Good Room

Overview

Greenpoint club for underground electronic music since 2014: two rooms (a main floor and the vinyl-lined 'Bad Room'), a d&b Audiotechnik system Mixmag ranked in its global Top 10, and a booking calendar built on long-running residencies.

Good Room opened just before Halloween 2014 in the shell of Club Europa, a Polish-American discotheque that had long served Greenpoint's immigrant working-class nightlife at 98 Meserole Avenue. Owner Greg Brier reportedly named the space on the spot ('It's a good room') and handed programming to Josh Houtkin, who had co-founded the downtown party FIXED with Dave Pianka at the Tribeca Grand Hotel in 2004 and brought that DFA-adjacent sensibility to Brooklyn. Veteran club designer Steve Lewis (Marquee, Butter) shaped two interconnected floors: the main 'Good Room,' anchored by a DJ booth, disco ball, and dance floor accommodating up to 600 guests in total, and the 'Bad Room,' a smaller space lined with a wall of vinyl records and draped in red light, running a house-focused second system. Deliberately positioned as a hybrid of licensed nightclub and Greenpoint local bar (drinks priced at $5, door rarely above $20) the room carved a niche between the warehouse DIY circuit and the VIP-table economy. The sound infrastructure, always central to the club's identity, was upgraded in approximately 2016–2017 when Oxygen Eventworks installed a permanent d&b Audiotechnik system in the main room, 'a game changer,' Houtkin said. Mixmag subsequently ranked Good Room in its Top 10 venues worldwide for sound, citing it as 'an East Coast favorite, beloved for its inclusive parties and top-notch d&B Audiotechnik system.' The booking calendar Houtkin built drew from overlapping worlds: disco-influenced house (Justin Strauss & Billy Caldwell, Kim Ann Foxman's monthly Firehouse), trans-Atlantic techno (Martyn, Vladimir Ivkovic, Jennifer Cardini, Lena Willikens), nu-disco (Quantic, Morgan Geist / The Juan Maclean via DFA), and the harder underground (The Bunker's techno axis, Willie Burns). The Carry Nation (Nita Aviance and Will Automagic) established one of the room's most culturally significant residencies, bringing high-energy New York house, acid, and voguing-adjacent programming to what the Red Bull Music Academy Daily in 2017 called the revival of New York's 'gay big room.' Octo Octa and Eris Drew played their first-ever set together here in 2018 under the T4T LUV NRG banner, splitting proceeds with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Good Room weathered the COVID-19 shutdown with an 18-month closure not cushioned by a Save Our Stages grant (the club was rejected without explanation). During the hiatus the team hosted Twitch livestreams with NYC DJs, splitting revenue with artists, and maintained the membership program. It fully reopened in September 2021 and marked its 10th anniversary in February 2024 with a members-only party, free beer, pizza, and personalized membership cards. As of mid-2026, it remains an active anchor of the Greenpoint underground, operating alongside Nowadays, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and Public Records as part of a cooperative rather than competitive local ecology; The Lot Radio, the community station on the nearby Williamsburg/Greenpoint border, sits within the same cultural geography.

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