Music Hall of Williamsburg

Overview

Brooklyn's first significant indie-rock concert room, opened in 2001 as Northsix in a former industrial building, renamed Music Hall of Williamsburg in 2007 under Bowery Presents, and a 650-capacity proving ground for nearly every major indie act of the 2000s–2010s before losing its lease and closing at the end of 2026.

The building at 66 North 6th Street had its first life as an industrial food-production facility (described in multiple accounts as a former mayonnaise factory) before architects Brian Swier and Michael Costantin reimagined it as a live-music room. It opened in spring 2001 as Northsix, named for its address and conceived as a DIY underground space for indie rock and avant-garde acts at a moment when Brooklyn had almost no serious live-music infrastructure. That timing proved decisive: Northsix became one of the first clubs to establish Williamsburg as a destination independent of Manhattan's traditional grip on the touring circuit, earning 'Best New Rock Club' from the Village Voice and 'Best Rock Club' and 'Best Williamsburg Music Venue' from New York Press readers, both in 2002. The venue's pivotal cultural moment arrived in 2003: Richard Linklater filmed the opening scene of School of Rock on its stage in the spring, and that summer Elliott Smith played a three-night run at Northsix, his final New York City performances before his death in October 2003. The same year, on March 15, 2003, the FDNY shuttered the venue over an allegedly expired permit following a booking of the band Leftöver Crack, whose lyrics had openly criticized the department in the wake of September 11; many in the scene read the closure as retaliation. Northsix reopened after roughly a month of negotiations. By 2007, surging Williamsburg rents made renewal on the original terms impossible. The New York-based concert-promotion company Bowery Presents, co-headed by founder John 'JoMo' Moore and Jim Glancy, who had joined from Live Nation in 2006, acquired the venue and undertook a thorough renovation, relaunching it in September 2007 as Music Hall of Williamsburg. The rebrand positioned it explicitly as a Brooklyn counterpart to the Bowery Ballroom: the same 650-person standing-room scale and eclectic booking philosophy anchored in indie and emerging artists, with the same care for sight lines and room acoustics. Three bars serve the three-level interior, and the hall's proportions (wide, relatively low-ceilinged, with solid sound distribution) made it a critics' favorite for mid-size shows. Bowery Presents' approach at MHOW was deliberately developmental: average ticket prices ran around $15–18 through much of the 2010s, subsidizing access for younger audiences while building long-term artist loyalty. The roster that passed through the room reads as a near-complete index of the indie era, Modest Mouse, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The National, Arcade Fire, Tame Impala, St. Vincent, Mumford and Sons, and Ed Sheeran among them. In 2017, AEG Presents acquired a stake in Bowery Presents, folding the operation into a larger regional network while nominally preserving its booking identity. From the 2010s onward, MHOW also hosted a genre of 'underplay', arena-scale acts choosing the room for intimacy or promotional purposes: Kendrick Lamar in 2016, Harry Styles in 2020, Deftones in 2023, Coldplay in 2024. Artists wanted the room even after they had outgrown it. On December 17, 2025, Bowery Presents announced that the building's owners had elected not to renew the venue's lease, and that Music Hall of Williamsburg would cease operations at the close of 2026. Staff members attributed the decision in part to escalating gentrification pressure in the surrounding neighborhood, a corridor now dominated by luxury residential towers and condominiums that had replaced the industrial and bohemian fabric that made Northsix viable in the first place. The hall will program shows through its final year. No successor space or relocation has been announced.

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