The Bell House

Overview

A Gowanus warehouse, the 1920s printing-press building stripped to its 88-foot barrel-vault ceiling and repurposed in 2008 by the team behind Union Hall and Floyd, that became a steady room for Brooklyn indie music and alternative comedy before its 2024 acquisition by Live Nation.

The Bell House occupies an 8,000-square-foot former printing-press warehouse at 149 7th Street in Gowanus, with an 88-foot-long, 25-foot-high wooden barrel-vault ceiling engineered for unobstructed machinery clearance and left intact when the building was renovated. It opened September 18, 2008, the third venue created by the team behind Union Hall (Park Slope) and Floyd (Brooklyn Heights), with talent buyer Jack McFadden named in contemporaneous press as co-owner and driving booking force, alongside Jim Carden and Andy Templar whose names circulate in later accounts. The interior was finished in a rustic register: exposed brick, dark-wood trim, chandeliers, and a country-tinged 'Adirondack' motif that softened the industrial bones. The main room holds roughly 500 standing around a 450-square-foot stage with EAW flying speakers, an Allen & Heath console, and a Hog 500 lighting controller; the 150-capacity Frontier Room front lounge (a 26-foot oak bar serving independent-brewery draft) functioned as a separate venue for smaller comedy and DJ sets. From opening, The Bell House programmed deliberately across forms: indie rock and folk headliners (The National, The Walkmen, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cold War Kids), recurring comedy showcases, food competitions, and themed dance parties, including disco and costume nights. It became the anchor venue for the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival and the usual recording home for NPR's game show Ask Me Another during that program's run; Two Dope Queens (Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams) and Las Culturistas (Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang) also taped there, establishing the room as a reliable podcast-live-taping destination before that format normalized. John Hodgman's Netflix special Ragnarok was filmed on the main stage in December 2012. The venue operated independently for sixteen years under the original team while the surrounding Gowanus corridor shifted around it. Nearby Public Records represented the neighborhood's later wave of purpose-built dance-music rooms; The Bell House stayed multi-format. In 2024 (job postings under the Live Nation banner appeared in May; the sale had reportedly been in discussion for roughly a year), the venue was quietly acquired by Live Nation without a public announcement from either party. Union Hall was not included in the sale and remained independent. Performers and promoters voiced concern that the acquisition would shift bookings toward higher-ticket mainstream acts and reduce space for emerging and community-oriented programming; early evidence suggested comedy and live-podcast formats were being prioritized over the eclectic mix that had defined the room. The Gowanus Canal was added to the EPA National Priorities List in 2010, two years after the venue opened; warehouse space in the corridor rented below comparable Manhattan rates through the venue's first decade, though no source reviewed here documents the Bell House's own rent or ties it to the Superfund listing. The 88-foot barrel-vault ceiling retained from the printing-press occupancy—rather than cleared for residential conversion—produced a room acoustically unlike a standard build-out. The 2021 Gowanus Rezoning, approved by the City Council to add thousands of residential units along the canal corridor, began shifting the land-value calculus for warehouse-scale spaces in the neighborhood. The Live Nation acquisition, reported in July 2024, placed the venue under corporate ownership for the first time since its 2008 opening.