Elsewhere

Overview

The 24,000-square-foot converted warehouse on Johnson Avenue where Popgun Presents (the team behind Glasslands) built a five-room post-DIY venue: an L'Acoustics sound system in the main Hall and a programming model that runs live music and electronic club nights in the same building.

Elsewhere occupies a four-story converted warehouse at 599 Johnson Avenue, near the Jefferson Street L stop, that Popgun Presents co-founders Rami Haykal and Jake Rosenthal signed a long lease on after their previous venue, Glasslands Gallery (289 Kent Avenue, Williamsburg), was displaced by Vice Media's 2014–2015 building acquisition. A third partner, Dhruv Chopra (Rosenthal's friend since elementary school) joined for the Elsewhere venture. The $3 million buildout, announced publicly in June 2016 and completed in time for a Halloween 2017 opening, produced 24,000 square feet across five distinct spaces: The Hall (main stage, approximately 700 standing capacity, modular performance stage, L'Acoustics sound system); Zone One (approximately 250 capacity, dedicated DJ room, eMotion LV1 digital console at front-of-house); The Loft (second-floor lounge with food service and balcony views into The Hall); The Rooftop (approximately 460 standing, wrap-around bar, circular stage, seasonal open-air); and a smaller Chatroom space. Rosenthal described the founding ambition as building 'a community space where people could spend their time at and think of as a home'; Haykal framed it as prioritizing longevity, 'the idea was, first and foremost, to build a space that could last.' The Hall received an L'Acoustics system purpose-built for both live bands and DJ sets, with adjustable staging to reconfigure the room's orientation. The programming model Elsewhere inherited from Glasslands is genre-agnostic in a specific way: the venue books emerging and mid-tier acts at the threshold of career inflection, hosting artists' New York City debuts (Kaytranada, Disclosure, and Mr Twin Sister are cited by the founders as early Glasslands examples of this logic), then offering return slots as artists scale. On the club-night side, Elsewhere has functioned as a long-term institutional home for queer and QTPOC parties that struggled to find stable venues. Papi Juice (the QTPOC dance collective founded in 2013 by Adam Rhodes, Oscar Nñ, and Mohammed Fayaz) established a recurring residency at Elsewhere that by 2019 ran events numbered into the forties (Vol. 47: World Pride, 2019). The venue has also hosted Third Floor Sounds (a recurring series drawing on house and garage lineage, with appearances by Stacey 'Hotwaxx' Hale) and recurring appearances by Eli Escobar. The opening-week RA review noted bookings of Juan Atkins, Total Freedom, Jlin, Stacey Pullen, Octave One, and Marcellus Pittman for the inaugural months, a signal that the club programming would not be cordoned off from the concert calendar. Elsewhere's most publicly documented institutional moment came on November 27, 2017, less than a month after opening, when Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the repeal of New York City's Cabaret Law (the 1926-era statute that had effectively banned dancing in unlicensed venues) in a ceremony on the Elsewhere stage. The venue had been a visible advocate for the repeal campaign alongside Councilman Rafael Espinal and the NYC Office of Nightlife. During the COVID-19 closure (spring 2020), Elsewhere organized 'Nether Meant,' a ticketed virtual music festival built to scale inside Minecraft (the replica was called 'Elsewither') with proceeds benefiting Good360's pandemic relief fund; performers included Anamanaguchi, American Football, and Baths, with the show also livestreamed on Twitch. The same period saw Elsewhere launch a tiered membership program (from $2/month to $30/month for unlimited entry) and a Discord community channel, both framed as infrastructure for two-way dialogue with the audience rather than a VIP product. By 2024, the venue had hosted over 600 events annually and logged more than 20,000 hours of live music since opening. Following a 15th Anniversary celebration for Popgun Presents at Elsewhere on July 25, 2024, the two entities formally merged under the banner 'Elsewhere Presents.' As Glasslands' institutional successor, Elsewhere sits in the lineage of the post-DIY Brooklyn model: it professionalized the ergonomics and technical infrastructure (sound, sightlines, bathrooms) that the DIY warehouse scene refused to prioritize, while retaining genre-agnosticism and emerging-artist commitment as its editorial core. That lineage connects it backward to Glasslands (which itself emerged from the Glass House Gallery in 2004–2006) and forward to venues like Nowadays, Public Records, and Good Room that operate on comparable multi-use, community-anchored principles. The Paradise Garage Reunion, an annual event at Elsewhere honoring the King Street club's legacy, reflects the venue's self-positioning within a longer arc of New York dance-music history that stretches well past its own seven-year lifespan.

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