Members Only

Overview

An unlicensed Bushwick after-hours, unmarked iron door on a desolate block of Ingraham Street, opening at 2 a.m. Saturday and running until Sunday afternoon, that drew international techno and deep-house DJs and became the closest thing mid-2010s New York had to a Berlin marathon club.

Members Only occupied an unmarked industrial space on Ingraham Street in Bushwick, identifiable only by a cross-armed doorman and the faint thump of bass through a heavy iron door, and operated as a weekend after-hours running from roughly 2 a.m. Saturday night into Sunday afternoon, sometimes as late as 3 p.m. The space was by most accounts unglamorous: nearly transparent ceilings that revealed the sunrise, couches for rest, and a room built entirely around the music rather than production. Its founders and operators have not been publicly documented; the venue existed and circulated word-of-mouth only, consistent with the unlicensed status that kept an address out of the press. A W Magazine feature from July 2016 noted that the venue had 'emerged last year,' which places the opening around 2015, though it may have operated informally before that. No closing date has been confirmed; the 2018 bound given here is approximate, consistent with the broader collapse of mid-2010s Bushwick unlicensed spaces under rent pressure and code enforcement. The booking policy tilted toward internationally rooted deep house and minimal techno: the W Magazine piece names Swedish improviser Sebastian Mullaert, Berlin-based Philip Jung of M.A.N.D.Y., DJ Tennis, and Brooklyn-adjacent selectors including Kike, Nadav, Alex Graham, and Guada FK, a mix that indexed to a transatlantic, Berlin-adjacent underground rather than the harder techno axis of The Bunker or the warehouse-rave circuit of UNTER. The sound was described as 'deep house and electronic, with vocals kept to a minimum.' No permanent or branded sound system has been documented. The room also reportedly offered movie projections as sunrise approached, a gesture toward the durational, social quality of the extended weekend that the venue consciously drew comparison to: W Magazine's framing was 'as close to the non-stop, 48-hour weekend in Berlin as you'll get in the States,' with a door policy it described as 'far more democratic' than Berghain or Watergate: for anyone who made the journey, access was 'more or less guaranteed.' The venue reportedly also staged at least one off-site event in the Catskills, suggesting an attempt to extend the brand into a festival-retreat format. Members Only operated in the same Bushwick industrial corridor that produced Bossa Nova Civic Club, Trans-Pecos, and eventually Elsewhere, a zone of former factory floors that remade the borough's after-dark geography in the decade after the 2008 crash. Unlike those venues, Members Only never formalized, never took a liquor license, and left almost no institutional trace: no Resident Advisor page, no sustained press, no archive of flyers or recordings that has surfaced publicly. Its closure was not announced; at some point it stopped being findable. Members Only operated during the 2014–2016 peak of a discourse about whether New York could sustain a Berlin-model underground against the forces of real estate pressure and code enforcement that had eliminated comparable spaces. That window closed sharply: the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland on December 2, 2016, which killed 36 people at an unlicensed event venue, prompted municipal authorities nationwide to intensify code-enforcement sweeps of informal entertainment spaces; New York City's fire and buildings departments conducted coordinated inspections of Brooklyn industrial zones through 2017 and 2018. Whether Members Only closed before or after that enforcement wave is not established in reviewed sources; the approximate 2018 bound is consistent with either trajectory. The formalized venues that outlasted the mid-2010s Bushwick underground — Elsewhere (opened 2017, properly licensed), Nowadays (outdoors from 2015, year-round indoor space from 2017), Good Room (licensed from its 2014 opening) — achieved longevity by securing permits that Members Only never sought. Unlicensed rooms operating on that announce-nothing model are far less common in Brooklyn than they were in the mid-2010s.