99 Scott

Overview

A 60,000-square-foot former factory building on the East Williamsburg–Bushwick border that ran as a Cityfox rave pop-up (2015) and a pandemic-era restaurant (Outerspace, 2020–21) before settling in as one of Brooklyn's largest independent event venues, hosting warehouse techno, art fairs, and label showcases from a multi-room industrial shell.

The building at 99 Scott Avenue is a two-story brick factory erected in 1931, sitting on roughly 53,000 square feet of lot in the M3-1 manufacturing zone just south of Flushing Avenue. PropertyShark records show the property sold for $3.33 million in March 2012 and changed hands again in December 2014 for $8.325 million, the transaction that preceded the venue's first life as an event space. The building last received a recorded alteration permit in 2015, the same year the Zurich-based promoter Cityfox (working through its production company, Reynard Productions) began using the yard and warehouse for a series of pop-up summer parties under the name Brooklyn Mirage, drawing capacity crowds for Tale of Us, Bedouin, and M.A.N.D.Y. with a KV2 Audio sound system and projection-mapped visual wrap. Cityfox operated on a catering license rather than a full liquor license, a workaround that avoided community board scrutiny; their Halloween 2015 attempt at a Greenpoint Superfund site rave, shut down by fire marshals, appears to have hastened the end of that arrangement. By late 2016, the art-world–adjacent co-founders Molly McIver (Frieze Art Fair) and Wells Stellberger (formerly Marc Jacobs) had taken over and were pitching 99 Scott to press as a 'blank canvas' hybrid space, cinema screenings, natural wine fairs, and label showcases alongside warehouse parties. Bedford + Bowery covered the opening in December 2016; the venue was still mid-renovation at the time. The physical plant, as built out by McIver and Stellberger, comprises three distinct zones: the Great Room, a 5,000-square-foot main floor with 20-foot ceilings, exposed wood beams, steel-framed windows, and capacity for roughly 800 dancers; an 8,000-square-foot courtyard garden that functions as an open-air floor in summer (the same yard Cityfox had used with temporary palm-tree staging); and the smaller Daylight Studio (also marketed as Fabr Studio) an 800-square-foot skylit room used for intimate and daytime events. Combined capacity across all spaces is cited at 2,500-plus, making it one of the largest independent event venues in Brooklyn by headcount. The complex and the surrounding block also house unrelated tenants, including Honey's meadery, the Smallhold mushroom farm, Bunker Vietnamese restaurant, and an architecture office, a light-industrial mix consistent with the M3-1 zoning. The music programming from the late 2010s onward leaned into warehouse techno and peak-time house, with bookings that included Ben UFO, Honey Dijon, Peggy Gou, Kaytranada, and Mau P, artists associated with the era's high-production Brooklyn club circuit rather than the DIY underground. During summer 2020, as indoor events collapsed, McIver and Stellberger pivoted the courtyard into Outerspace, a 126-seat outdoor restaurant featuring a rotating cast of Southeast Asian chefs including Anthony Ha (Ha's Đặc Biệt) and Chinchakriya Un (Kreung Cambodia), with a menu sourced from Union Square Farmers Market and a soundtrack curated by local labels. Pete Wells of the New York Times called Outerspace 'the restaurant of the summer' in July 2021; within hours the general manager and the chefs announced they had quit, publicly alleging disputes over pay, working conditions, and management. Dance programming resumed after the restaurant chapter, and 99 Scott has continued operating as a rental venue with periodic promoted nights. Recurring promoter relationships include Gray Area and Repopulate Mars. The venue does not maintain a named residency structure; its model is closer to a per-event rental block for larger touring productions than to the resident-DJ model of clubs like Good Room or Nowadays. No dedicated sound system brand has been publicly confirmed by the venue, the 2015 Cityfox iteration used KV2 Audio; the current fit-out's specifications have not been disclosed in available press.