Rubulad

Overview

Brooklyn's longest-running DIY arts-and-party collective, co-founded by Sari Rubinstein and Chris Thomas in 1993: an immersive, word-of-mouth loft environment that has moved through three locations across three decades.

Rubulad began in 1993 when Sari Rubinstein (a Bennington College alumna and member of the Gamma Rays) and Chris Thomas, along with members of the Brooklyn bands Fly Ashtray, Uncle Wiggly, and Smack Dab, rented a 5,000-square-foot basement on South 5th Street in South Williamsburg for roughly $1,100 a month. Frustrated with the passive transaction of playing bars, they conceived the space as a living installation: movable walls carving out artist studios by day, and every surface (ceilings, rooftop, backyard) colonized by themed decor for the elaborately staged public events they held roughly once a month. The name is a phone-number acronym, mapping the keypad letters of their old 718 number. Word traveled by mailing list and friend-of-friend only; the door was staffed by about eight people, the bar by six, and the aesthetic aspiration was what Rubinstein called 'a holistic piece of art, an experiential environment.' By the early-to-mid 2000s, as South Williamsburg shifted rapidly under real-estate pressure, Rubulad relocated to 338 Flushing Avenue in Clinton Hill, running there from approximately 2005 through 2011. The Flushing Avenue period expanded the operation to include Grub, a bimonthly freegan community dinner that ran for years as mutual-aid infrastructure, separate from the event programming. It also saw the addition of Kae Burke and Anya Sapozhnikova to the orbit of the collective; both later co-founded House of Yes and have credited Rubulad as a direct formative model. A 2011 conflict with Hasidic neighbors at the Flushing Avenue building, on the Clinton Hill–South Williamsburg border, drew coverage in the Brooklyn Paper and ended in eviction. Rubulad subsequently relocated to 389 Melrose Street in Bushwick. The same address was Secret Project Robot's home from 2011 until September 2016; whether the two spaces overlapped there, or Rubulad arrived after SPR left, is not established. Events documented during the current Rubulad era include the Ghoul-O-Rama Halloween haunted-house art shows (noted by Time Out New York) and ongoing music programming logged on Songkick. Rubulad’s three-address migration — South 5th Street (1993–c.2005), Flushing Avenue (c.2005–2011), Melrose Street (c.2016–present) — traces the 30-year geography of Brooklyn underground-arts displacement almost exactly, each move pushed by rising rents or neighbor friction from a neighborhood the previous location had partly pioneered. Kae Burke and Anya Sapozhnikova, who co-founded House of Yes in 2007, are associated with Rubulad in its Flushing Avenue years; the lineage between the two spaces is widely assumed but is not documented by any interview cited here. House of Yes went on to become a large, publicly programmed Brooklyn venue; Rubulad remains word-of-mouth by design, running monthly-or-fewer events.