Knockdown Center

The frame that still names the warehouse

The name did not come from a party: it came from a door frame. In 1956, Samuel Sklar invented the knock-down door frame here, a frame that traveled disassembled and was installed on already erected walls. The 50,000-square-foot building was built in 1903 as the Gleason-Tiebout glass factory, in the industrial corridor of Maspeth, and later passed to the Manhattan Door factory. It remains in the Sklar family. When production moved to New Jersey in 2010, the shell remained empty and a step away from demolition.

An impossible volume in Queens

Tyler Myers arrived in 2012 looking for a place to paint a tent for Frieze. He saw a strange volume in New York and stayed. With Michael Merck and Kate Watson, the place began to operate as Knockdown Center: sculptural minigolf, projections, drones, concerts. There were years without a liquor license, neighborhood suspicion, and an M.I.A. concert in 2014 in the middle of the battle for the license. The renovated floor and the alcohol permit arrived on May 20, 2016. Today it is presented as the largest independent venue in the city.

3,200 bodies upstairs, techno downstairs

The main room, the former manufacturing area, has 20,000 square feet and up to 3,200 standing people. The venue groups six connected interior spaces and a courtyard for up to 1,200 more people. In 2023, Boulevard Carroll installed an L-Acoustics K2/K3 PA prepared to go from a concert of a thousand people to a festival. Below, since May 2019, BASEMENT—a project of the venue itself, with Téa Abashidze and Gega Japaridze—concentrates the driest techno in New York: Funktion-One, concrete booth, photo ban, and curated door. In 2022, STUDIO opened, a second, more house-oriented dancefloor. Outside, The Ruins turns the courtyard and boiler ruins into a summer stage.

Own programming, not a borrowed brand

WIRE, Outline, and RUSH are cycles of the venue, not external local ones. LCD Soundsystem, Honey Dijon, Jeff Mills, or Arca have sounded under the same brick and iron beams. The map is misleading: it is not in Brooklyn, but in Queens, a quarter of an hour's walk from the Jefferson L, with the car service dropping off on 54th Street.