Sad news: BKLYN Yard, the place for fun, pop-up events all summer long, is closing down. Here is a letter I received today from MeanRed Productions, producers of those great events at the yard right next to the Carroll Street Bridge. My sense is that some of the events they’ve got planned for this summer will be re-located to other locations.
To our Yardies…
Over the past four years, we have worked hard to create BKLYN Yard. You watched us grow from a small unknown independent venue into a space that hosted the best tacos in NYC, incredible talent (Lee Scratch Perry, Kaiju Big Battel, Dan Deacon & Jose Gonzalez to name a few), the Sunday Best dance series, the Gowanus Harvest Fest, the BK County Fair, Score! Pop-Up Mega Swap, Parked: Food Truck Festival, and countless lobster bakes, pig roasts, BBQs and more. This past Memorial Day Weekend, we were so proud to open our doors and display all the hard work we have been putting into the space to make this summer even better…from our new bar, to our atm, to our bocce court. Thousands of you came out and supported us and made it one of the most beautiful weekends we have had yet, so we are sad to announce, that last weekend was the final weekend of BKLYN Yard in our Carroll Gardens home.
Our landlord of the past four years, who used to share our vision for BKLYN Yard, notified us on Tuesday May 1st, that they would no longer honor our lease which had been in place since early this year. They chose not to give us an opportunity to renegotiate, and requested that we take what we have built, and terminate all of our confirmed plans and schedule for BKLYN Yard this summer.
BKLYN Yard is a labor of love for MeanRed, rooted in our core company values: Love for artists, food, music and community. We are sad to see our passion project go in its brightest year, and are sad to let down all the people who have support and worked with us for the past 3 summers.
But if there is one thing we pride ourselves in, its our ability to think outside the box, to take a leap when there is no net, and to reach our highest visions. We wouldn’t be who we are if we let hurdles keep us down. If we can turn a dim sum restaurant into a nightclub, a loft into a members-only club, and a toxic yard into a beautiful summer oasis… we can do anything.
Rest assured, our renegade spirit and love for pop-up spaces will come alive again this summer — very possibly with the same collaborators and programming you see on our current schedule… And very possibly even better than we had planned before.
Doug Singer, Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter’s Sunday Best series will continue on at another location, including this Sunday with DJ Koze. You can keep an eye on them at www.sundaybestnyc.com
In the meantime, we want to say:
Thank you for sharing in BKLYN Yard. We hope you’ll continue on this crazy ride with us as we bring you what’s next. Stay tuned, we will pop-up where you least expect it, with the words:
“Built by BKLYN Yard”
With love,
It’s really too bad. That landlord pulled the lease out of an arts organization that was on an engineless WWII U-boat where I once gave a poetry reading to the best audience ever. It seems that just when the organization’s marketing is really, really working, lots of people are benefitting, and funding is going well, the lease is up and unrenewable. I call that sadism.