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‘Bad Guy’ Knitting Factory Exiting Tribeca for Brooklyn
When it opened on East Houston Street in 1987, the performance space was reserved for the furthest of outliers in the Downtown music scene. In 1994, the club left the Lower East Side for 74 Leonard St. in Tribeca, and classed up its act a bit—the club now has satellite clubs in Los Angeles, Spokane and Boise as well as its own record label—while retaining a reputation as Manhattan’s home for alternative rock, jazz and all the wierd sonic space in between. Those sounds are coming to an end, at least on this side of the East River. The club is expected to close in January, this time moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For Jared Hoffman, the club’s owner, the move signifies a rebirth for the Knitting Factory legacy. For Leonard Street residents, the club’s departure means the end of years of complaining about noise, garbage and loitering outside the club. “It’s not fun to be somewhere where you’re seen as the bad guy,” Hoffman said during a recent interview in a converted Brooklyn apartment that’s the club’s new office. “There’s just no way, in that environment, not to annoy some people. It’s an un-winnable situation.” “People are expecting Tribeca to be as quiet as a suburban street in Greenwich, Connecticut,” he added. Ahn-Tuyet Pollock, who has lived next door to the Knitting Factory for eight years, said she and many of her neighbors have been waiting for the day that the club would close and the sidewalk be free of its patrons. “It’s been a struggle for us ever since we moved in,” Pollock said. “[Club-goers] line up in front of the building, they smoke, they make all kinds of noise, they want to come into our building to use our bathroom...it’s a nuisance.” While the departure of the Knitting Factory is welcome news to many Leonard Street residents, their respite from club-going throngs could be short-lived. Joe Rosales, a broker for Lee Odell Real Estate, closed on a $12 million sale of the six-story building at 74 Leonard Street to the Laboz Family Trust in July, and the space, he said, has already drawn interest from developers looking to install nother nightclub. “The way that space is laid out, it has to stay commercial,” Rosales said. The Knitting Factory’s problems went beyond its troubled relations with its neighbors. And though the club’s lease didn’t expire until July 2009, Hoffman had started scouting for a new location last July. The club, Hoffman noted, has had an increasingly difficult time drawing its target audience to Tribeca. In order to meet its expenses—rent is $25,000 a month—the club has had to regularly rent its performance spaces to large-scale promoters representing established acts. Given the choice, Hoffman said he’d prefer to see the club downsize than cave to pressure to book more mainstream shows. “Rather than try to grow, and become the biggest [venue] in New York, which ultimately puts you into the trap of fighting for the obvious artists, we’re more interested in finding new artists,” Hoffman said. To Hoffman, moving to Brooklyn isn’t a concession so much as it is a defiant return to the club’s roots as an oasis for outsiders. When the Knitting Factory reopens in Williamsburg in March, it will have shrunk from three stages to one, and only about one-third of its current staff. However, it will only be paying about half the rent. The cheaper digs, he said, will allow the club to retain its status as a breeding ground for new and undiscovered talent. “In a lot of ways, Manhattan abandoned us,” Hoffman said. “In a belated fashion, we’re following our community. We’re not meant to be a 1,000-person room trying to follow the same 90 tours that come through the city every year. We’re meant to be finding the artists and giving them a platform.”
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