A new venue in Brooklyn is set to bring large-scale cultural events to an industrial area of the city.
Announced Tuesday (May 21), Brooklyn Storehouse is a 104,000-square-foot warehouse that’s been taken over as a venue for culture-spanning programming involving fashion, art, music and more — with an emphasis on electronic events.
Brooklyn Storehouse is a partnership between two longstanding independent promoters: New York City’s Teksupport, which was founded by Rob Toma and has produced electronic music events in pop-up (and often industrial) spaces around the city since 2010, and Broadwick Live. Founded by Simeon Aldred in 2010, Broadwick Live is a U.K. live events company that operates 30 venues and event spaces including Drumsheds and the former Printworks London. Housed in a former Ikea and a converted newspaper printing facility, respectively, Drumsheds and the now-defunct Printworks London fit squarely into Broadwick Live’s focus on repurposing industrial buildings.
Together, Teksupport and Broadwick Live have leased the Brooklyn Storehouse from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with the warehouse space existing amid a 300-acre industrial waterfront complex. The building was first used for shipbuilding during World War I and II, and its structure maintains its original industrial aesthetic. Much of the Navy Yard is currently being developed for industrial use by clean energy and climate solutions companies. As such, it’s unlikely that the area will be built out with housing units, allowing Brooklyn Storehouse more leeway when producing live (and often late-night) events.
“One of the problems we have in the U.K. is that nearly every space we open, two years later someone’s building condos right on our back door, and it becomes a constant pressure,” says Aldred. “One of the things that’s very attractive about the Navy Yard is that it’s protected for jobs, and it’s going to be like that for a long time.”
The founders — who launched the endeavor with “50/50 our own money,” says Aldred — soft-launched Brooklyn Storehouse last September with a fashion show by Ralph Lauren. The venue can host a maximum of 7,000 people.
The partnership brings Teksupport’s strengths as a producer — “promotions, marketing, bookings, licensing, opening doors, breaking down operations, community outreach” says Toma — along with the company’s ability to, Aldred says “immediately supercharge this [space] with 30 to 40 shows.” Over the next few months, Brooklyn Storehouse is set to host performances from Justice, Charlotte de Witte, Dom Dolla, John Summit, Swedish House Mafia, Alesso, James Hype and Meduza and four parties from Ibiza-based party brand CircoLoco later this year.
Toma adds that a lot of those artists are “coming to us because we don’t only focus on selling tickets on the dance floor. They know the spaces we do are involved with fashion [and other cultural programming], and they know this is that.” Toma also says artists are drawn to performing shows in special locations, with Brooklyn Storehouse thus offering “an advantage over our competitors.”
Toma adds that the key to making the space work is “the balance of not only having programming in terms of cold hard tickets. It’s more about figuring out how to position it in a way where we’re also bringing in several different industries, from film to fashion.” The founders hope it can be a space where orchestras, musicians and other groups can set up extended creative residencies. It will be also used for corporate gatherings.
Brooklyn Storehouse is the first of several venues Broadwick Live and Teksupport plan to operate in the United States, with the partners also currently looking at former industrial spaces in Boston, Miami, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“In America at the moment we’ve got 25 to 30 [conversations ongoing],” says Aldred. “Five to 10 of those are in the money part of the talk, so they’re becoming quite real.”
In these industrial spaces, the partners see a particularly timely expansion opportunity, with Aldred predicting that many such facilities will open up as the power grid converts to clean energy.
“These spaces were used for kind of dirty work,” he says. “In the next 5 to 10 years, you’re gonna see them coming offline from being dirty and developers not knowing what to do with them. You’re not going to bulldoze a hundred-year-old power station with amazing architecture. It’s not easy to put retail in them. It’s not easy to put housing into them.”
But as is the hope with Brooklyn Storehouse, parties, fashion shows and DJ sets will be just the right fit.
