Last year, the team behind Glasslands, the show space that shuttered alongside 285 Kent when Vice Media took over their space on the Williamsburg waterfront, announced that they’d be moving a little bit east and investing $3 million in a new, 24,000-square-foot venue in a former warehouse. Elsewhere opened Tuesday with a Battles show that doubled as a Halloween blowout, and is already serving up a full slate of programming. We stopped by last night as ADULT. finished up their show and learned something interesting about the stage.
Yesterday we told you what we know about Elsewhere, the new venue from the Glasslands crew set to open in East Williamsburg sometime this fall. As we speak, the owners are wrapping up a $3 million makeover on the 24,000-square-foot warehouse they’ve landed that, when complete, will boast a 5,000-square-foot music hall, among other performance spaces, all of them rigged with a superb sound system, plus a rooftop party zone, an art gallery called the “Skybridge,” a courtyard, even a “loft bar.”
It all sounds pretty grand, especially as a follow-up to Glasslands, which closed just as 2015 began, and in the course of its existence traded in and out some classic DIY features: homemade art installations (those clouds, tho), labyrinthine lofting, and swinging saloon doors between your bathroom break and the impatient line waiting behind you.
Elsewhere, so far just a $3 million enigma wrapped in an upside-down pyramid cutting through waves. (Image via PopGun Presents)
It’s only been about a year and a half since the closure of Glasslands Gallery, the other DIY venue on the Williamsburg waterfront– the one that was the button-down oxford (second-hand, but you couldn’t tell) to Death By Audio’s torn-up band tee. It wasn’t so surprising– after 8 years of hosting indie rock, R&B, techno, you-name-it shows in their cavernous, blackened industrial confines, their neighborhood along Kent Avenue no longer felt like the “forgotten backwater” it did when they opened in 2006. Today the Glasslands team announced that it’s returning with a new venue in East Williamsburg, Elsewhere, set to open this fall– and it’s not just any old ramshackle DIY establishment, but a 24,000-square-foot affair in a former warehouse. It’ll be #blessed with $3 million worth of pure sparkle, including a sprawling roof, food and drink service, and an adjacent art space.
This Tuesday at noon, SOCCC [Save Our Charas Community Center] will host a Three Kings Day march from the East Village to City Hall, hoping to convince Mayor de Blasio to save PS 64/CHARAS/El Bohio from developers. [EV Grieve]
Three men were arrested after allegedly punching and robbing a 33-year-old man in McCarren Park last Monday night, just before 1 a.m. And a 16-year-old boy was attacked while trying to save a Lorimer Street parking space for his father last Wednesday. [The Brooklyn Paper]
During his arraignment yesterday for the attempted rape of a Stuyvesant Town woman, Juan Scott was charged with two additional sex crimes committed against East Village women. [NY Daily News]
If all the paperwork goes through, Bowery Mission will receive $9K of the city’s 2015 fiscal year budget to restock its food pantry, said District 1 Council Member Margaret Chin. [Bowery Boogie]
It’s been five years since their last album, but these Brooklyn indie darlings are back, and playing a release party for their latest, Lights Out (out Aug. 19) Watch the video for the album’s instantly catchy first single, “Start Again,” and read a q&a with frontman Justin Rice, the “first heartthrob of the mumblecore era,” here.
We’re calling it here and now: Bad Girlfriend, an all-girl group based in and around Williamsburg, is next-big-thing material. On the verge of breaking their debut full-length, due out this winter and produced by Chairlift co-founder Aaron Pfenning and School of Seven Bells’ Benjamin Curtis, this chic quartet offers an edgier, New York Citified answer to stylistic cousins Vivian Girls and Best Coast.
Bad Girlfriend is made up of singer/guitarist Christian Owens, bassist Savannah King, drummer/singer Lyla Vander, and singer/guitarist Brianna Lance. We spoke to Lance, who’s also head designer at local It Girl fashion favorite Reformation, ahead of tomorrow night’s show at Glasslands Gallery, where Bad Girlfriend will open for fellow North Brooklynite Luke Rathborne. Read the B+B Q+A — and listen to their eponymous EP and their new single, “Feelings” — below. More →
“I can’t believe we’re here,”said Kurt Feldman on stage at Glasslands on Saturday. Considering the rapturous, slightly disbelieving response of the crowd, they couldn’t believe it, either. They’d gathered for what was billed as The Depreciation Guild’s first show in more than two and a half years. More →
Taiwanese-born, Canadian-bred musician Alex Zhang Hungtai refracts popular American music, like blues, rockabilly, soul, and R&B, through his uniquely-fractured sensibility. His latest release, Drifters/Love Is The Devil, is a double LP that chronicles his itinerant life on the road over the past two years. Italian pop-smith Porcelain Raft opens.
