Brooklyn Made Presents is making good on the company’s plan to expand its venue portfolio. The independent promoter and venue operator has acquired two buildings adjacent to their flagship 500-capacity music venue in Bushwick which opened last fall.
The two new venues will be a midsize 1,200-1,500 capacity room and a larger 2,000-2,500 capacity space located across the street from the first venue, the 500-capacity Brooklyn Made. The three venues will combine to form a sprawling music complex where artists of all sizes can play and grow into the larger rooms as demand allows.
“It wasn’t planned out,” says Brooklyn Made Presents founder and venue owner Anthony Makes. Makes – who was formerly the president of Live Nation New York and veteran of AEG and Bowery Presents – says the empty warehouses were almost sold to another buyer before friends at a design company informed he had an opportunity to swoop in.
“We got real fortunate and grabbed them at the last minute. It is all very serendipitous and they just happened that they were available in the exact capacities we wanted for our growth,” Makes tells Billboard.
Like Brooklyn Made, BMP’s two new venues will be custom designed and built from the ground up with artist amenities and comfort in mind, featuring lighting design by Jeremy Roth – who has worked with Wilco, Dead & Company, Nathaniel Rateliff, Mazzy Star — and sound by D&B Audiotechnik. Covering more than 22,000 sq. ft., the two rooms will be connected by a newly built bar and lounge, which can be opened up for special events to form a massive 4,000-capacity space.
Adding more venues to the Brooklyn Made roster has been a plan for Makes since he left Live Nation to form his own company in July of 2020. The two new Bushwick venues will sit right next to the Brooklyn Made complex that Makes designed to create multiple avenues of revenue for Brooklyn Made Presents. Between the three establishments on the property (Brooklyn Made venue, restaurant Connies and café/bar Standing Room), the Brooklyn Made property is open from 7am to 4am daily for coffee, music, food and drinks and gives the company the advantage of not having to rely solely on ticket sales to sustain the business.
The Brooklyn Made campus was “off to a flying start” when it opened last September with a performance from Jeff Tweedy, says Makes, who adds that it came to a screeching halt in mid-December due to the Omicron spike. The venue closed down until late February and is now back up and running as restrictions have loosened and case numbers have dropped.
The two new venues will add to the Brooklyn Made complex in 2023 with the larger room, followed by smaller space in 2024.
“Like I said from the beginning when we launched [Brooklyn Made], we’re not trying to take over the world and get everything and everything we can get our hands on,” says Makes. “We’re being very strategic about what we want to do. They have to be beautiful venues and they have to be special.”
