3 Dollar Bill

Overview

Brooklyn's largest queer-owned club and performance space, a 10,000-square-foot former brewery complex with a front Americana bar, the back warehouse dance room Sutherland, an outdoor yard, and the adjacent 9 Bob Note, home to drag, ballroom, live performance, and OTA Weekly since 2018.

3 Dollar Bill occupies a sprawling red-brick complex at 260 Meserole Street that housed the Otto Huber Brewery from the 1860s until roughly the 1950s. The building passed through several industrial tenants before Brenda Breathnach, a Kerry-born lesbian who had operated An Béal Bocht in the Bronx and purchased Phoenix bar in the East Village in 2011, identified it in 2016 as a site with the scale Brooklyn's queer community lacked. After two years securing permits and a 25-year lease, Breathnach and her partners opened 3 Dollar Bill in summer 2018 as the largest LGBTQ+-owned venue in New York City, filling a void left by a run of closures including Sugarland Nightclub, This N' That, Veronica's, and Lovegun. The name riffs on the phrase 'queer as a three-dollar bill'; the logo (a trinity of hairy white legs) was designed by Coro Crew. The complex divides into three zones that can run simultaneous programming: a front Americana-style bar called 3 Dollar Bill; the back warehouse room Sutherland, a 50-foot-ceiling concrete hall whose sound system was partly inherited from the Roseland Ballroom and later rebuilt around a Gary Stewart–designed GS-Wave system with Pioneer Pro Audio stacks, Linea Research amplification, and Pioneer CDJ-3000 decks, and an outdoor yard with picnic tables and a larger patio. A subsequent expansion added 9 Bob Note (9BN), an adjacent club space on its own ticket, giving the complex four discrete environments that can serve separate crowds at once. Total ticketed capacity is cited at 625; the complex's square footage has been described as 10,000 square feet. An early phone-sealing policy (magnetic-strip bags inspired by a Berlin model) encouraged floor presence over app-scrolling, though the policy evolved over time. Programming spans drag, live music, DJ dance parties, comedy, and ballroom competition. The official grand opening in April 2019 featured Lil' Kim, Irish drag icon Panti Bliss (whose 'High Heels in Low Places' sold out), RuPaul's Drag Race winner Sasha Velour, and DJs The Carry Nation. Susanne Bartsch launched a monthly 'Play Now' residency early in the venue's run. Hot Rabbit, the long-running queer dance collective, uses 3 Dollar Bill for its Brooklyn Pride events; the rotating Ty Tea afternoon party runs Sundays in summer. The drag program 'Godmother,' headlined by Sasha Velour, won Best Club Party at the 20th Annual Glam Awards. Since 2019, OTA (Open To All), the weekly ballroom mini-ball founded by Legendary Leggoh JohVera (Cazayka Hyman Walker-Johnson) of the House of JohVera (named for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) has anchored Monday nights, drawing an intergenerational ballroom crowd and celebrity observers including Madonna, Lil Nas X, and Sam Smith; OTA's New York series culminated in a Times Square ball with sponsorship from the Brooklyn Nets, Nike, and the Guggenheim. 3 Dollar Bill sits in the lineage of Breathnach's earlier venues and doubles as a community center for rallies, rehearsals, queer weddings, and daytime workshops, conceived in scale as 'a bigger Arlene's Grocery,' the Lower East Side music venue Breathnach's group also owns. Its founding was understood as a direct response to the erasure of Brooklyn queer infrastructure in the 2010s, and it remains, as of 2026, the anchor of East Williamsburg's LGBTQ+ nightlife.

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