As the Manhattan invasion of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg continues to flourish, another Williamsburg institution is forced to close its doors.
285 Kent has been a grimey den of self-expression for the past 8 years, and a key fixture in the DIY artist & musician movement that eventually turned Williamsburg into a hip, then commercialised suburb, encouraging the movement of Manahattanites to this cool new realm.
Ever since Lou Reed’s assistant encouraged him to expand his horizons in the hunt for a new studio space all the way to Brooklyn (his people eventually canned the idea), the space that has been 285 Kent for the past several years has been occupied by a string of art-movement types. The aforementioned assistant banded together with a bunch of people who started ParisLondonNewYorkWestNile, an experimental artist work/live space & intermedia performance centre, which thrived, then collapsed, before being handed over to the next space entrepreneur.
285 Kent was institutional in the likes of Odd Future, Mykki Blanco, Grimes and more recently Blood Orange finding credibility in their rise to fame, as grungy Brooklynites smoked and graffitied the walls around them during shows. Most artists site the freedom they felt at a venue like 285 Kent, as opposed to the more strict and polished Manhattan venues; a warehouse space created to inspire, that didn’t pretend to be anything but.
This past week, however, 285 Kent closed its doors after a series of farewell live shows (featuring DIIV, Fucked Up, Dan Deacon & many more) and a series of police raids and health inspections. To keep 285 Kent going, its owners would have needed to invest at least $100,000 to build proper bathrooms, comply with fire standards… all that boring legal stuff that sadly danced on their toes for just a little too long. All this for just a short period of time before their lease was due for renewal, not ensuring good enough return on the investment considering the rising cost of realty in Williamsburg.
Considering the history of the warehouse space, surely it is just a matter of time before someone who can afford to legalize the space [read: Manhattan-capitalist-type] will step in to spit-shine everything up a little, and a new style of venue will rise from the ashes, just like a series of other long-term Williamsburg retail spaces forced to close their doors in the ever-gentrifying area.
-Lani Williams
