Knockdown Center

Overview

A 50,000-square-foot former glass and door factory on the Queens–Brooklyn industrial edge, converted by building owner David Sklar with artists Michael Merck and Tyler Myers from 2011 onward into a multi-room arts and nightlife campus, anchored upstairs by a 3,200-capacity main hall with an L-Acoustics K2 rig, and in the literal basement by BASEMENT, a Funktion-One techno club co-founded by Georgian-born promoters Téa Abashidze and Gega Japaridze.

The building at 52-19 Flushing Avenue has been in continuous industrial use since its construction in 1903, first as the Gleason-Tiebout Glass Company's manufacturing floor, then (after Samuel Sklar acquired it in the 1930s) as the Manhattan Door Factory, where the 'knock-down' door frame was invented in 1956 and became an industry standard. When the door business relocated to New Jersey in 2010, Samuel's son David Sklar inherited a 50,000-square-foot shell and resisted developers who wanted to demolish it. He offered studio space to visual artist Michael Merck, who became an early programming director; Tyler Myers, then a Frieze Art Fair producer with a background in House of Blues venue development, joined the collaboration around 2011–12. The first public-facing event was an outdoor sculptural mini-golf course in fall 2012; concerts began in 2013. A two-year battle with community boards and the local Community Board over a liquor license (documented partly in Juniper Park Civic Association opposition) ended when a renovated ground floor officially opened with its license on May 20, 2016. (Early programming survived without alcohol partly through Red Bull Music Academy residencies and TV-and-film location revenue, including Gotham's 'Catwoman dungeon' shoots.) The result is a campus of nine distinct rooms including the 20,000-square-foot main hall, the Ruins outdoor backyard, and a gallery, described by curator Ali Rosa-Salas as 'there's really nothing like it in the United States.' The main room's current sound system, a left-right L-Acoustics K2 array of 14 boxes supplemented by K3 delays, KS21 subwoofers, and Kara II front-fills, installed by Boulevard Carroll Entertainment Group in August 2023, supports a 3,200-capacity room configurable down to under 1,000. The scale has attracted an unusually wide booking range: LCD Soundsystem (four sold-out shows in 2023 alone), Wu-Tang Clan, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Kylie Minogue, and Tangerine Dream on one end; Arca, Kim Gordon, Sunn O))), Eartheater, and Drain Gang on another. BASEMENT, which opened May 10, 2019 beneath the main room, operates as a distinct club within the campus. Co-founded by Myers alongside Téa Abashidze and Gega Japaridze, two Georgian promoters who had booked festivals and clubs in Tbilisi before arriving in New York and joining Knockdown Center's in-house booking team in 2018, BASEMENT features a custom-tuned Funktion-One sound system, minimal lighting, a concrete DJ booth, a strict no-photos policy, and a selective door philosophy focused, in Japaridze's words, on 'dancers and people who needed to be there.' A second room, STUDIO (built around the factory's original furnace), opened September 2, 2022. Comparisons to Berghain are actively resisted by Abashidze: 'all these clubs are unique in their own ways.' BASEMENT's annual expansion, Wire Festival (debuting May 20–21, 2022) is a two-night, two-stage techno event that hosts panels on artist labor, queer safety, age-restriction policy, and industry responsibility alongside the DJ program, with stages historically curated by Georgian club Bassiani and Paris queer collective Possession. Knockdown Center functions as a year-round LGBTQIA+ programming anchor: Bushwig (multi-day drag and music festival), Horse Meat Disco, Everyday People (the Black music collective), Get Wrecked, Danny Krivit's 718 Sessions (classic house), and Pitchfork/them co-presented Pride events have all recurred. The venue welcomed over 370,000 attendees across 215-plus events in 2023 (its largest year to date) and is widely cited as a central venue of contemporary New York nightlife, predating Brooklyn Mirage, Elsewhere, and most of the current industrial-corridor club wave.

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