Brooklyn Made Presents Announces Two New Bushwick Venues

Brooklyn Made Presents, the quickly growing promoter and venue operator founded in 2020, will open two new clubs across the street from its flagship 500-capacity Bushwick venue, the company revealed Monday.

A 1,500-capacity room across Troutman Street from the club Brooklyn Made, which began putting on shows in late September, is on track for a spring 2024 opening, while a second, 2,500-capacity venue – located back-to-back with the 1,500-cap one, on neighboring Jefferson Street – will welcome fans even sooner, in fall 2023.

BMP plans to build a bar and lounge between the two new venues; when joined, the spaces will total 22,000 square feet and be able to host up to 4,000.

“It just was very serendipitous,” says Anthony Makes, the former Live Nation New York president who founded BMP in summer 2020.

As Brooklyn-based design and build firm Land & Shore Creative wrapped its work on Brooklyn Made, it tipped off Makes that the 427 Troutman Street property it was using for storage was up for sale. So was the 444 Jefferson Street property behind it, which had the same owner.

“This literally fell in our lap,” Makes says with a chuckle. “I mean, it was comical how I found out about it.”

BMP seized the opportunity, making an offer and finalizing the deal in March.

“They’re both raw spaces that need to be completely built out from scratch, which we plan on doing,” Makes says. “That being said, they’re in really good shape.”

LSC is once again signed on as contractor, and like Brooklyn Made, the new rooms will feature sound by D&B Audiotechnik and lighting design by Jeremy Roth, who has worked with Wilco and My Morning Jacket.

Makes also plans to maintain the top-flight artist experience that has become a Brooklyn Made signature, including with a finished cellar in the larger space that will serve as a compound for artists.

The unnamed venues will dramatically alter a north Brooklyn landscape defined by its many under-1,000-cap clubs, the 1,800-cap Bowery Presents-operated Brooklyn Steel, and the 5,000-capacity complex Avant Gardner. And, Makes explains, securing the new properties was essential to BMP’s long-term viability as it competes in the market with Live Nation and The Bowery Presents, which is an AEG affiliate.

“Once the newness and the honeymoon wears off [with Brooklyn Made], if we don’t have the upper-level capacity, bigger venues to compete against the bigger guys with, eventually the other guys can just be like, ‘Well, if you play Brooklyn Made, then you’re not gonna play with us at all these other places,'” he says. “So, we had to get these venues in a strategic way as protection for ourselves to make sure that we still get the best shows we can possibly get at our 500-cap club. Now we’re gonna have a level playing field with these venues, where we can compete with anyone in New York City because we have the capacities to do it.”

As far as programming, Makes says the new venues will continue in the vein of Brooklyn Made, which has a foundation in indie-rock and Americana but also books rap, electronic and more.

In the same way that Brooklyn Made has already hosted several underplays at its space, including the two solo Jeff Tweedy shows that opened the space and three-night runs by The Mountain Goats, Whitney and Band of Horses, Makes envisions the new venues, particularly the larger one, luring major acts.

“I’m going to be putting in some pretty slamming offers,” he says. “I’m going to be going for some big dogs in that big room. We’re gonna be able to put up some big guarantees for like, three-, four-, five-night offers and beyond.”

The venues continue the growth of Bushwick, located immediately to the east of Williamsburg and on the southern border of Queens’ Ridgewood neighborhood, into a premiere arts and culture destination in Brooklyn. BMP’s current club and the two forthcoming rooms are situated immediately off the Jefferson stop of the L train, which runs through lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and Bushwick, and Troutman Street is also home to several trendy bars and restaurants. Makes is bullish about the neighborhood, invoking “future decades” of operation.

“We’ve made it very clear that we want to be in the community long-term and add a positive vibe to it,” Makes says.

Though Bushwick is now Brooklyn Made Presents’ clear focal point, the company continues to expand both in and out of New York City. BMP books the historic United Palace theater in the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, which will host Wilco for five nights this month as the indie-rockers performer their seminal 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in full. Upstate, the promoter books the outdoor CMAC in Canandaigua, N.Y., which has a packed summer calendar including Kenny Chesney, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Journey and Chris Stapleton.

Across the river from the United Palace, BMP has recently started booking Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J., and the promoter added New Orleans’ Civic Theatre to its portfolio late last year.

“It’s been a wild ride the last few months,” Makes says. “We’re rolling.”