Public Records

Overview

A Gowanus compound (vegan café, hi-fi record bar, and sound-system dancefloor under one 1913 ASPCA roof) where Francis Harris, Shane Davis, and Erik VanderWal built a listening-culture venue that descends from The Loft's audiophile doctrine and the Brooklyn deep-house continuum.

Public Records opened in March 2019 in a 14,000-square-foot former Brooklyn ASPCA headquarters at 233 Butler Street, a 1913 Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker–designed brick building that served for decades as the borough's ASPCA shelter and, for several decades prior to the venue's arrival, housed RetroFret Vintage Guitars on its upper floor. The three co-founders brought distinct disciplines: Francis Harris, a veteran Brooklyn producer and DJ (Adultnapper, Frank & Tony with Anthony Collins) who also founded the Scissor & Thread and Kingdoms labels, handled music programming; Shane Davis (Creative Director) shaped the design; and Erik VanderWal oversaw hospitality. The first bookings, consecutive Optimo sets across bar and Sound Room on opening night, March 21–22, 2019, followed quickly by Jan Jelinek, Octo Octa, Call Super, Hieroglyphic Being, Damo Suzuki, Laraaji, and Maayan Nidam, spanned deep house, ambient, avant-jazz and experimental electronics. The sound systems set Public Records apart from most contemporary club builds. The Sound Room's centerpiece is a four-corner stack system designed by Devon Turnbull (OJAS) and Jason Ojeda (formerly VOID Acoustics): each stack pairs two Void Acoustics Nexus XL subwoofers with a custom OJAS Quad 15 slot-loaded enclosure, an Altec 1505B Multi-Cell horn, and a FaitalPRO super-tweeter, amplified via Void Bias V9, V Q2, and D1 units alongside BGW VXi3.3s with BSS signal processing. The Hi-Fi Bar uses a complementary system of OJAS cabinets with 500Hz horns and Altec HF drivers, corner-stacked over Void Venu 115 subs, powered by Crown Macrotech and vintage BGW units with analog crossovers. Both rooms are fitted with custom Isonoe rotary mixers; the DJ booth runs four Pioneer CDJ-2000NXS2s and four Technics SL-1200 MK2s. The Sound Room seats up to 200 and was designed with perforated-plywood acoustic panels; lighting was devised by the Brooklyn-based Nitemind crew. The stated philosophy draws on Mancuso's Loft lineage — high-resolution playback, with club-grade low-end added for dance programming. The Sound Room closed through the pandemic and reopened September 17, 2021, with resident Amelia Holt and Shaytoon Records' Sepehr headlining; the following weekend saw Virgil Abloh and AceMo play an unofficial warm-up before programming resumed with Mike Servito, Dee Diggs, Jenifa Mayanja, and a Frank & Tony reunion residency. In late 2022 / early 2023 Public Records absorbed the second floor (previously RetroFret until 2022) and opened Upstairs: an intimate listening lounge designed by Studio Kos / DSLV, acoustically engineered by Arup, and anchored by a Devon Turnbull–built 'acoustic vessel' with wall-embedded subs, vintage horns in a Douglas fir frame, custom tube amplifiers, and a reel-to-reel deck. The Nursery (an open-air plant-nursery event space) also received its own fully horn-loaded four-way system co-designed by OJAS and Norwegian industrial-design studio NNNN. By 2024 the founders had launched Public Service, a design-led hospitality consultancy, and in December 2025 NYCEDC announced a partnership with Public Service to program a new ~1,000-capacity music and arts venue in Building A of MADE Bush Terminal, Sunset Park, expected to open in late 2026; it will not carry the Public Records name. Public Records occupies the intersection of two distinct New York traditions. The first is the audiophile dancefloor lineage descending from David Mancuso's Loft: the practice of high-fidelity playback as a form of care for the music and the listener, carried forward through Shelter's Saturday nights in the 1990s and Vinyl's Friday programming in the 2000s. The second is a producer-led approach to venue-building in which the music programmer is also a label operator and recording artist — Harris's Scissor & Thread and Kingdoms labels feed the same networks his DJ sets draw from, and the Back to the Deep collaboration with Shelter (featuring Timmy Regisford, Harris, and Jenifa Mayanja) made that lineage explicit on the 233 Butler Street dancefloor. The sound system philosophy — Turnbull's OJAS horn cabinets over Void subwoofer arrays — is aimed at resolution rather than volume. The MADE Bush Terminal project announced in December 2025 is a roughly 1,000-capacity venue in Sunset Park, about five times the Sound Room's stated 200-person maximum.