screenprinting lends itself to protest so well, because it’s really affordable, you can make multiples easily, and you can really deliver a message.

paints

brooklyn spaces: What’s the screenprinting community like? Do you guys get together and talk shop?
Amy: Sure, we’re friendly, we’re fun, we like to get along with everybody. We’re buddies with USA Tees, we have a good relationship with The Arm, a letterpress studio in Williamsburg, and also with the Brooklyn Artists Gym, which is just down the street. It’s really exciting to be in Gowanus right now, part of the growing artist community.

oven

brooklyn spaces: Who are some of your exciting clients or members?
Amy: We worked with one Brazillian designer doing specialty printing, glitter and things like that, and we do some contract work with the fabric designer Scott Hill, who runs Old Village Hall. Two of our long-term members, Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats, are part of Camel Collective, and they were featured in Mass MoCA’s “The Workers” show. Some other great members are painter Jeremy Penn, illustrator Erin Gallagher, graphic artist Norm Ibarra, and printmaker Andreas Ekberg. The artists here do really amazing things.

our instructor

brooklyn spaces: What’s the best part of working at a printshop?
Amy: I just think it’s exciting to be a part of a space that encourages people to make things, and to work in a way that they might not be able to on their own. I mean, you can screenprint at home, but it’s certainly very difficult, especially in New York with tiny shoebox apartments. So I love being able to facilitate people having the space they need to work and create.

me with my screen

***

Like this? Read about more makers: Pickett Furniture, 6 Charles Place, Werdink, Bushwick Print Lab, A Wrecked Tangle Press, Metropolis Soap, Arch P&D, Gowanus Ballroom, Urbanglass, Better Than Jam, 3rd Ward

According to The Bushwiki, PS 52 was built in 1883 and served as an arts-intensive elementary school until 1945, when it was sold for use as a manufacturing space.

I couldn’t find any information on what happened to it over the next fifty years, but the New York Times steps up to fill in the space’s modern history: in 1996, a twenty-something artist named Erin McGonigle found it listed as a rental in the Village Voice. The building was decrepit and overrun with debris, and Erin and some friends took five months getting it into livable shape. When they started living in the refurbished Schoolhouse they called themselves ORT, an acronym for “organizing resources together.” In 2002 the second floor opened, ushering in the second wave of the collective.

Some artists who passed through in those early years include: photographer David Linton, Yale drama critic Sunder Ganglani, poet Ariana Reines, composer Keiko Uenishi (who works with Issue Project Room), Grace Space director Jill McDermid, video artist Tia Dunn, Smithsonian dancer Samir Bitar, costume designer Kaibrina Sky Buck (who has paintings in the Museum of Sex), trash and performance artist Gertrude Berg, journalist Erika Yorio (who wrote for Nylon), musician Toshio Kajiwara, artist Elliot Kurtz, filmmaker Derek Deems, blogger EV Bogue, and artist Mariette Papic, who gave me a ton of information to help with this piece.

In addition to serving as home for a revolving cast of artists, the Schoolhouse (also sometimes called the Old Schoolhouse or the Old Red Schoolhouse) hosts plenty of events. A small sampling of the musicians who have performed there over the years: Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Magnum, Verbal Graffiti, Spanish Prisoners, Madame Beak, The Christopher Complex, Zachary Cale, Revival Times, The Asteroid #4, Hollow Jones, and DJ Polarity. Todd P has even put on some shows there.

The artists currently living in the Schoolhouse (there are about twenty spread over three floors) consider themselves the third wave of the collective. They run the gamut of creative pursuits, including photography and visual arts, musicians and DJs, fashion design, jewelry making, screenprinting, and even mobile art. One of the benefits of the space is of course how freaking huge it is, and though many of the bedrooms are kind of tiny, the vast common areas make up for it. I sat down with Justin, Chris, Willy, and Dave to talk about their experiences living and making art in this incredible space.

brooklyn spaces: Were you guys drawn to this space specifically, or to Bushwick in general?
Willy: The space. I’d never lived in Bushwick before, I didn’t really know much about it. I’d been to a few different spaces that were built out and thought they were cool, but I’d never seen anything like this before. You walk in here and you just feel the creative energy. And now I get to come home to it.

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like being here has affected the way you do your art, the choices that you make thematically or physically?
Dave: Absolutely. A big thing about this space is having people bounce off each other, and inspiring each other to be greater and to dream bigger. How could you not be affected by other creative people? You’d have to be an alien.
Justin: We all have our more and less productive periods, but for the most part, most of us are always working on something. So you go into Chris’s room and you get inspired by what he’s doing, or you go downstairs and see the screenprinting and get inspired by that. And then the building itself, having artists living here for so long, it has this energy that just resonates. It’s a give and take; the more you put into the place and the more you’re doing, the more it really gets energized. But there’s definitely always something going on that you could tap into.

brooklyn spaces: I know in the space’s early years there were some robberies and trouble with community integration. Do you feel like you guys have overcome that?
Dave: Yeah, when we started throwing the block party. Block parties are incredible, every community should do it.
Chris: The block parties are a lot of fun. We do that every summer.
Justin: Everyone in the neighborhood comes out and contributes. This year they roasted a pig.
Willy: There was a giant inflatable water slide. We had the ball-throwing machine where you get dunked.
Dave: We put speakers on the roof, there was a live mariachi band, and then we played old funk records, hip-hop, salsa, Brazilian music, for the block, you know? To show the love and appreciation we have for all art and music. It really makes it safer for the artists who live here.
Willy: Now we know everyone, everyone looks out for each other.
Dave: You have to be a part of the community. You can’t just narrow-mindedly walk past the people who live right next to you. During the block party we open up our home and show people that we’re cool, that we’re in the same struggle. Artists ain’t making a lot of money, you know what I mean? So now everybody sees each other as human beings, and that’s beautiful.

brooklyn spaces: How did you get it started? Did you just go knocking on people’s doors?
Chris: We actually did have to go door-to-door to get the petition.
Dave: Yeah, but it started before that, once we made friends with Sonny. There’s always a hawk on the block who watches, a grandfather spirit, and that’s the person you have to meet and be friends with. It was actually his idea to do the block party. And then we took our strength and went and got the permits to show that we were serious, that we were taking an initiative in the community.

brooklyn spaces: Are you involved with the greater Bushwick art community?
Dave: Yeah. Jason Andrews, who does Norte Maar and Storefront, he stumbled in on one of the music shows here and he scooped me up, and then he showed Justin’s artwork at one of his galleries, so it just all started being interconnected. I performed for the first BOS show at the Collision Machine three or four years ago. I think Arts in Bushwick really started to connect the different spaces, because everybody could come and see everybody’s space and meet each other. We do shows at the McKibben Lofts now, and they come do shows over here. It’s an ongoing artistic explosion.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any thoughts about being an artist in Bushwick these days?
Dave: I don’t think anybody can take credit for what’s happening; I think it’s universal, I think it’s a sign of the times. This area is just part of that shift. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a greater world, a new belief that we want to get together and be creative again, to be dreamers again. There’s nothing wrong with that. Not everybody’s cut out to be on Wall Street, not everybody’s cut out to be a doctor. Some people just like to fucking paint, some people want to beat on a drum. And we should let that live, not stifle it with overpriced rent and over-gentrification.
Chris: As far as art in Bushwick, I think it’s awesome. I think things like Bushwick Open Studios are brilliant. We need to get more recognition out here. Manhattan’s boring, nothing’s really going on in Manhattan. People still sometimes look at Bushwick and think dangerous, like Bed-Stuy, dangerous, and I think it’s just ridiculous. People hear about us and go, “Oh, a bunch of white kids in the ghetto making art.” Not really, we’re hanging out with our neighbors, we’re doing our thing, everybody’s doing their thing, and we’ve got this beautiful space to show for it.

***

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Flux Factory, Swimming Cities, Monster Island, Hive NYC, Arch P&D, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Silent Barn

In case you didn’t know, Brooklynites are serious makers. We make everything, all over the borough, like gin in Sunset Park, cheese in Red Hook, glasses in Williamsburg, and soap way the hell out in Bay Ridge.

Metropolis Soap Co. is run by Megan, with some help and moral support from her husband, out of their Bay Ridge home. She produces vegan, all-natural, eco-conscious soaps, bath salts, body scrubs, aromatherapy oils, lip balms, and more. Her products have been certified cruelty-free by PETA and organic by the USDA; she uses recycled packaging whenever possible and avoids things like palm oil, due to the rainforest destruction caused by harvesting it. She’s even got a glossary on her site so you can tell how all the ingredients are going to affect your skin.

Maximus and I schlepped out to Bay Ridge to chat with Megan and check out the operation, and she even did a live soapmaking demonstration for us, which was amazingly cool. She was kind enough to send us home with several soaps to try, and they were all lush and rich and creamy, fantastic smelling and extremely cleansing. After our interview, I spent the rest of the day at the beach, and Metropolis’s Lemongrass & Ginger bar was imperative in ridding me of the clinging film of Coney Island detritus I came home covered with.

***

Q&A with Megan!

brooklyn spaces: I bet you could tell me the historical origin of soap.
Megan: I can! It dates back to the times of human sacrifice. They would burn people on these pyres, and as the fat melted and liquefied it would mix with the wood ash, which would drip down into the water and create this bubbly substance that people noticed was really good for cleaning.

brooklyn spaces: Can you give me a really brief tutorial on how to make soap?
Megan: Sure. To make soap you need lye, or sodium hydroxide, and fat. When the fat mixes with the lye, it causes saponification. After that you can add essential oils, fragrance, whatever you want. Then you pour it into molds, let it harden, cut it, and let it cure, which means the water evaporates and it becomes a hard bar. That takes about six weeks. As a side note, the fats in most soaps are usually lard or tallow, which is deer, cow, or pig fat. I’m not a vegetarian, but that just skeeved me out, so I did a lot of research to see what I could substitute. The formula I use now is based on sunflower oil and shea butter, so my soaps are really moisturizing, and no animals had to be sacrificed.

brooklyn spaces: What made you start doing this?
Megan: I started making soap in 2004, and I honestly think it was because I was afraid to be the smelly kid in class. I’ve always loved perfumes, cosmetics, that kind of thing, so I went online and learned how to make a body scrub. It was just sugar and oil! So I was like, “Oh my god, what else can I make?” Then I learned how to make a lip balm and was like, “Oh my god, what else can I make?” and it just went from there. Once I started making soap I got really nerdy about it. It’s been my obsession for seven years now.

the beginning of a bar of Cedarwood Lime: sunflower oil, palm kernel oil, shea butter, and rice bran oil

brooklyn spaces: What’s the first soap you made?
Megan: Oh, it was awful. It was root beer soap, and I colored it with brown mica, but I didn’t measure very well. I put it in these Kraft boxes, and the boxes all got oil stains, and my friend told me it stained her washcloth brown. It was a hot mess. Now I don’t do fragrance oils or micas, it’s all essential oils and herbs, which is less traumatic for everybody.

brooklyn spaces: What are some of your favorite soaps you’ve made?
Megan: I love the Rosemary & Spearmint, it totally gets me going in the morning. My favorite for my face is Dark Lavender Lime. I have the skin of a thirteen-year-old boy, and the charcoal in that one just sucks everything out.

blending in cedarwood and lime essential oils, and parsley and gingko powder

brooklyn spaces: How did you learn about all the different ingredients and how to combine them?
Megan: Any book I could find in the library I got. Brooklyn Public Library was huge in making this work. The two best books, which I eventually bought, are Illustrated Encyclopedia of Essential Oils by Julia Lawless and Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs. I would also research online of course; I’d go to botanical.com, and just go, “What does this do? What is comfrey? What is arnica?”

brooklyn spaces: How did you pick the name for the company?
Megan: It comes from one of my favorite movies, Metropolis. I just love the special effects from the twenties. And also New York, I love New York. So it was part nerdy, part… okay, it was all nerdy. A smorgasbord of nerdery.

pouring the mixture into logs to cure

brooklyn spaces: How did you get the word out?
Megan: I started at the markets. I did Brooklyn Flea, Brooklyn Indie Market, Renegade Craft Fair, BK Craft Central, any weekend market that I could find. I’m starting to see the benefits of that now, because lots of people come up to me and say they recognize my soaps from this market or that one, which is great.

brooklyn spaces: Do you think being in a place like Bay Ridge, or Brooklyn in general, influences you as a crafter or a small-business owner?
Megan: I think it motivates me. When we first moved here, I vended at the Bay Ridge Festival of the Arts, and I met so many local businesspeople. It was great. There’s a very welcoming community here for tiny businesses, and people want you to succeed. Everyone is really encouraging and holds each other up.

cutting the cured logs into bars

brooklyn spaces: Are there other people in particular who have been a strong influence on you?
Megan: My good friend Laura, whose apron I will be wearing when I make soap for you guys. Her company is Fisk and Fern, her stuff is in Uncommon Goods now. Karen of Markets of New York is amazing. She’s a great supporter of indie crafts. And of course my amazing husband Steven, who has been a huge help with the company and keeps me somewhat sane.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any advice for someone who’s starting a small business of this nature?
Megan: Don’t expect immediate awesomeness. It will take forever, and it’s always evolving. But the little payoffs along the way totally make it worth it.

***

Like this? Read about more makers: Twig Terrariums, Breuckelen Distilling Co., Pickett Furniture, Better Than Jam, Bushwick Print Lab, Gowanus Print Lab, A Wrecked Tangle Press, Arch PYD

The Lab—or as it’s known to the dance kids and hipsters, Electric Warehouse—is a 10,000-sq-ft underground party space deep in Bed-Stuy. Once upon a time it was used to repair trolleys, then it was a parking garage, then a strip club. It’s rumored that famed Brooklyn DJ Frankie Bones held some of his storm raves there in the mid-nineties. Now it’s a pliable, chameleonic space that hosts all kinds of parties for all different facets of the underground. As the Lab, there’s events like Friday Night SinSations, an urban gay dance party; weekly female-only hip-hop parties; CARNIVIBES, a reggae party with Carribean food and drinks; and P. Diddy’s “Biggie Day” tribute. As Electric Warehouse it caters to techno music and rave culture, with parties thrown by groups like Feed the Starving Artists, NYCRavers, SUN Collective, RefugeNYC, and Unicorn Meat. The space has also hosted some big-name artists, from Ninjasonik and Designer Drugs to Chris Brown and Snoop Dogg.

I haven’t been to a rave in a lot of years, but I’ve been wanting to check out the Lab for months, and after a special invitation from Alex of Unicorn Meat, who, along with Feed the Starving Artists, was co-producing GET DIGITAL, a pre–Burning Man dance party, I headed out to Bed-Stuy with the intrepid Maximus Comissar to see what it was all about. First we went mid-week to see what the space was like empty, and I was a little surprised at how bare and personality-less it was, compared to other underground party spaces like Rubulad and Red Lotus Room. But when we went back on Saturday night, after a very thorough pat-down at the door, we walked in to find the place totally transformed. There was a huge pyramid jutting out of one wall, different crazy video projections coming from four different balconies, the stage was lush with six-foot flowers, there were fire-spinners and a Merry Pranksters–like bus in the parking lot, and the whole place was teeming with people just dancing their faces off. I’d forgotten how crazy awesome the energy gets at a rave, and it was super fun to watch. Everyone was dressed crazy, painted up crazy, gyrating and fist-pumping and sweating and grinning like mad. Good fucking times.

***

brooklyn spaces: How did you get involved with the Lab?
Alex: I throw underground warehouse parties all over New York, so I know a lot of different spaces. The Lab is really big, large enough that we would likely be able to not reach capacity over the entire night. At the last place I put on an event we had a much smaller capacity and way, way too many people came. So I talked to the owner of the Lab, built up a relationship with him.

brooklyn spaces: Have you been to other events here?
Alex: Oh yeah, a lot. Drew Meeks, a friend of mine and a member of the Burning Man community, he did a party here a year or two ago called Gratitude, which was one of the most amazing events I’ve ever been to. He had acrobatic aerialists, massages, chill rooms, and he worked with Leo Villareal, who’s a famous LED artist and also a part of our Burning Man camp. They had these giant red LEDs, which are part of a sign they bring out to the desert every year, and they just had these crazy transformations, shooting into the center and back out, making different patterns and all these different variables. The GET DIGITAL party was more of a rave than the other events my friends and I usually do. Our scene is a little bit different than the rave scene, musically and culturally.

brooklyn spaces: How do you define your scene?
Alex: It’s art-based. There are some others that touch on artistic things, but mostly in decoration, not in practice. We really go out of our way to make our own clothing, make our own costumes, do interactive art during events. It’s generally an older, more mature crowd, and there are a lot of working professionals who are very talented. Any time I need any kind of legal advice, or real estate advice, or we’re trying to deal with something logistical, all I really need to do is put the word out, and within hours we can get anything solved.

brooklyn spaces: Are there some artists you’ve worked with a lot who you really love?
Alex: I love all artists. There’s so many, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

brooklyn spaces: When you’re planning the parties, how do you decide what elements to include?
Alex: It’s sort of like the orgasmic peak in a song, where it starts off kind of slow and mellow and then builds up, and then you have a heavy-hitting section, and then it kind of mellows out again, and then right before it ends, you just pump it up out of nowhere. When I book my artists, that’s what I take into consideration. There’s an endless amount of artists in the city who want to participate in good parties. We’re so blessed with it.

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like Brooklyn has had an impact on the way you throw parties or the way you conceive art, or the way the underground works?
Alex: I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve been to thirty-something countries in the past two years, hitchhiking all over the place, and the reason I came back here is because I’m a cosmopolitan, I love all people, I love the world, and New York is the center of the world. It’s got more cultural diversity, countercultural diversity, linguistic diversity, it’s got something for everyone, no matter who you are. It’s really a beautiful place.

brooklyn spaces: For you, in the simplest terms, what makes a good party?
Alex: The people. That’s the most important thing. As long as you have a room, music, and good people coming in, that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

***

Like this? Read about more underground party spaces: Rubulad, Red Lotus Room, Gowanus Ballroom, 12-turn-13, Newsonic, Gemini & Scorpio loft

Let’s just take a minute and talk about something totally outside of the purview of this blog: ice cream sandwiches. Think about an ice cream sandwich. We all have the same picture, right? Mushy chocolate cookie with rock-hard crappy vanilla ice cream? Let me just clear that image right out of your head. Here, my friends, are some freaking ice cream sandwiches:

chocolate-dipped almond cookies filled with black cherry ice cream

cucumber & gazpacho granita ice bites

basil ice cream with bacon on tomato

orange sherbet on sliced beet

I hope I blew your mind a little bit with those. Because Ger-Nis Culinary & Herb Center, where I took the Artisanal Ice Cream Sandwich class that produced such loveliness, totally blew mine.

Ger-Nis—like so many of the spaces I’ve profiled—has a lot going on. In addition to a whole slew of incredible cooking classes—like Indian Street Food, New Nordic Cooking of Iceland, and a Make Your Own Take-Out series, to name a very few—they’ve got social clubs and supper clubs and meetups and all sorts of festivals. It’s a warm, incredibly welcoming space, and I can’t wait to go back to cook something else. You should too! But first read my interview with Nissa Pierson, the space’s creator.

photo by me

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space?
Nissa: About seven years ago I started a business called Ger-Nis International, which is an importing business for organic, fair trade fruit and vegetable. We were looking for a new space for the business, and we found this one. Honestly, the moment I saw this place, I said, “I’m going to open up a culinary center,” even though it was just an empty room then. I’m very quick to do these kinds of things. Luckily, my brothers are builders, and they were amazing, building everything out for me after I designed it. I think of the theme as “modern French farm.” I really like a kitchen to have a homey feel. Kitchens that are too modern make you feel very icy, very culinary school, big chefs with their hats, and so the modern edge here is for the artistic side, and the farm-y feel is for the culinary side. I think the place has really nice energy, because it’s all been done with love.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: How long have you been teaching cooking classes?
Nissa: Thirteen, fourteen years. I’ve taught for the city of Santa Monica, a bunch of Whole Foods in different cities; I’ve done lost of private classes, I’ve taught at culinary studios across the country. I’ve also written a lot of herb recipes. But I’m 100 percent self-taught in everything I do.

brooklyn spaces: Do you also take a lot of cooking classes?
Nissa: Not really. I’ve taken a few and been bored to death, because most of them are just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Cooking classes are all so technique-based, and I’m not such a believer in technique. I think you can cut an onion a million different ways. I travel a lot, and when you travel, it’s not so much about technique, it’s about ingredients. So that’s what I try to emulate.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How do you decide what to teach here?
Nissa: Listen, my head is filled with so much stuff. Creating the classes is the exciting part for me. I get bored super easily, so it’s really important that we have a variety of classes. We first opened in the summertime, so we started with a lot of ice cream and gazpacho. Our bestselling classes are my Latin classes; our pasta classes are popular too. We have such a laid-back feel about the place, and great people come in who really want to learn. And it’s a really social thing. People leave exchanging numbers and come back again together, which is really nice to see.

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick rundown of all the different components of the space.
Nissa: Well, of course there’s the cooking classes. We also have a couple of series. One is Brooklyn Conversations, with local chefs, which is a nice way for people to get to know the chefs, and for the chefs to get to just talk about food. We have one called the Brooklyn Artisanal Kitchen, so like Salvatore Brooklyn will teach people how to make ricotta, things like that. We also do supper clubs, with a local chef and all the different local artisans, farmers, and purveyors. We did a social club this summer, sort of like a meetup for foodies, where we organized events and brought food, like we did “Opera in the Park” and brought antipasto. I’m doing one in a couple of weeks called “Lettuce Shred It” at Rockaway, which is free surf lessons—I’m a surfer—and lettuce sandwiches. Then we also have Kids in the Kitchen, and we go into schools, or have school groups come here. We’ve done programs with developmentally disabled adults. We do all different kinds of things, so long as it’s about food education.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship with the community?
Nissa: I’m a strong believer in supporting the community. We do as much as we can to work with neighborhood businesses, to collaborate and cooperate. We work with Union Market quite a bit, and a lot of the restaurants around here, like Miriam, Franny’s, Al Di La. We arranged one of our meetups at the Sycamore, which is a bar and flower shop. We try to bring our customers to the people and businesses we believe in supporting.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Nissa: I’d like the space to be profitable because I’d like to pay my rent. That’s number one. I’d like this to become a place where people in the community come to socialize, to learn to cook, to play. I’d like it to become a domain for local chefs, food artisans, people with a food education message. A lot of people tell me that I take on too much, that there’s too much going on. But I believe that if you have a good grasp of how to connect it all, then it’s easy. So that’s my goal.

***

Like this? Read about more teaching spaces: Brooklyn Brainery, Lifelabs, Pioneer Works, 3rd Ward, Time’s Up, Bushwick Print Lab, Urbanglass

One of my favorite things about this project is how often it surprises me. And holy shit was it a surprise walking into Film Biz Recycling, an enormous basement warehouse in Gowanus in between the Ger-Nis Culinary & Herb Center and the Textile Arts Center, just bursting with castoffs from movies, television, and commercial shoots.

photo by me

And I’m not just talking about plastic display food and costume jewelry and faux brick walling (although there’s plenty of those); there’s also racks of designer clothing and shoes, row upon row of high-end leather couches and brass lamps, plus headboards and telephone booths and bicycles and filing cabinets. And those are just the big items; there’s also aisles of small stuff, from books to toasters to street signs to toys.

all photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

What’s it all for? Well, for you, for whatever you can think to do with it, whether it’s building out your loft or decorating for a themed party. Eva, the founder, and her crew collect everything the film biz can’t use, and then they separate it into things to sell, things to deconstruct and reuse, and things to donate. They work with dozens of charities, including Blissful Bedrooms, Recycle-a-Bicycle, Room to Grow, Fertile Grounds, and Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, sending clothing to shelters, baby items to single mothers, e-waste to recycling centers, and building materials to reuse shops. In the three years it’s been open, Film Biz Recycling has diverted 180 tons of stuff from landfills. And they’re just getting started! It’s a space you’ve really got to see, and a cause that is so worth supporting, with your time (they love volunteers!), your money (don’t you need a new armchair?), and your ideas. Get over there! But first, check out my interview with Eva.

brooklyn spaces: What made you get into all this?
Eva: I worked in the film business for fifteen years, and I just spent so much time trying to find homes for all the leftover materials. I started a Google Group in 2007 to get all the art departments talking to one another, figuring out how to exchange materials. But the stuff needed a place to go, so in 2009 I got a tiny space in Long Island City. I used my savings for the deposit; it was totally underfunded, which was fine, that’s what ecopreneurs are famous for. But it turned out we had to grow or die, so I started looking for a new space. When I found this one—11,000 square feet!—I said, “We’ll be here or nowhere.” So we did an emergency fundraiser and raised $20,000 in two weeks, everything from $10 from a production assistant to $1,000 from Bridge Props, another prop house. We were weeping from the support. So we raised the money, signed the deposit, and got the hell out of Long Island City.

brooklyn spaces: Are you happy in Gowanus?
Eva: We love it! It’s like a perfect metaphor. We’re in between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, which are both gentrified and pretty wealthy; and then there’s this sort of ugly center, this butt crack in between those two lovely white cheeks. It’s so dirty here, but the people who love it really love it. One of the first things I did when we got here was start reaching out to anybody who’s trying to make Gowanus a better place, like Gowanus Canal Conservancy. I said, “Hey, we have materials, and we’re going to give them to you for free. Come down and see what you want.” Then I started finding local charities. CHIPS, a men’s shelter, is down the street, as is Camba Women’s Shelter. Sean Casey Animal Shelter is up the road.

brooklyn spaces: Are all the charities you work with so close?
Eva: No, they’re all over. Materials for the Arts picks up from us once a month, and Build It Green. Wearable Collections picks up clothing; they send what’s usable to South America and recycle the rest. Our mission is sort of a triple bottom line: people, profit, and planet. People are saving money, and these rich companies aren’t spending $900 a dumpster for all this usable stuff to just be tossed. It’s cheaper to donate it. It’s never not been that way.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, take me through all the different components of the space.
Eva: Well, first we have the Re-Workshop. We want this to be a community hub, a place for groups to meet and talk to one another. We have a Re-Gallery, to show the works of our featured artists, who have a workshop in the back. Right now it’s Dog Tag Designs. We’ve got our offices in the back, and a kitchen, and even an underground terrace, where they used to store the coal to heat the building. It’s our break room and spraypaint area and impromptu garden center—I’ve made some planters out of toilets that Build It Green refused, and we’re growing basil and things.

photo by Alix Piorun

brooklyn spaces: Now tell me about what you’ve got for sale.
Eva: Let me just give you a couple of examples. There’s a set of brand new white leather couches that cost $3,700 new; the whole batch is $1,200 here. There’s a roll of rubber flooring, which costs $1,000 at RoseBrand, that we’re selling for $200. A gorgeous vintage lamp that was $2,300 new is $400 here. There’s a couple of crazy old phone booths that we just sold to Brooklyn Creative League to use in their coworking spaces. And that’s just the huge stuff. We also have a Small Boxes section. We have things like Bodega in a Box, Birthday Party in a Box, Hospital in a Box—these are usable items, not just props. We have salt and pepper shakers, lunch trays, trophy cups, petri dishes, candles, maps, a whole box of creepy clowns.

brooklyn spaces: So is everything for sale?
Eva: Not everything; we also have a rental-only section for items that are specific to the industry. Like, imagine a Downy commercial, with the mom looking into the dryer at her laundry, or a Sunny-D commercial, with the kid looking into the fridge. How do you get those shots? You cut a hole in the back of the dryer or fridge. And what did we do in the goddamn stupid industry forever? Bought a new one every single time. So now at Film Biz Recycling we rent them out.

brooklyn spaces: Have you found anything that you were just stumped about how to repurpose or recycle or resell?
Eva: Theatrical flats. They’re huge, they’re made with lauan—a rainforest material from the Philippines—and they get used once and tossed. But I’ve been thinking about remaking them into composting bins. Our composting company is Vokashi, and I’m going to see if they could use something like that. There’s a solution for everything.

brooklyn spaces: Do you want to export the Film Biz Recycling model to other cities, like LA?
Eva: Well yeah, but you know what? Brad Pitt needs to write me a check. I’m not doing it from the ground up again. But I really do want to fix the film industry. I don’t want to go to a movie and know that everything on the screen is in a landfill now. There’s a midcentury credenza I had to throw away once that haunts me to this day. That thing survived so many decades, made it to our set, and, because somebody flaked on Craigslist, was put into a dumpster and is dead now. That’s not okay with me. Film Biz Recycling isn’t the last resort; we’re the only resort.

brooklyn spaces: And it doesn’t just benefit the film industry.
Eva: The industry is only 10% of our revenue. This is stuff that anyone can use, and I just want to get the word out, so people will. It’s starting to work; Film Biz Recycling is being featured on a new Discovery show called Dirty Money. Eco Brooklyn just wrote a post on us; they redo brownstones sustainably, and they bought some materials from us, which is just what we want. I mean, it’s easy to sell a couch; it’s hard to sell a piece of wood. Anyone who’s redoing their apartment or building out their loft should come here, there are so many possibilities. You could use four theatrical flats to make a platform for your bed or your band or whatever. Trim it with some carpet squares or curtains, it’s beautiful. Anything you can think of.

***

Like this? Read about more community spaces: Books Through Bars, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Time’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Trinity Project, Boswyck Farms

The Red Lotus Room is breathtaking. The first time I went was for BANZAI!!!!!, a surreally crazy art and performance party, full of elaborate costumed revelers, an eclectic selection of multimedia art, and performances from drag acts to DJ sets. The second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) time I went back was for the famous Shanghai Mermaid party, an underground, more-or-less-monthly, themed event (usually Paris, Shanghai, Berlin, or New Orleans in the twenties or thirties), where everyone has to dress accordingly. It was a beautifully bizarre experience, riding the subway out to Crown Heights in period attire, wandering down darkened streets in heels, then stepping through the door into a sprawling, whirling, huge space, walls draped with red velvet, tables laden with candles, everyone in hats and suspenders and fans, sequins and rhinestones and fringes, with cigarette girls hawking candy and treats, exotic cocktails and food, and hours and hours of amazing performers: aerialists, fire dancers, musicians, burlesque, and more. The parties start at ten and go until dawn, if not later. It’s an absolutely phenomenal way to spend a Saturday night.

Juliette, photo by Erica Camille

So how did it all get started? Read on for my interview with Juliette, who’s responsible for the whole thing.

Blue Vipers of Brooklyn, photo from shanghaimermaid.com

brooklyn spaces: So how did it all get started?

Juliette: I really had a vision. I just decided I wanted to do a nightclub like Paris in the 1920s. Paris and Berlin and Shanghai all had these very decadent underground club scenes at that time. There was so much turmoil throughout the world, but people who have traditionally been marginalized—artists, intellectuals, gay people, people of color—have historically created underground scenes as a reaction to the mainstream, which then, ironically, takes its cues from the underground. Anyway, at the very beginning, my dear friend Tanya Rynd suggested that i throw some parties in lieu of trying to start an actual nightclub, to see if anyone was interested. For the first party, I think we each sent out fifty emails, and we were really particular about who we invited, because we wanted people who would really get it and appreciate it. And it was amazing. I had friends who had this space in Dumbo, and even though Dumbo hasn’t been dangerous for a long time, at night it’s kind of desolate, and four years ago even more so. People would be walking around going, “Are we in the right place?” and they’d walk through this maze of tagged walls, and then they’d hear music, and they’d walk in and it was just complete glamour, candlelight and chandeliers, the whole thing. It was really unexpected, which for me is part of the magic. You want to feel like you’re in a different time and place. That’s really my goal, to make people feel like they’ve been completely transported.

Lady C, photo by Erica Camille

brooklyn spaces: It’s kind of like a gift you’re giving to people.
Juliette: I don’t think there’s enough glamour in the world, I really don’t. Even though we may not have any money, we certainly can have glamour. If you have talented and creative people around you, you can make anything you want. But it’s definitely a lot of work, you have to be really obsessed to manifest your vision because it’s definitely against all odds, sometimes.

photo from Red Lotus Room’s blog

BANZAI!!!!! co-creator Eric Schmallenberger, photo by Gabi Porter for New York Metromix

brooklyn spaces: So what happened to the Dumbo space?
Juliette: Well, we outgrew it really quickly. Shanghai Mermaid got listed on Nonsense NYC, which is a wonderful list, and Jeff Stark wrote something very nice about it—I think he mentioned that we use real glassware. It was really exciting, but it made the party huge. And the landlords happened to be driving by and they called the cops and the fire department. About a dozen fire trucks and cop cars descended on the space. They walked in and were like, “Oh my god.” But they stayed for like an hour. Amber Ray was performing when they finally turned the lights on and the music off, and everyone started booing. I said, “You know what? You’ll look way cooler if you let her finish her number.” And they said okay. They were really, really cool.

photo by Michael Blase

brooklyn spaces: Did you get the Red Lotus Room right after that?
Juliette: No. We were mobile for awhile, which was so much work. Everything at Shanghai—tables, chairs, tablecloths, bar, chandeliers, curtains, the stage, the lights, the sound—we had to bring all that with us. Then we’d set up for hours, and when it was over, I’d be sweeping the floor in a ball gown at seven in the morning. So I knew I needed my own space, I didn’t want to keep setting up and breaking down. But finding a space in Brooklyn is super hard. I looked for a year and a half. I really wanted Red Hook, I wanted something on the water, I love turn-of-the-century warehouses, but finally I realized I had to be realistic. I like that it’s in Crown Heights, that people have to go a little bit out of the way to get here. I think when you have to work harder for something, you appreciate it more. Like the dress code. I hate to turn people away, but if someone’s going to go spend money and time to create an outfit from another era, I don’t want other people to come in in a polo shirt and jeans. It’s not fair and it breaks the whole illusion.

Trixie Little & the Evil Hate Monkey, photo by Benjamin Mobley

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship with the people in the neighborhood?
Juliette: I try to be a part of the community, and I’ve had a great response. I support the neighborhood, I buy everything I can around here. And there’s all these little kids, really nice kids, and they don’t have anything to do, so sometimes I let them come in, and I show them the backstage area and all the costumes, and I let them on the stage. I really want to try to do kids’ workshops or classes here, it’s definitely something the community needs. On the whole, there’s good things and bad things about gentrification. I remember being at Home Depot when we were first building out the space, and this guy said, “I’m so happy white people have moved into this neighborhood.” I said, “You are?” and he said, “Yeah, because now when you call the cops, they come.” That just gave me the chills.

Maine Attraction, photo by Michael Blase

brooklyn spaces: Who are some of your favorite performers to work with?
Juliette: Les Chauds Lapins, they were the very first act at the very first Shanghai Mermaid. I love Hot Sardines, Baby Soda Jazz Band, Blue Vipers of Brooklyn—they were also at the first Shanghai Mermaid. For burlesque performers, I tend to go for people who are costumey and conceptual, like Veronica Varlow, and Maine Attraction, she’s got this great personality, very Josephine Baker. Amber Ray performed at the April in Paris party, when everything was very French and dramatic. Then there’s the fire performers, there’s so many great ones, like Reina Terror, Christine Geiger, Lady C and Flambeaux. And for aerialists I adore Seanna Sharpe, and of course  Anya Sapozhnikova from House of Yes and Lady Circus; she’s another example of someone who’s not only a performer, as I am, but who works her ass off to run her own venue while performing all around town. I’m very impressed with her and her dedication.

BANZAI!!!!! photo by Gabi Porter for New York Metromix

brooklyn spaces: Do you think the exclusive nature of the parties attracts people?
Juliette: Shanghai Mermaid is not exclusive, and I’ve never wanted it to be. Everyone is welcome. It’s just that for survival it had to be really on the down-low. Although lately it’s not so down-low anymore; it’s listed as a venue on Time Out New York, Gothamist just wrote about it, the Village Voice called it the “Best Literally Underground Cabaret Show.”

photo from shanghaimermaid.com

brooklyn spaces: Since this is a Brooklyn blog, tell me your thoughts on being in Brooklyn these days.
Juliette: I very much believe in Brooklyn, in the Brooklyn scene. I think Brooklyn’s really exciting. There’s still a little bit of a Wild West quality here, which I don’t feel like Manhattan has anymore, it’s gone really corporate. The party-throwers in Manhattan, they have PR agents and big websites, they want to do a lot of corporate stuff. I usually stay away from that. There’s definitely money in it, but the thing is, who are you creating it for? Not that people who go to corporate events don’t deserve something fabulous, but it’s just not something I’m going to go after. I guess I’m a purist.

Blue Vipers of Brooklyn, photo by Erica Camille

brooklyn spaces: What’s one of the best, most beautiful memories from the parties?
Juliette: I’ll always remember the very first moment at the very first Shanghai Mermaid when the curtains opened and Les Chauds Lapins were playing, and I looked around and saw all these people dressed so beautifully, and I thought, “We did it, and it’s so lovely!” It really was how I imagined it. That’s a great memory. Opening night at the Red Lotus Room was really exciting too. It’s a tremendous amount of work, but it is super rewarding to be able to do something like this and share it. And I’ve always been very, very blessed to have beautiful wonderful people come. When I walk down the aisle, people grab my arm and say, “Thank you so much for doing this.”

***

Like this? Read about more underground party spaces: Rubulad, Newsonic, Gemini & Scorpio loft, The Lab (Electric Warehouse), 12-turn-13, Gowanus Ballroom, Big Sky Works

Brooklynites are makers. We make everything, no matter how weird or difficult. We make gardens in abandoned lots, screen-printed skateboards, pools in dumpsters, art from old books, games out of shopping carts. So of course we’re also making booze. There’s beer from Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint, wine from Brooklyn Winery, and a handful of small distilleries making harder stuff: Kings County Distillery in Bushwick, New York Distilling Co. in Williamsburg, and Breuckelen Distilling Company in Sunset Park.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

Housed in a former boiler room—which used to contain a massive coal-fired furnace that steam-heated the surrounding buildings during the Industrial Revolution—Breuckelen offers a selection of gins and whiskeys. They make all their spirits on the premises, from scratch, using organic ingredients sourced from within New York State. And they do it all themselves, from milling the grains to corking the bottles. You can buy their spirits in bars and liquor stores around New York City (and in a few other states), and you can sample them at the distillery: they have tastings every Saturday from 12 to 6—for only $3, refundable if you buy a bottle—and they pair their gin with Q Tonic, also from Brooklyn.

So how’s this stuff made? I didn’t know, so in case you don’t either, here’s a simple rundown. Breuckelen’s spirits start with organic, whole-grain wheat from Upstate New York. This is milled into flour, which gets dumped into a huge masher, mixed with water and natural enzymes, heated, and then cooled. Next they add yeast and pump it into fermentor tanks (which smell just like baking bread!). What comes out is like a crude form of beer. That’s loaded into their custom still, which heats the mash gently and evenly. During the fermenting process, the spirit that comes off first isn’t palatable, so Brad and Co. smell and, eventually, taste the first few jars to determine when the alcohol is good to drink.

At this point, the spirit can become either gin or whiskey. The gin is re-distilled with juniper berries, lemon peels, ginger, rosemary, and grapefruit. The whiskey is aged in charred oak barrels, which gives it  a maple syrup flavor, along with the yeasty taste of the wheat; Brad says it tastes like a pancake breakfast. Finally, the spirits are diluted with NYC tap water, bottled, and corked. Neat!

brooklyn spaces: So are you a huge gin drinker? What made you decide to do this?
Brad: Yeah, I like gin, I like whiskey. That was one of the things that was important to me, to make something that I appreciate. I had this other job where I wasn’t making anything, and I saw all these people in Brooklyn making stuff, taking something and transforming it into something totally different, whether it’s turning steel into a knife, turning flour into bread, or turning coffee beans into the second most delicious thing in the world. I wanted to do something like that, to make a contribution. Then one day I read an article about how the federal government had recently relaxed some of the rules and now it was financially possible to have a small distillery. It sounded perfect, to do something totally my own, whether it’s good, bad, popular, unpopular; it would taste of the ingredients we used, and of the processes we designed to make it. I decide to try it, and things sort of came together.

brooklyn spaces: How did you know how to get started?
Brad: I read some books, then I visited some small distilleries, like Koval in Chicago. Kothe, who made the still for us, puts on some classes, so I took one of those. I also did a lot of drinking to understand the different spirits, why they taste the way they do. And then just a lot of experimentation.

brooklyn spaces: How did you find this space?
Brad: I knew I needed sixteen-foot ceilings because the still was going to be so tall. My real estate agent told me about this space, but she said it in passing, like, “Well, there’s one other place with high ceilings, but it’s not in the right neighborhood for you. You can go look at it in your spare time if you want.” So I rode my bike down here, and I remember coming under the BQE; with all that construction, it felt like a war zone. The neighborhood seemed a little desolate, but the space was beautiful, and I knew it was a good fit. And then once I started coming down here, I realized there are actually a lot of really cool, friendly people doing great things around here. A couple doors down is Object Metal, they makes gorgeous furniture; next door Kevin Barrett is doing amazing abstract metal sculpture; down the block is Pawz, a company that makes rubber dog booties, which my dog uses all the time and they’re awesome. There’s a bunch of other artist studios next door, and nearby there’s Cut Brooklyn, who makes knives, Sway Space Letterpress, and Lite Brite Neon.

brooklyn spaces: So it’s a good community?
Brad: Yeah, it’s really awesome, really friendly. After I rented the space, one of the first things I bought was the forklift, and I had it delivered in the middle of the night, because that was cheaper. So the guy shows up at three in the morning, we unload the forklift, and I try to bring it inside. It’s a used lift, and the guys who had it before had modified it by welding a section on the top, so even though I’d checked the height online, it didn’t fit through my doors. Kevin wound up storing it for me for three months while I got the doors replaced. So yeah, there’s a great community down here.

brooklyn spaces: I feel like there’s almost an unprecedented surge of creativity in Brooklyn right now. Do you think Brooklyn attracts people who want to do things like this?
Brad: Definitely. For me it was just being here and realizing how great it was and deciding I wanted to be part of it. It really made me rethink my path. The whole idea of Brooklyn, it was inspiring to see people doing these crazy, ridiculous, but really authentic projects, independent of some giant organization. And people support that here, too; I used to bike three miles to get the coffee beans that I like.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Brad: To survive. To keep making better gins and whiskeys. We’re working on a jenever-style gin, and a barrel-aged one, gin aged in an oak barrel like a whiskey. I have a couple other ideas for different flavors that I want to try. The whole project is a big experiment, trying to figure out how to keep making it better and better.

Like this? Read about more makers: Metropolis Soap, Urbanglass, Ugly Duckling Presse, Twig Terrariums

During this year’s Bushwick Open Studios, I had an ambitious roster of spaces to hit, and by a fortuitous chance, one of those was Hive NYC, a nonprofit multidisciplinary art space that is home to a collective of musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, photographers, and aerialists. There was fantastic art on display, by Jewel Lim, Tamar Meir, Our Guy, Sigal Arad Inbar, and Fumie Eshii. And the artists who were there—Yula, Isaac, Kate, and Melanie—were just amazingly warm and welcoming.

Yula, Isaac, Kate, and Melanie, photo by Maximus Comissar

They showed us all around the space, then brought out a lovely little impromptu lunch: salad and couscous, hummus and boiled eggs, avocados and cheese and coffee. They were bubbling over with excitement about their space, their projects, their bands, and the life they’re making for themselves. In addition to art and music, they have plas to green their home with a rooftop garden, compost, a water accumulation system, and doing more buiding with salvaged and reused materials. They even have their own living metaphor: an actual beehive on the roof.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How did the space get started?
Kate: There was a group of us all playing music together, and we were all into different forms of art as well, like I write, Isaac does theatre productions, we have a saw-player who paints, our trombone player is working on a rooftop garden, stuff like that. So the idea was just to bring in as many people as possible and give them a place to create whatever they wanted to create.

photo by Alix Piorun

brooklyn spaces: How did you find the space?
Yula: It was so amazing, it happened really fast. About a year ago, I told a friend, “What I want is to have a little sanctuary for the people I know and love, so they could do whatever they want to do.” And in no more than a year, the Hive started coming together. All these people started being drawn in, our friends brought more friends, and each one of them were geniuses in their little ways. So we were like, “Okay, we need a home.” And a month later, I found this place on Craigslist. Isaac came here, and he was like, “It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s amazing!” The landlords are awesome, they’re artists, they said, “As long as you don’t burn the place down, you can do anything you want.” And so we moved in and started doing things. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s also really rewarding and fun.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What was the last show you had?
Yula: We had a show last night, and our band The eXtended Family played with Dolchnakov Brigade. There were so many people here, it was ridiculous.
Kate: It was so overwhelmingly positive too, everyone was just having a great time. I think there’s a mutual understanding that this isn’t a club, this is a place where people live. We had so many people dancing, and all this artwork all around, and nothing got disturbed, there were no problems at all, there was just a really beautiful, positive energy.

Yula and the eXtended Family, photo from streetcredmusic

brooklyn spaces: What are some of the other projects people here do?
Yula: The eXtended Family is the heart, it’s all of us. The music is very eclectic. We call it ro-punk, romantic punk, but you can’t really define it, it’s a mix of a lot of shit thrown together with a kind of punchy attitude, but in a positive way. And then Dolchnakov Brigade is just like a megalomaniac onion, an underdog-ish, fascist kick in the face. There are several other bands who work with us too, there’s Crooks & Perverts, Gato Loco, This Way to the Egress, Torcher Chamber Ensemble.

photo by Maximus Comissar

Kate: We have a website that features writers, artists, music, sustainability projects, and humor, as well as allowing members to barter for goods and services.
Yula: There’s also a Philly Hive. They’re doing events in a place called BookSpace, with aerialists and circus-ish type stuff and book readings and poetry.
Kate: One of our members is the editor of Helo: The Crisis Story Magazine. We’re also in the middle of a Kickstarter to try to raise money to get our roof garden off the ground, ha ha.
Yula: We have bees on our roof now. Thirty thousand little sweet bees! I never thought I would be so comfortable around so many bees. But you can be one foot away from this huge swarm, and they don’t bother you, they just mind their own business.
Kate: Didn’t you name them all Deborah?
Yula: Yes, Deborah the Hive. It’s one organism made of many little things, which is a perfect metaphor for us.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like Brooklyn has influenced the way you conceive the space, or do you think spaces like this are having an impact on the way that Brooklyn is right now?
Yula: I think the second. For us at least. You can do pretty much anything you want here if you respect everything else. And if you set that tone, people respond to it wonderfully. Little by little, if you just spread it slowly, you might be able to make a difference in a larger way. As soon as Bushwick Open Studios started and I started walking around the neighborhood, I was like, “We’re not the only people doing this!” It’s wonderful. We just need to make some connections and make this trust circle bigger, broader, and stronger, and then who knows what can happen? I’m hoping that this is just the beginning, that everybody’s going to pick up from this and just do more and more.
Kate: There’s been a pretty big snowball effect since we’ve started. We’ve been picking up more and more people and having a great time. This space has definitely come together very quickly.
Yula: If we can just continue to do what we do and enjoy it, that’s all we really want. Just don’t bother us doing it. World, don’t interfere. If you have any bad intentions, just stay out.

Like this? Read about more communal art spaces: The Schoolhouse, Swimming Cities, Arch P&D, Silent Barn, Monster Island, Flux Factory, Bushwick Project for the Arts

Wau Wau Sisters at Big Sky Works

When I was in college in New Jersey, we used to come to Brooklyn to hunt for weirdness as much as we could. The first time I came to Galapagos was probably in 1998, when it was still in Williamsburg, and I saw some totally insane shows there. One of the best was the Wau Wau Sisters (Tanya Gagné and Adrienne Truscott), an “acroband” who wear crazy costumes and sing ribald songs while balancing on each others’ shoulders or sharing a trapeze. They were sensational.

Tanya, photo by Maximus Comissar

Where are they now? Still performing, of course, mostly in the UK and Australia. But when they’re home, Tanya—who happens to be one of the warmest, most exuberant ladies I’ve ever met—runs a circus school, Trapeze Loft, in an incredible community art and performance venue, Big Sky Works. At Trapeze Loft you can take classes in things like partner acrobatics, hula-hoop, trapeze, wire-walking, silks, cloud swing, and contortion. And at Big Sky Works you can see an insane variety of crazy, crazy, fabulous shows, with acrobatics, circus freakshow stunts, live music, projections, pie fights, clowns, burlesque, drag, and just all manners of creative weirdness. I actually got to see the Wau Wau Sisters do a farewell show there before they headed overseas, and they were even more sensational than I remembered. I’ve since been back for a handful of events—including Coney Island–based Mermaid Musee, the spectacular Morgan O’Kane‘s CD release party, and a benefit for Vic Thrill—each more weirdly wonderful than the last. Big Sky also collaborates with lots of amazing local groups, including Funny Bone Theatre, a comedy-based after-school program for kids.

Head over there for some old Williamsburg–style freakiness as soon as you can. But first, check out my interview with Tanya!

from Great Aerial Reef, 2006

brooklyn spaces: Have you been a performer your whole life?
Tanya: I grew up doing theatre and gymnastics and all that, but I don’t come from a show-biz family. I started studying circus when I moved to New York in my early twenties, and then I moved to France and Spain and San Francisco and trained really hard for a few years, and then I came back to New York and opened the Trapeze Loft in ’99. I started off giving private lessons, and I was slammed. We were a little bit ahead of this grand circus curve; at that point there was no Elizabeth Streb, no Circus Warehouse, no Sky Box, nothing. Now there’s so many spaces, which is wonderful.

Miss Ekaterina as the world's most terrifying unicorn

brooklyn spaces: Is it a good community? Do you guys all share tips?
Tanya: I definitely check them all out, and I know a lot of the teachers over at House of Yes and Lady Circus. A lot of the students take classes at all the spaces, and that’s cool because they can see what everyone has to offer. I’m kind of jealous of the students now, because when I came to New York there was only one person to train with, Irena Gold, this crazy old Russian lady who trained for Big Apple Circus.

brooklyn spaces: Why did you move the Trapeze Loft into Big Sky Works?

Tanya: I wanted to expand the possibilities. The Trapeze Loft was about half this size, so you couldn’t have a class with more than four or five people. This space is really ideal. The ceiling is seventeen feet high, and you can rig anywhere. I knew it would be a lot of work, because when I first got it, it was just an empty space. But I decided to take the risk. I think there’s a need for it in the neighborhood, there’s not enough underground, kooky things going on, you know? So I got the space and drew up a really basic plan. And then one of my students who’s a welder was like, “I’ll weld the railing!” And one of my friends who’s a carpenter was like, “I’ll build the stage!” Janet Clancy and Kris Anton, who are my technical directors now, and the most awesome people in the world, they helped install all the lights, sound, and rigging. It was like a tiny village all coming together. It was really nice seeing all these people saying, “We want to help make this happen.” It came together really fast, like within six weeks. It was a ton of work, but we kicked ass.

photo from Big Sky Works' Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Do you choreograph all the shows yourself?
Tanya: It depends. Some of the shows I choreograph, but the one we had last weekend was a circus cabaret, everyone coming with an act, everything from aerial to clown to juggling. Other times people will come in with their own show all ready to go. The space is open to whatever. I’ve had friends shooting music videos, my friend had his wedding here, another friend had an art opening, another wants to do a pie-fight show, clowns running around with shaving cream and whipped cream pies, and I’m like, “Yes! This is your place!” I want any kind of shows, whether it’s rock and roll shows, puppet shows, dance parties—whatever the fuck you want to try out, bring it here, we’ll see how we can make it happen. It’s not just a circus space. I want it to be seen as a funhouse. That’s the kind of New York I want.

photo from Big Sky Works' Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some cool shows you’ve had here.
Tanya: The last few were the circus cabaret shows, which bring in a great mix of people from the professional circus scene. There’s people who teach at Circus Warehouse, TSNY, Sky Box, there’s people from LAVA, an all-women’s dance and circus troupe I used to be a part of. It’s a great way to try out a new act and meet new people in the community. Usually I have a host; among them have been amazing performers like Circus Amok‘s Jennifer Miller, Miss Saturn, and Murray Hill. Recently Butt Kapinski, she’s like a private eye investigator clown, put on an amazing show with a live jazz band. Some other great performers I’ve had here are Ambrose Martos, Chris Rozzi, Magic Brian, Amy G, Amazing Amy, Vic Thrill, Lone Wolf & Cub, Mermaid Musee, Miss Ekaterina, and members of Suspended Cirque and the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus A couple of weeks ago one of my teachers did a student showcase. My friend BAMiAM.tv is going to start putting on a monthly party with bands, aerialists, video projections.

Corn Mo, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you think being in Brooklyn influences a space like this, or that spaces like this have an impact on Brooklyn?
Tanya: Yes, yes, yes. When I moved into the neighborhood in 1992, I lived in a place called Keep Refrigerated, near the Mustard Factory, and there were so many crazy abandoned buildings. This place was full of crack and cars on fire and hookers. So if you wanted to put on a show, you just went into a abandoned building and put on a show. Obviously that doesn’t exist anymore, that period’s over. But I feel like anyone can still put on a show, you don’t need a million dollars or a fancy producer and director. In that sense I think Brooklyn has definitely influenced how I look at making shows. Just because all the fancy high-rises and people with money are moving into the neighborhood, that doesn’t mean this place can’t be kooky anymore, and it doesn’t mean we all have to leave. It’s still awesome here, just in a different way. I want to keep some freakiness, and I think the new people moving in want the freaky shit too. That’s why I want the space to get more visibility, because I feel like it’s still pretty underground, and I want to get people here to see all this great stuff.

***

Like this? Read about more performance spaces: House of Yes, Red Lotus Room, The Muse, Cave, Rubulad, Gowanus Ballroom, Chez Bushwick

I’ve been to Death By Audio a few dozen times, but somehow I always forget how cool it is. My friends’ doom metal band Bloody Panda played a brain-meltingly loud show there a few years ago, and I saw my other friends’ band Dead Dog there last summer. Todd P books there a lot. The shows are always raw and raucous, which of course befits one of the early Williamsburg DIY venues.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

When I went a few weeks ago, the show was as crazy as I expected. First was Bubbly Mommy Gun, a weird psych rock outfit, who had their saxophonist hiding behind the wall and playing through a tiny window. Next was Mugu Guymen, a duo with the guitarist kneeling over dozens of pedals and the drummer just going crazy, playing faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. Last was Makoto Kawabata (from Acid Mothers Temple) with Pikachu (from Afrirampo), who flailed around and leapt up onto her drum kit and grabbed a microphone from out of the ceiling to scream into. Amazing, amazing show.

Bubbly Mommy Gun

Q&A with Edan, Death By Audio’s booker

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space and your involvement.
Edan: Death by Audio was a pedal company before it was a show space. Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangers moved in in 2005. At first they rented out the front part as a photo studio, but after a while that didn’t pay the rent, so they started throwing shows. I worked the door at some of the earlier shows. I was booking shows around town, but I just kind of started bringing everything here. Then one of the bookers didn’t want to do it anymore, and I took over.

Pikachu

brooklyn spaces: Is there a particular kind of music that’s generally the focus?
Edan: It’s whatever I want to listen to. I wouldn’t have a show here if I didn’t want to see the band. But I feel like I have a pretty broad musical spectrum. It tends to go toward noisier music, heavier rock, heavier metal, and weird harsh noise stuff. But there’s all kinds of pop here too. If it sounds awesome, and if I think it’s going to be cool live, we put it on.

Bubbly Mommy Gun

brooklyn spaces: What are some favorite shows you’ve booked or seen?
Edan: Last summer we had Ty Segall, Charlie and the Moonhearts, and a bunch of other awesome bands. That show was amazing. The best part of that was Ty and Michael had a project together before that, and they did a duet at the end as an encore. That was really cool, it was something I never thought I’d see. And all kinds of band reunions, or people saying they saw videos on YouTube of bands playing here and were like, “Oh man, I want to play there.” Universal Order of Armageddon said that, Party of Helicopters said that. Paint It Black, we did a show for them, that shit sold out in an hour. I never even sell advance tickets for shows, and that one was gone in a day, which was crazy.

Makoto Kawabata

brooklyn spaces: Do you have a struggle or a triumph you want to share?
Edan: I have all kinds of trials! The more it’s a personal thing, the more effort you put into it, the harder it is when you lose to things like money. That’s not what it’s about, but you know, sometimes bookers come in and put holds on dates and tell me I’m going to get some band and I’m like, “That’s fucking awesome, they’ll be great.” And then a month later the booker’s like, “Oh, we were never actually going to bring the show there, we were just holding it in case we couldn’t find a bigger space.” That kind of stuff is soul-crushing. Or there’s always some show that I’m missing a band on, and I end up sitting in front of a computer for hours, emailing tons of bands and getting so many nos. It takes a long fucking time. Then I go to work at like seven, run sound all night, get off at three in the morning, have to clean the place twice. But it doesn’t matter, because I get to see all the shows, you know? I’m always excited about anything that’s here.

Mugu Guymen

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts about being in South Williamsburg these days?
Edan: Some of the first underground DIY shows I saw were around here. There’s a place that’s just now newly a condo where I watched Lightning Bolt play in a dirt pit, and Liars, and Panthers, it was a really sick show. Glass House Gallery was one block away, I saw tons of shows there, I saw Dirty Projectors play to like three people there. I grew up on that, in my adult life, my Brooklyn life. I’ve watched Williamsburg go from totally weird-ass back streets to something more normal, although people still walk down here thinking it’s the edge of the world. I used to have people leave after their shift and get mugged for the $20 they’d made, but it’s not fucking like that now. It’s totally safe, totally normal. Death By Audio and Glasslands and 285 Kent and Glass House and Main Drag Music and so many other spots, we’ve helped change what’s safe and unsafe.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Edan: Just to continue, to maintain the quality, and to keep appreciating it. I don’t want to get bored of doing this.

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Like this? Read about more music spaces: Silent Barn, 285 Kent, Shea Stadium, Bushwick Music Studios, Newsonic, Dead Herring

Gowanus Ballrooom is one of my very favorite spaces, one I can’t help updating and re-writing about again and again. (In fact, check out my article from their Fall 2011 show “Paint Works” on Gowanus Your Face Off!) The space, most of the time, is home to Serett Metalworks, but three or four times a year it gets transformed into a massive art spectacle. They’re doing so much to make a home for emerging and underground artists in New York, and every one of their shows is spectacular—and necessarily ambitious, given the sheer scope: the Ballroom is 16,000 square feet on two levels, with 50-foot ceilings. You have to slink down a super-sketchy dark alley on the canal to get to it, but oh, man, is it worth it.

The group shows feature outrageously great art from up to fifty  artists at a time, including huge metal sculptures, lush photographs, hyperreal paintings, abstract assemblages, quirky dioramas, stained-glass windows, woven cloth streamers, giant wooden installations you can climb around in, collages you can run your fingers through, intricate ink drawings, shifting projections, and more. Plus live entertainment! Aerialists like Seanna Sharpe (in her first performance since her stunt on the Williamsburg Bridge), fire dancers like Lady C and Flambeaux Fire, and of course bands, including Crooks & Perverts, Les Bicyclettes Blanches, Apocalypse Five and Dime, Yula and the eXtended Family (from Hive NYC), and Morgan O’Kane, the absolute most phenomenal banjo player you’ve probably never heard (unless you ride the L train a lot). At the 2011 Art & Architecture Show, he played past 2 a.m., almost two hours of just the best music ever, and I haven’t seen so much foot-stomping, arm-flailing, whooping joy since… well, since the last time I saw Morgan play, I guess.

2011 Art & Architecture show

Crooks & Perverts, photo by Megan K O'Byrne

Q&A with Josh, the Ballroom’s founder, and Ursula, art show curator

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space.
Josh: I run Serett Metalworks, and I moved the shop here a year ago from Nostrand Avenue. This is twice the space I need, but it was the bottom of the economy crash, and when I saw the space I knew that I would use it for other things besides metalwork. It’s a fucking beautiful shit hole, I love it. It doesn’t make sense for me to run a metal shop here, because you can’t heat it in the winter, there’s always water leaks, and it gets too hot in the summer. But we deal with it. We build weird art and architectures structures, so the people who work here, it kind of inspires them to do better work, to be happier about their job. That’s a big part of it, just the beauty of this insane old place. It used to be a steel mill, a boatyard, a cannonball factory, a chemical factory. The history here is ridiculous.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: In the metal shop, is it all your projects? Do other people do their projects here too?
Josh: It’s mainly our shop where we fabricate our stuff, but I also work with all these different groups. Someone comes and says, “Hey man, I need lockdowns for this WTO protest, can you help me build them?” Or like Swimming Cities, a bunch of fucking hippies who are building pontoon boats they can collapse, ship to India, and sail five hundred miles down the Ganges River. How fucking cool is that? I want to support those fucking maniacs, because that is awesome.

photo by Ursula Viglietta

brooklyn spaces: What made you start doing art shows?
Josh: I always wanted the space to be dedicated to art and architecture and engineering, mostly because architects and engineers, their social life is so fucking boring. But it’s a really interesting group of people doing really interesting work, and I like the idea of art and architecture and engineering together, because there’s a lot of aspects of engineering and architecture that are art. So the idea was to have a space for all three. We did the first Art & Architecture show in early 2010. The whole thing was thrown together in two weeks, and it went real well. Then we did another one about six months later that was really successful and really fun. But I learned it’s a lot of fucking work putting on a show, it’s an insane amount of coordination, and the person who’s doing the coordination loses their mind not at the end, but halfway through.
Ursula: I stayed pretty sane.

Flambeaux Fire, photo by me

Josh: Yeah, I’m getting there. I’m just finishing the story. Anyway, it blew my mind how much work it was. So I was like, all right, if our next show is going to be twice as big, it’s going to be a major ordeal. So I asked Ursula to get involved, and she came in and took the steering wheel, coordinating, organizing, categorizing, social working, all this stuff that has to come with an intense art show. And it was a great move, she really handled the stress well. There’s a lot of fucking stress involved. We pick people who do great art, but when you do that, you’re going to be dealing with some characters. That’s where the social-working aspect comes in.
Ursula: I’m actually training to become a social worker, so it worked out well. I think my background is just the right balance of art and psychology. It was a challenge and it was fun. I like doing really difficult things. If I see something that looks like you can’t do it, I’m like, “Okay, let’s figure it out!” I met a lot of really great people, and it was pretty inspiring for me as an artist.

Morgan O'Kane, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What happens to the metal shop during a show?
Josh: Believe it or not, moving the whole shop out of the way only takes three or four hours. And while the art show is up, we’re still fucking welding and grinding. All my guys love it. Setting up for this show, every single one of them came and worked fifteen, twenty hours for free, just because they loved it.
Ursula: Of course, they snuck their own artwork in as well. I’d come in and be like, “Where did that come from?”

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: How do you think Brooklyn affect a space like this, or how does a space like this affect the future of art in Brooklyn?
Josh: The beauty of the Gowanus Canal is that it’s now a Superfund site, and that means that 2,000 feet from the edge of the water, in any direction, you can’t build housing or food service of any type. So this area is going to be a great place for about ninety years. There’s always going to be this nice mix of industrial industry and art studios. It’s not going to be McKibben Street—puke my brains out.
Ursula: There’s also an artistic community here that’s a little bit hidden, so it’s a really nice spot to have a new exhibition space, because we’re not competing with what’s going on in Williamsburg or Chelsea. It’s a place for emerging artists to do what they want, and it’s huge. I mean, to be able to invite people who do the kind of large-scale installations that we had, and to tell them, literally: “You’ve got two weeks. Build something.” Not many places can do that. Especially when you’re dealing with artists who don’t have a name, and you’re just trusting them. So I think that’s something that we can offer to the neighborhood, and to the art community in general.
Josh: I started off working for Cooper Union, working with a lot of pretty big-name artists, and I was really turned off by the art world, how nasty it was, the money, everything was just politics and crap. This space is great because we can do it our way. We just fill it full of cool shit, and people fucking love it.

Lady C, photo by Megan K O'Byrne

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any advice for other people who want to take on a project like this?
Josh: Just call us. You got something crazy? You think you have schizophrenia? That’s beautiful. Call us. We like that.

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Like this? Read about more art & events spaces: Monster Island, Big Sky Works, Red Lotus Room, Gemini & Scorpio loft, House of Yes, Cave, Rubulad, Vaudeville Park, 12-turn-13, Werdink / Ninja Pyrate

Okay, the Lost Horizon Night Market isn’t exactly a space, it’s more an idea contained in many, many spaces. But it’s such a spectacularly fun idea—and several of the awesomest nights I’ve had in my ten years living in New York—I couldn’t possibly not cover it.

The Night Market is a crazy guerilla art event, masterminded by Mark Krawczuk and Kevin Balktick (interview with Kevin below!). Every few months, dozens of people rent box trucks, make them over into interactive art installations, park them on an empty block in a desolate corner of Brooklyn, then roll up the doors and invite people in to play. The whole event only lasts about four hours, and then the trucks drive away and it’s like nothing ever happened. Melissa, who did the Campfire Truck with her art collective, Blood Dumpster, said, “The whole concept reminds me of gypsy caravans or traveling circuses in the way that they would roam from town to town, set up shop for the day, and then be gone by morning.”

photo by Maximus Comissar

At the Night Market in March 2011, some of the trucks I played in were: The Teapot Dome Disaster, where we all sat around a long table and were served green tea; Granny’s Attic, dense with clothes and dishes and books and detritus, all for the taking (I got a plate and a scarf!); Bass Tsunami Truck, where I walked along suspended planks and my whole body vibrated with the pumping bass; Space Truck, filled with fog, where moonmen urged us to “drink of the body of space” while proffering a goblet of punch; the Petting Zoo and BBQ Truck, in which, after cozying up to some very lifelike papier-mâché cows and pigs, we were served delicious cubes of barbecued pork; and the Smash Truck, where lucky participants went behind plexiglass and donned goggles to smash up old electronics with a hammer. Some trucks I missed: the Hot Tub Truck (yes, for swimming in), the Strip Truck (yup, with actual strippers), the Boxing Truck (with a ring and costumes for the competitors), and so much more.

The Big Quiz Thing, photo by Maximus Comissar

According to Melissa, “making a truck pushed me to think outside my normal boundaries. This was trying to immerse not just one person, like most art, but a large group of people into a different setting, and to play on the expectations of what they would find in the back of a truck.” The possibilities really are endless.

Noah, who did the Big Quiz Thing, a spinoff of his company of the same name, said, “This is the kind of thing we live in NYC for. I’m always amazed how much effort people put into things like this, expecting no financial reward. It renews your faith in the human race, and in the positive power of art.” I couldn’t agree more!

photo by Michael Blase

brooklyn spaces: What was the genesis of such a crazy project?
Kevin: Mark saw this pickup truck with a pagoda thing on top at Burning Man, and he thought they were serving sushi. It turned out that they weren’t, but he thought it was great and wanted to do something like it. There’s an event called Decompression that the New York Burning Man community puts on here, and he decided to do it there. I was working that night, and I was on the radio, and someone announced, “By the way, I would strongly suggest that everyone check out the secret Japanese noodle restaurant running out of a truck in the parking lot.” And, lo and behold, there was a fully functioning ten-seat restaurant serving freshly made noodles, running out of this rental truck. Mark did that a few more times, once in front of Rubulad, once in Dumbo, bringing the truck to different parties. And then we started thinking, “Let’s do an event where everything is in trucks!” The first official symposium for the Night Market was held in a truck parked behind a building in Dumbo, and the first Night Market was three or four blocks from there, during the Dumbo Arts Under the Bridge weekend about a year and a half ago. We had about ten trucks, and it was the only Night Market that will ever happen where every person got to see every truck. This past one is the fifth we’ve had in New York. San Francisco has had two. There are other cities that are interested in picking it up, too. It’s turned into a really nice project. And it started with Mark and the noodle truck at Decompression.

outside the Boxing Truck, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: I tried to get into the noodle truck, but the line was too long.
Kevin: Yeah, it gets pretty brutal.
brooklyn spaces: But they did a good job, they had someone standing outside giving haiku assignments to keep the masses entertained.
Kevin: That’s something we just learned. One of the San Francisco Markets had an Alice in Wonderland truck, and there was a guy at the back of the lift-gate telling riddles, and whoever answered the riddle got to go in, whether they’d showed up an hour ago or five seconds ago. That was the dawn of the line-based entertainment. I’ve got to do something for my truck next time, because I always have a line, and people are always standing there looking unhappy.
brooklyn spaces: Because especially as it gets later, you start to panic, since there’s so much left that you haven’t seen yet.
Kevin: Well there’s no way to see all of the trucks at this point. In theory if you spent exactly six minutes in each truck or whatever you could do it, but that’s kind of pointless.

inside the Teapot Dome Disaster, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How did you publicize it at the beginning?
Kevin: We didn’t. And the reason for that is because it’s an event with a very finite capacity. We’ve always said that the rule of thumb is: “Don’t invite anyone you wouldn’t invite to a party in your home.”

Circus Truck, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: As the originator of the event, how much authority do you bring to it? How much do you have to do?
Kevin: Technically speaking, we have no authority. These are all things that happen in public places, so from a certain perspective, we can’t tell anyone what to do. The planning really consists of getting our friends together and encouraging people to do trucks, helping them conceptualize and things like that, setting up the meetings and symposia, and then Mark and I drive around a lot and look for places that we feel would work right. It’s actually a sort of very reasonable amount of planning, because everyone is totally self-contained. It’s just not a ton of work for something that creates a lot of joy for a lot of people. Everyone involved does a little bit of work, but no one has to give their life up to make sure one of these things happens.

Campfire Truck, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What have been some of your favorite trucks?
Kevin: I’ve actually seen fewer trucks than most patrons, since I’m often presiding over my own. But some of the most memorable for me have been the Surveillance Truck, the Sleep EZ Motor Inn, the Hot Tub Truck, the Strip Truck, Make It Happen, the Smash Truck, and, of course, the Lost Horizon Noodle Bar.

brooklyn spaces: What are some you’d still like to do or see?
Kevin: There are so many ideas out there. My favorite clever idea that no one has done yet is the Needle in a Haystack.

Pillow Talk Truck, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Any final thoughts?
Kevin: The Night Market gives people a platform to realize projects without having to worry about renting a venue or promoting themselves. It’s a forum for DIY creativity and entertainment. We believe that it’s a nicer world when everyone can create with and learn from one another instead of relying on the world of commerce to tell you what to do and who to meet. We didn’t invent and certainly don’t own the idea of truck-based entertainment. Anyone can do this; you don’t have to wait for us to tell you when the next one is going to be. Rent a truck. Do something neat. Invite your friends. Have fun.

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Like this? Read about more public art & spectacle: Dumpster Pools, Broken Angel, Idiotarod, Bring to Light, Cathedral of Junk

I love apartment galleries. I’m always struck by the neat intimacy of leaning on someone’s bed or sitting at their kitchen table while looking at art.

Experimental apartment gallery Concrete Utopia ran for a year, showcasing a diverse array of art in different media. The show “Spork Used as Knife” featured video art, photography, and installations. “I’m Not a Good Enough Feminist” was an ambitious undertaking that included twenty-four artists and a companion book of interviews, historical and contemporary texts, artistic pieces, and images.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

Q&A with Melanie, Concrete Utopia’s founder, director, and chief curator

brooklyn spaces: How did you pick the name?
Melanie: I was doing a curatorial fellowship in Philadelphia last year, and it came from one of these curatorial statements I was looking at when I was learning about different kinds of spaces around the world. It’s from a man named Ernst Bloch, the director of the MAK Center in Vienna, which is devoted to contemporary making and is a also museum, so it’s both art and design. They’re really devoted to not just showing things that are past, but making possibilities for new things to be made for museums, which is something I’m really interested in, giving people I love a reason to make things. I was seeing so much stagnation of so many people whose work I thought was amazing, and I wanted to encourage them to start making things again. So “concrete utopia” as I reformalize it is a perpetual state of being actualized, or deciding that utopia is where we are right now, it’s not something to be made in the future. It’s about being a certain age when you’re like, “Wait a second, I get to take life by the balls! How do I want to do that?”

brooklyn spaces: How many shows have you had?
Melanie: We had “MANIFEST-O” in October, and then we had a night of performance in November, “Food Party,” featuring a storyteller and the proverbial campfire, which was really sweet. And then we did “An-Architecture,” which was a collaboration with Recession Art, a young organization that does shows at the Invisible Dog. It was a two-person show with Caroline England and Ian Trask.

brooklyn spaces: How long does it take you to put a show together?
Melanie: It depends on the scope of the project. “An-Architecture” took three months. The storytelling show, since it was just a one-night event, was really a month or two. This show I put together in a month, although I should have given it more time. We’ve been working on “I’m Not a Good Enough Feminist” for a really long time now; we were planning on putting it up in January, and then March, and then at our first staff meeting—I am lucky enough to have some amazing, amazing, amazing women who decided to help me out—we realized we still needed more time for it. In the end that one is going to take almost six months to put together.

brooklyn spaces: Do the pieces stay up when the gallery isn’t open?
Melanie: Yeah, each show stays up pretty much until the next one. I’m really lucky because it’s kind of like I’m renting art for free.

brooklyn spaces: Why did you pick this neighborhood?
Melanie: When I moved back to New York, I said, “I’m not going to live in Williamsburg, I’m not going to live in Williamsburg, I’m not going to live in Williamsburg.” And then my best friend moved to Williamsburg, my brother moved to Williamsburg, my two other best friends moved to Williamsburg, and suddenly it was where everyone I knew was living. So it was a personal decision to move here, rather than a gallery decision, but it’s turned out to be a really good place to be.

brooklyn spaces: Do people in the building or in the neighborhood know there’s a gallery here? Is there any interaction?
Melanie: It’s a funny thing, and I think it’s a funny thing that’s inherent to any neighborhood that’s in the midst of this kind of gentrification: this building is half twenty-something hipsters and half Hispanic families. We have a nice relationship with the families, we all smile and say hi, but as much as I want to share what I’m doing, I’m nervous about pushing it into their lives. It’s a gallery, but it’s also often a party, you know? So that’s a difficult relationship that I’m learning how to navigate. We did finally start flyering in the neighborhood for this show, and the neighbors next door came to the walk-through we had last week. So that’s promising.

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Like this? Read about more art galleries: Invisible Dog, Ugly Art Room, Central Booking, 950 Hart, Wondering Around Wandering, See.Me

update, Aug 2011: Macro|Sea, the brains behind this amazing project, are at it again. In conjunction with 3rd Ward, Artists Wanted, The Danger, and chashama, they’re putting on The Palms, “a late summer ode to the Boca Raton Resort Pools of the 1940s (with more music, spectacle and hedonism).” It’s not actually in Brooklyn, but I headed to Queens to see it, with Leila of everydaytrash, of course (read her take on it here). I thought it was totally fun! DJs and lounge chairs and fancy cocktails and a lobster roll truck—and, of course, the pools, which are pretty amazing to behold. Here’s a few pix by Maximus Comissar (but with my crappy camera).

***

My brilliant friend Leila, one of my main blogging inspirations, writes an amazing garbage blog called everydaytrash.com. In 2009, she and two other trashies (visible trash and Ruby Reusable) started Decorative Dumpster Day, “the biennial holiday during which we take a moment to think about where we are depositing our waste by posting photos on blogs of decorated trash receptacles,” and this year she invited me to participate. Of course the first thing I thought of was the Dumpster Pools, which I’ve read about, but sadly never got to see. It’s one of the projects that caused the idea for Brooklyn Spaces to start percolating in my head, though, and I’m happy to pay tribute to a fantastically cool idea.

photo from current.com

ReadyMade Magazine broke the story. Inspired by a similar project in Georgia by Curtis Crowe of Pylon, in 2009 a trio of designers called Macro|Sea (Jocko Weyland, David Belt, and Alix Feinkind) decided to create functional guerilla art by repurposing Dumpsters into swimming pools. According to the group, the point of the project was to show that “with not too much expense, you can creatively reuse what is basically considered urban detritus and make something really cool and fun and also fairly easy to put together.” The Dumpsters were donated by a construction company, and then cleaned, sealed, lined, and filled with water—all in only twelve days. The pools opened on July 4th, 2009, and the group held very exclusive, invite-only pool parties all summer in a rented lot on the Gowanus Canal, which, in addition to the three pools, featured a BBQ grill, lounge chairs, a changing cabana, and a bocce ball court.

photo from superforest.org

In August 2010, the project was replicated in Midtown Manhattan, by invitation from Mayor Bloomburg. Macro-Sea has future plans to take the project on the road and set up Dumpster pools in strip malls all across the country, starting in Atlanta. With such a terrific intersection of practical reuse, summer fun, and serious silliness, the Dumpster Pools were a perfect Brooklyn summer project well worth sharing with the rest of the country.

pools under construction (photo from ramblinworker.com)

photo from readymade.com

Read more about the Dumpster Pools: ReadyMade, Inhabit, New York Times, Gawker, Brokelyn, Gothamist

Like this? Read about more public art & spectacle: Bring to Light, Lost Horizon Night Market, Broken Angel, Idiotarod, Cathedral of Junk

all photos by Maximus Comissar

Newsonic was terrific. It was way way out at the edge of South Williamsburg, virtually unmarked, and a complete shock when you walk in. Just an absolutely vibrant space, full of découpaged furniture and great art and twinkling lights and  linked televisions playing crazy video montages and a bookshelf made from a hollowed-out Coke machine. It had a lovely chill vibe and good music and just incredibly nice people.

Over the years, it was inhabited by about twenty different people, primarily musicians and artists, and they just quietly threw amazing shows and parties for over a decade. With hardly any web presence, they were totally underground, spreading the word through NonsenseNYC and a handful of party lists. Check out  my interview below with Brian and Seth Misterka, who was there from the beginning.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a bit about the history of the space.
Seth: We found it in the back of the Village Voice classifieds, and it was just an empty warehouse. It was really a blank canvas; the landlord gave us totally free reign to create whatever we wanted to. My original partners were a fellow named Massa, who was working for Francis Ford Coppola as an assistant, and my friend Jeremy, who worked for MTV and played in bands, and I was working at Miramax and playing in bands. We were all musicians, and we were all involved in either film or television, so we built the space out to be a music venue from the start. It’s the perfect environment for music, because our neighbor on one side is an auto mechanic, the other is a grocery store, and below us is an office, so we can play music basically any time without bothering anybody. There could be a raging party in here with a hundred people or more, and from the street it’s as if nothing’s happening at all. So it’s like this little secluded artist colony in the middle of the industrial part of Chasidic Williamsburg, this really mystical neighborhood.

brooklyn spaces: Were you putting on shows from the very beginning?
Seth: From the very beginning. The space had a built-in stage from its days as a factory, so we framed it out and started throwing shows, and they immediately were so much fun and so successful that we just kept doing it.
Brian: In the three years I’ve been here, I’ve never been to a party where there hasn’t been just a completely good vibe all around. Everybody loves it here; it’s impossible not to enjoy the space. It brings out the best in people, it really does.
Seth: It’s kind of an out-of-the-way destination, it’s a place that you have to hear about it and then make a point of coming to, and so because it’s not the kind of space that you’d just be passing by, it gives it a kind of a special nature.

brooklyn spaces: So why are you guys moving out?
Seth: The landlord just wants to shuffle things around. It really reflects the broader change in the northern part of Williamsburg, with its expansion of real estate and population; that’s also happening down here. This building is going to be turned into offices. You know, money talks and the artists walk.

brooklyn spaces: But you’ve definitely nurtured a lot of artists through here.
Seth: Absolutely, yeah. There’s been so many different phases of the place, and everybody has brought a different vibe. We’ve found so many great, creative people over the years, and they’ve all contributed different things to the space, which has allowed it to take on the character it has. In addition to the parties, I’ve also had a recording studio here, and I’ve recorded all sorts of bands. My band is Dynasty Electric, and we’ve also recorded a lot of big indie bands from the 2000s, like Battles, Parts & Labor, Shy Child, and El Guapo, as well as a lot of jazz records.
Brian: Seth also recorded two records with Brian Chase from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and they’re planning on recording a third with a jazz duo they have, Brian Chase and Seth Misterka Duo.

brooklyn spaces: How would you describe the kinds of shows you put on?
Seth: Usually it’s a laboratory kind of show, with four or five bands and DJs. It’s a good platform for people to play, a good opportunity to play in a more relaxed environment and for a bigger crowd than would just be hanging out at the clubs.
Brian: Seth makes very eclectic picks. You’ll have a dance band, then you’ll have an indie band, then you’ll have a raga band, and then you’ll have these old guys who play for, like, what band was it?
Seth: One time the drummer from Saturday Night Live, his band came down.
Brian: And they had so many instruments! It was insane. There’s always a different atmosphere, a different thing, and it’s all connected into one night.
Seth: The thing with Newsonic—which is also the name of my record label—the idea has always been about the spectrum of sound, new sound, whatever it is, regardless of genre. Because I’ve been a working musician and have that access and connections to so many great musicians, the parties have become this secret party for musicians. Great musicians just want to come here and play, not for the money or whatever, but for the experience, just to be part of this energy that’s happening down here. We’ve always kept it on the lowdown because it was kind of amazing that we were able to throw parties for ten years without any trouble from the neighborhood or anything, and we didn’t want to jinx our run. But now that it’s ending, we just want to celebrate and show off the space while we have it, and to document it. We knew something cool was happening here, so we want to capture it like a time capsule and share it.

***

Like this? Read about more underground party spaces: Rubulad, Red Lotus Room, The Lab (Electric Warehouse), Bushwick Project for the Arts, 12-turn-13, Gemini & Scorpio loft

The guys who make up Arch P&D—Evan, Ian, and Zak—are some of the nicest, hardest-working dudes I have ever met. Not only were they willing to give me an interview and walk-through of their amazing new space way late at night, they actually set up a private art opening for me and Maximus, new works by Andriana Santiago in collaboration with Evan, weeks before the show will be open to the public. The Arch artists hung out with us for hours, bubbling over with excitement and energy and passion, chatting about art and life and skateboarding and bedazzling and pleasant anarchy.

photos by Maximus Comissar

You’ve probably heard of the previous incarnation of Arch, from their big, bright gallery space on Troutman Street in Bushwick, where they held group art shows and indie boutiques, and were a fixture in neighborhood art events like Beat Night and Bushwick Open Studios. But they’ve moved on, with a new space (in Ridgewood, technically), new goals, new ideas, and new synergy. As Evan says, “Arch was started to create a space where artists could get together and share art and skills, to do work that everyone could benefit from in a sustainable manner.” There are eight artists sharing space at the new Arch, and they make every kind of art imaginable, from visual art to commercial art to music to skateboarding to metal and woodwork. Even with so many people, the space is incredibly organized and doesn’t feel cramped; every workstation is built on wheels, so they can clear out the space easily for parties and events. They’ve got a crazy diverse roster of high-profile clients—including Lady Gaga, Dos Equis, Andrew WK, Dance New Amsterdam, and Lindsey Lohan—as well as working with many other underground Brooklyn spaces, like Red Lotus Room and House of Yes. They also throw art salons and parties, have open hours as a gallery, and are open to collaboration and skillsharing.

brooklyn spaces: How did you all come together?
Evan: I met Zak doing a job for Dos Equis. We made steampunk party boxes and a steampunk piano for Andrew WK.
Ian: I met Evan through working with Narcissister. He started pulling me onto some jobs, and I pulled him onto some, and it went back and forth for awhile, until we decided that it was silly not to merge into one entity.

brooklyn spaces: So you guys have lots of high-profile clients, individually as well as collectively.
Evan: Everything is collective now. Together we’re doing what one of us could never do alone.
Ian: Everything in the shop is communal, so long as you know what you’re doing and you clean up after yourself. It’s respectfully collective.
Zak: It’s an open exchange of ideas and materials and tools.

brooklyn spaces: How did you pick the name?
Evan: It’s from a project that I did with a massive group of friends for Pier 59’s fifteenth anniversary party. It was for Fashion Week Spring 2010. We designed a massive Roman set, with an arch and columns and blocks, which took every last bit of help from everyone I knew. And it became obvious that the structure of an arch requires every block in the arch to hold it up. Actually, tomorrow we’re going to go and pick up that arch from storage, and we’re going to install it in the House of Yes for the new show, Caligula Maximus. It’s coming full circle.
brooklyn spaces: Where will it go when House of Yes is done with it?
Evan: I don’t know, it might end up at Materials for the Arts.
Zak: Sustainability is a key element for us. Everything we do is going to get reused or given away.

brooklyn spaces: Has Bushwick influenced the space, or Brooklyn in general?
Zak: Bushwick is the pulsating center of art in Brooklyn right now. It’s where everything is happening.
Ian: I think even the way we’ve set up the space, it has a Brooklyn feel. It’s open, there’s no walls between our spaces, everything is there for everyone to see.
Evan: It’s all DIY and scavenged, the windows leak, it’s freezing cold, you’re working in the shop in all your clothes. That’s Brooklyn.
Zak: Survival skills.
Evan: Also it’s really bleak, it’s this post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland.
Zak: In the wintertime you walk out there and it’s like snowfields and dilapidated train tracks and broken-down warehouses, but what’s coming out of here is what people deem some of the most beautiful artistic work in the world. On the outside this building looks like nothing, but inside we’re creating stuff that’s on Fifth Avenue. The juxtaposition is fantastic, it embodies the whole situation.
Andriana: And we’re remaking the neighborhood. It’s just about taking what you have, whatever it is, even if it’s old or dirty, and making it your own and creating your own life. Whatever you want it to be.
Ian: That’s what’s so beautiful about this space, it’s all of our dreams put together, making it into a collective dream.
Evan: I’m gonna cry.

brooklyn spaces: What else is even in this immediate neighborhood? Are there other artists creeping out?
Evan: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of lofts out here that are filled with artists.
Andriana: We’re like roaches.
Zak: Yeah, we come out at night and we’re impossible to get rid of.

brooklyn spaces: Will this space be open to the public like the last one?
Evan: We just recently did a gallery show; obviously this will be an ideal place to have art hanging on a regular basis. We’ve been open to the public for about five events. We’re trying to find where our public presence as a space exists.
Ian: A lot of it comes from opening up the space to other artists. We’re open to helping people who don’t have the space to do larger projects.
Zak: We’ve all been there, having a concept but not the space to realize it. So we’re more than willing to help out other artists with space and materials.

brooklyn spaces: Do any of you want to talk about recent favorite projects that you’ve done?
Evan: We just made a mannequin for Melody Sweets, a burlesque performer. And we did a really nice set at Lincoln Center for Fashion Week for Odd Molly, a Swedish fashion company. And we did a set for Black Nativity Now, an Off-Broadway production by Alfred Preisser. Zak just headed up a project doing two suites for the Lady Gaga concert at Madison Square Garden.
Zak: I also make surfboard fin key necklaces, in a range of metals and finishes, and Lindsey Lohan has taken a liking to them, so I’m getting some calls from her. That speaks to the diversity in the whole situation, we have high-end sets, high-end furniture, high-end jewelry, it’s such a range.

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you want to tell the world?
Zak: Tell them to come by! They’re more than welcome, our doors are always open. Just be friendly. Have a smile on your face and want to be a little bit creative and get your ideas out.
Ian: There’s always a way to make your project happen.
Zak: Yeah, whenever someone says “Is that possible?”, we never say no. It’s always possible. It just takes a little bit of creativity, a little bit of blood, sweat, and tears.

***

Like this? Read about more art coworking spaces: Exapno, Time’s Up, Bushwick Print Lab, Urbanglass, 3rd Ward, Brooklyn Lyceum, No-Space

I’ve loved City Reliquary for years. It’s right on Metropolitan Ave., and I pass by it at least once a month, always delighted to find a new bizarre and beautiful display in the front window, whether it’s an array of Pez dispensers, ceramic unicorns, pizza magnets, or postcards from the Queens World’s Fair. In fact, City Reliquary started out around the corner from its current location as just a window, the street-facing window of founder Dave Herman’s apartment, which he filled with his own collection of Statue of Liberty figurines and other New York ephemera.

all photos in this post by Maximus Comissar

Now, like Proteus Gowanus, City Reliquary is a non-profit community-based micro-museum. The Reliquary is slightly broader in scope, with a permanent collection of NYC artifacts, including a selection of Subway tokens, a picture gallery of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the original 2nd Avenue Deli sign, among much, much more. Even the bathroom houses its own micro-micro-gallery of old-timey tincture and lotion bottles. Though the museum is certainly tiny, you’ll want to spend a while poring through the staggering amount of amazing stuff crammed into it. They also have terrific events and fundraisers, including the monthly THird THursday party, Show and Tell open mics, an annual block-long street party called Bicycle Fetish Day, and more.

Q&A with Bill, City Reliquary’s president

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the exhibits you’ve had.
Bill: We just took down one that was all photographs of streetlights. It was one guy’s personal collection, and he told the histories of each one, when they disappeared, stuff like that. We found him through a guy named Kevin Walsh who runs a great website called Forgotten New York.

brooklyn spaces: What’s the current exhibit about?
Bill: It’s a guy who’s eating a slice of pizza from every pizzeria in Manhattan, and he takes a picture of every slice and the restaurant where he got it.

brooklyn spaces: How often does the exhibit change?
Bill: It depends how long it takes us to get the next one together. We tried to do a new every month, but it was just too much.

brooklyn spaces: And are they always New York–centric?
Bill: Yes. The only thing that isn’t New York–centric is the window up front, Community Collections. That showcases collections by different New Yorkers.

brooklyn spaces: Why Brooklyn? Why Williamsburg?
Bill: Just circumstance. We didn’t pick the neighborhood; Dave lived here, this space opened up, we moved in.

brooklyn spaces: What’s the relationship with the community?
Bill: Everyone’s been really great. Saltie and Roebling Tea Room have donated food for benefits, Momofuku donates cookies, sometimes we hold events at the Knitting Factory.

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you want to tell the world about the museum?
Bill: Our hours are noon to six, Thursday through Sunday. Come to the events, they’re great fun. We always have Brooklyn beer at them.

***

Like this? Read about more micro-museums: Proteus Gowanus, Micro Museum

Time’s Up is an all-volunteer, nonprofit environmental advocacy group. They do about 200 themed group bike rides a year, dozens of campaigns, and close to 300 workshops annually. They have been hugely instrumental in increasing bike-riding all over New York City (including helping to start the pedicab industry), and have done great work with community gardens, greenways, reclaiming public space, animal advocacy, deforestation, fracking, and more. They’ve been written about everywhere, from the New York Times to the Indypendent, from the Brooklyn Paper to the L Magazine.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

I took my sister with me to this interview, and, embarrassingly, we didn’t bike. (In our defense, it was snowing like crazy.) But everyone was kind andwelcoming anyway, and we took a tour of the incredible space, and also got to talk to Bill, Time’s Up’s founder, and Steve, a longtime volunteer.

These days, Time’s Up is most known for its focus on biking. According to Steve, “Time’s Up is an environmental group, and biking is very environmentally sound. The mission of the group is to increase cycling to help the environment.” Among a slew of other campaigns, they participate in the mass bike movement Critical Mass, work for auto-free streets and parks, create and maintain ghost bike memorials, offer legal aid for arrested cyclists, and recently began a “Love Your Lane” campaign, designed to make cyclists feel rewarded for bicycling, rather than persecuted or harassed. Their latest action has been to build pedal-powered generators for the ongoing #OccupyWallStreet movement.

To donate to this or any of their amazing work, click the “donate” button on any page of their site. But first, check out my Q&A with Bill, Time’s Up’s founder!

brooklyn spaces: Has biking always been important to Time’s Up?
Bill: Absolutely. We’re trying to make sure biking stays solid in New York City, because we helped get it going a long time ago. We have to constantly keep the bikers strong. We focus a lot on new cyclists, with our bike rides, our campaigns, and our workshops.

brooklyn spaces: What happens at the workshops?
Bill: People learn how their bike works, what can go wrong, how to fix it, things like that. There’s a women’s bike repair class every Monday, which has been going for over six years. There’s classes about each different part of a bike. There’s thousands of dollars worth of tools here that people can experiment with. We teach cyclists skills they can use for the rest of their lives. They’re empowering themselves, making themselves independent and stronger. And it’s all good for the planet.

brooklyn spaces: What are some of your campaigns?
Bill: We have a lot of fun campaigns, like clown rides, pirate rides, sound-bikes, dancing bikes, fountain rides, where we actually go in the fountains and swim. Our next project is a “Love Your Lane” campaign, where we’ll be handing out chocolates to cyclists on the bridge, to reward people for bicycling, and to try to build community.

brooklyn spaces: Time’s Up doesn’t really do traditional demonstrations, right?
Bill: No, we mostly do positive celebrations. Instead of going somewhere and holding up signs, or standing in front of a fur store screaming, we put a plant in the ground, or fix something or recycle something. Even some of our bike rides that are designed as demonstrations, they’re saying, “This is a good thing,” not demonstrating against something.

brooklyn spaces: How has Time’s Up been affected by the move to Brooklyn?
Bill: It’s a little more difficult here, we have more security issues than we had in Manhattan. But there’s a lot of bike culture here. If you go down Bedford into Williamsburg, you have an incredible bunch of new bikers that are moving here, a kind of bike gentrification. And then if you go the other way on Bedford, you have the Chasidic neighborhood. Time’s Up is really good at growing the biking community, so instead of going to the Chasidic people and yelling, “Get out of the bike lane!”, we’re trying to get them on bikes. Chasidic kids are allowed to come here and take bikes for free, to try them out. And we’re definitely seeing more Chasidic people riding bikes, especially the men.

brooklyn spaces: Are you looking to expand Time’s Up into even more spaces?
Bill: Oh yeah, if we can get more spaces, we’ll have more great activities. One of the hardest things has always been finding space. And we always get spaces without heat, without air conditioning, and everyone is freezing. It takes years to get a space set up using all volunteer work, and then we have to move, because every time we fix up a place and make it cool, the first one to go is us. We usually only can afford to stay in a space for two or three years, so we’re always looking. But whenever we have a space, you can really see the city changing. When we were in the LES we saw more biking in the LES; when we moved to Williamsburg we saw more biking in Williamsburg. Of course we went there because it was friendly to biking, but I think we really helped encourage the movement.

brooklyn spaces: How does someone get involved with Time’s Up?
Bill: Come to the Brooklyn space on any of the days we’re open—Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday—and then just keep showing up. We operate a lot of people in a small space, and we’re all over each other. But people like to work together, it builds community. And you can cross-flow the volunteers. Some volunteers will come here to do paperwork, and then they’ll realize, “Well maybe I’d like to fix a bike.” Or some of the mechanics are like, “I could do some graphics for that flier.” That’s really all we need: the space and the volunteers. Once you have a space, people volunteer, and then magic can happen.

***

Like this? Read more about community spaces: Body Actualized Center, No-Space, Trinity Project, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Brooklyn Free Store

I actually love Time’s Up so much, I went back to interview them again two years later. That one is here.

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

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.

Tito, who started the space, ran it with a very socialist attitude, encouraging anyone who wanted to get involved to come by and book a show or help with promotion. The space was highly illegal, with no liquor license, no fire-prevention system, and serious over-occupancy issues on most nights.

BMS was only a few blocks from some other great Brooklyn spaces, including Werdink / Ninja Pyrate, Shea Stadium, House of Yes, 3rd Ward, and Bushwick Project for the Arts. When Tito left town, the space changed hands and became The Archeron.

photos by Maximus Commissar

Like this? Read about other music spaces: Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, Death By Audio, Newsonic, 285 Kent