Output

Overview

Brooklyn's first fully licensed, purpose-built dance club: an 11,000-sq-ft 1929 spice factory rebuilt around a Funktion-One system, with a no-phones floor and a rigorous house-and-techno booking program. For its six-year run it was the center of gravity for Williamsburg's electronic scene.

Output opened in February 2013 at 74 Wythe Avenue, in a 1929 former Superior Ingredients spice-blending factory steps from the Wythe Hotel, and was immediately received as what New York magazine called 'the absolute best dance club in the city.' Co-founded by Nicolas Matar, Bo Pittman, and Shawn Schwartz (operators who were themselves immersed in the culture) the club was engineered from the outset around its sound system: a Funktion-One rig with large-format horns paired with double 21-inch subwoofers, designed by Sound Investment co-founder Daniel Agne, deploying Full Fat Audio amplification and NST processing and control. The result was 11,424 square feet of raw concrete and exposed steel organized into three zones, the cavernous Main Room, the more intimate Panther Room (with fireplace, velvet touches, and its own programming), and a roughly 2,500-square-foot rooftop deck commanding views of the Manhattan skyline, every room built around the sound rather than the scene. Output's operating philosophy was a deliberate rebuke of the bottle-service era that had hollowed out Manhattan nightlife: no VIP tables, no cameras on the floor (phones were stickered or taped at the door), a booking program that reached from New York underground stalwarts like Danny Tenaglia, François K, and Justin Strauss to European techno heavyweights including Ben Klock, DVS1, and Loco Dice, and a curatorial openness that brought in artists such as Bonobo, Four Tet, and Carl Cox in the same seasons. Bryan Kasenic's long-running techno series The Bunker (which had held a monthly residency at Public Assembly since 2007) moved permanently to Output at opening in February 2013, a partnership that directly freed Kasenic to launch The Bunker New York as a record label the following year. Horse Meat Disco launched a New York residency at Output in 2015, anchoring the Panther Room in a velvet-and-disco counterpoint to the main floor's harder programming. In February 2016, the dance-music institution Halcyon Records (one of the city's most respected DJ shops) reopened inside the venue in the space formerly known as the Stilton House, with its own street entrance on N. 12th St. and connections to both rooms, completing Output's vision of a daytime and nighttime ecosystem under one roof. The club ranked in DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs poll throughout its run (reaching #28 in 2018) and was named Best Club – Northeast in DJ Mag's 2017 Best of North America Awards. Its booking roster across six years included Richie Hawtin, Seth Troxler, The Martinez Brothers, Maya Jane Coles, Nicole Moudaber, Amelie Lens, Jamie Jones, Tale of Us, and scores of deeper underground figures; the closing New Year's Eve marathon was handled by John Digweed. Owners cited 'rapidly shifting social trends, unfavorable market conditions, and weakening financial outlooks' in their December 2018 announcement, a polite shorthand for what was structurally a story of Williamsburg gentrification: the building had been purchased for $1.6 million in 2012 and sold for $7.4 million in 2014, and the neighborhood that had made the club possible had priced out the clientele that sustained it. Output ran its final night on December 31, 2018 / January 1, 2019. The building was subsequently gutted and rebranded as 74Wythe, a 15,000-square-foot private event and hospitality venue operating across four interconnected spaces on three floors. Halcyon, notably, continued to operate after Output's closure, carrying the record-store function forward independently. Output's run is routinely cited as the high point of Brooklyn's 2010s club-building boom; its closure, alongside Verboten, Glasslands, and 285 Kent, marked the end of that wave.

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