Knitting Factory

Overview

The downtown institution founded in 1987 by Michael Dorf on Houston Street that became a primary room for the city's avant-garde and free-jazz underground, surviving four Manhattan chapters and a thirteen-year Brooklyn exile to reconstitute, twice, in the former Pyramid Club space on Avenue A.

The Knitting Factory opened in February 1987 at 47 East Houston Street, where Michael Dorf (a Wisconsin law-school dropout who had driven to New York with his band Swamp Thing) and partner Louis Spitzer (who departed within the year) had found a derelict two-thousand-square-foot former Avon Products office at $1,800 a month. The venue's own history credits the name to childhood friend Bob Appel and songwriter Jonathan Zarov, joking about Appel's stint in an actual knitting factory; Appel replaced Spitzer as co-operator. Dorf's early programming instinct was eclectic (poetry Wednesdays, jazz Thursdays) but the room's identity was fixed almost immediately by Wayne Horvitz, who Dorf hired from a Village Voice classified and who, for $150 a night over eight weeks, curated the first serious concert series, beginning with a Butch Morris / Fred Frith duo. Horvitz's network (Bill Frisell, John Zorn, David Murray, Cecil Taylor) made the tiny Houston Street room a laboratory for what became known as 'downtown music': free jazz, noise, punk, performance art and their permutations, none of which fit the established jazz-club or rock-club formats. Zorn in particular shaped the creative posture of the early years, premiering Hu Die there in the club's early years and recording Naked City's live sessions in 1989; the A&M partnership that produced the four-volume Live at the Knitting Factory compilation (1989–90) and a nationwide radio series broadcast to over two hundred stations gave the Houston Street room outsized reach for its 2,000 square feet. In 1994 Dorf relocated to 74 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, a former warehouse that held over 600 people across three stages, a major jump in scale that allowed the programming to diversify into indie rock, comedy, and large festival productions while retaining the subterranean smaller rooms for improvised work. Knitting Factory Works, the independent label Dorf started around 1990–91 with financing and licensing from Tokuma Japan, built a substantial catalogue over the following decade. The annual 'What Is Jazz?' festival, which the venue began staging around 1990–91, grew into the New York Jazz Festival and ran across multiple city venues. The Leonard Street chapter closed at the end of 2008, forced out by rents that had tripled over fourteen years; its last night was New Year's Eve. The space became a contemporary art gallery. In September 2009 the Knitting Factory reopened in Williamsburg at 361 Metropolitan Avenue, the former Luna Lounge, with a remodeled 300-capacity room and a neighborhood-bar front. It operated there for thirteen years before COVID revenue losses combined with a near-75-percent rent increase (to roughly $30,000 a month) forced the Brooklyn closure on August 21, 2022. A brief return to Manhattan followed: July 2023 through mid-2024, the Knitting Factory anchored Baker Falls, a café-bar-live-room complex at 101 Avenue A in the former Pyramid Club space, a partnership with entrepreneur Nick Bodor. That iteration closed for soundproofing renovations in July 2024, and the space re-opened as Night Club 101 in early 2025, a collaboration between Knitting Factory Entertainment and the owners of Baby's All Right. Michael Dorf founded City Winery in 2008 — the same year the Leonard Street Knitting Factory closed — opening a first location at 155 Varick Street in TriBeCa and expanding the concept across more than a dozen American cities over the following decade and a half. Other rooms took up parts of the same programming: John Zorn founded The Stone in 2005 at Second Street and Avenue C to house the improvisational and composed avant-garde work that had made Naked City's Knitting Factory sessions possible (The Stone relocated to The New School's Glass Box Performance Space in 2018 as its permanent Manhattan home); Roulette moved from TriBeCa to a permanent home at 509 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn in 2011; Issue Project Room, founded 2003 by Suzanne Fiol, took another slice of the experimental calendar into its own successive Brooklyn homes. The Baker Falls and Night Club 101 sequence at 101 Avenue A briefly returned the Knitting Factory name to a Manhattan address for the first time since the Leonard Street closure fifteen years earlier. Morgan Margolis remains CEO of Knitting Factory Entertainment.