Union Pool

Overview

A cavernous former pool-supply store on the shadow of the BQE that Zeb Stewart opened in 2000 as a corner-bar pivot point for North Williamsburg's arriving artist class, live music back room, bonfire patio, and resident DJs seven nights a week; co-shaped by Ray and Alyssa Abeyta until their deaths in 2014 and 2017.

Union Pool occupies the ground floor of a onetime pest-control and swimming-pool supply warehouse at the corner of Union Avenue and Meeker Avenue, beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass in North Williamsburg. Zeb Stewart opened the doors in 2000, converting the cavernous shell into a neighborhood bar, wooden banquettes, a central DJ booth, a fire pit fashioned from a Bowery restaurant wok, and a back room bookable for live acts, at a moment when the surrounding blocks were still described as desolate. Ray Abeyta, artist and self-described honorary Mayor of Williamsburg, and his wife Alyssa Abeyta co-founded the project alongside Stewart, and all three remained embedded in the North Brooklyn arts scene; the Abeytas later opened Hotel Delmano (2008) on Berry Street together with Stewart as a companion cocktail-and-oyster bar. Union Pool's back room holds roughly 100–150 standing, and its programming spans indie rock, experimental music, and late-night DJ sets running to 4 a.m. on weekends; the venue's own description notes resident DJs playing seven nights a week and retaining many original staff members across its more than two decades of operation. The outdoor patio, set behind the building in a fenced courtyard, became Union Pool's most iconic space, a shack bar, an El Diablo Taco Truck that anchors it seasonally, wooden benches, and a summer-night social gravity that generated an entire genre of city-magazine rites-of-passage writing. The bar's Summer Thunder free concert series, now in its fourteenth year, brings outdoor afternoon shows every Sunday in July and August, with a curatorial range running from Sun Ra Arkestra to underground indie acts; it functions as one of the few genuinely free recurring live-music programs left in Williamsburg. The venue also runs a DJ program from 8 p.m. to close daily, programming that leans eclectic, the 150-cap interior is less a dedicated dance room than a social bar that moves late in the evening. The two founding co-owners died within a few years of each other: Ray Abeyta was struck by a truck on Flushing Avenue while riding his motorcycle on December 1, 2014, and died at 58; Alyssa Abeyta died in 2017. Their community ethos survived in the staff they shaped, employees Suzanne Cub and Ryan Sawyer launched a weekly food pantry at the venue in June 2020, serving approximately 150 people every Wednesday through the COVID shutdown and beyond, citing Alyssa directly as their inspiration. The building itself survived a five-alarm fire on July 1, 2022, in an adjacent three-story structure at the same address; with 200-plus firefighters responding and 14 injured (11 firefighters, 3 civilians), Union Pool sustained water and smoke damage and closed for just over a month before reopening on August 5, 2022, with a relaunched Summer Thunder lineup.

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