They’re on a Boat! Floating Restaurants Try to Redefine the Dinner Cruise

Via The New York Times, written by Liz Robbins:

As the early-evening sun blazed, the old Navy boat gently pushed into the East River and the 32 passengers were mindfully served cocktails, wine in tumblers and beer in cans. Life aboard the Revolution eased to two knots.

“In New York, we’re so fast-paced,” said Erik Gerlach, 37, a Brooklyn architect relaxing with his wife, Josa, in the cabin of the floating restaurant, the Water Table. “This is a way to slow down. When you’re in the moment, you want to make it last longer.”

In New York this summer, the artisanal meets the nautical, as a group of floating restaurants have claimed what had been uncharted territory in New York’s culinary world.

The ventures vary from a modest New England tavern to a French-Caribbean oyster bar to a three-deck lobster shack. But their challenges have been similar: They all had to navigate bureaucracy, bad weather and boat plumbing in an effort to redefine the dinner cruise.

The newest of the boat-restaurants does not actually leave the dock: Grand Banks, an oyster bar on the Sherman Zwicker, a 142-foot schooner tied up at the end of Pier 25 in the shadow of One World Trade Center in TriBeCa, will stay through October before it sails south.

With a capacity of 160 people, Grand Banks is envisioned as the Balthazar of boats, said Alex Pincus, who founded the Atlantic Yachting School on the Upper West Side with his brother, Miles, before selling it and founding Grand Banks with two other partners. Witness the $16 cocktails, the French bistro bar stools, the zinc and mahogany bars and the windswept patrons on a recent weekday afternoon, including the actress Marisa Tomei, ignoring the pitching waves.

The fashionable scene belied the travails below deck. “The challenge was not the idea,” Mr. Pincus said. “The challenge was making it happen.”

First, they had to find the right ship. When they found the Sherman Zwicker in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the Pincus brothers established their own maritime education foundation to persuade the owner to donate the boat. As a museum, it cannot take passengers cruising, however, and that necessitated the right dock for seasonal mooring.

Because city construction foiled plans for a spot at East River State Park in Williamsburg, the group negotiated with Hudson River Park. The opening was originally scheduled for July 3, but storms delayed it until July 4. On the boat’s second day of operation, it ran out of oysters, and Mr. Pincus furiously called in favors for a rush weekend shipment.

Then, a couple of days later a pipe burst on the 72-year-old boat and there was no running water.

Still, the demand for $3.50 oysters and $17 fluke crudo remained strong.

“This is basically the grown-up version of the Frying Pan,” said Golnar Nassiri, 34, out with her husband on a recent evening. Ms. Nassiri, like others that night, could not help making comparisons to the Frying Pan, the lightship boat permanently docked at Pier 66, infused with a fraternity party vibe.

“I feel like I’m in the Hamptons or something,” said Matthew Glass, 53, drinking wine with his friend Ken Clark, 56, after their rides in spandex biking shorts — a bit underdressed, they acknowledged.

They might have felt more at home aboard the North River Lobster Company’s vessel, a former gambling boat called the Destiny, which is run by New York Cruise Lines, the parent company that also owns the Circle Line.

The idea is to take the usual dockside lobster shack — complete with lobster rolls ($16), peel-and-eat shrimp ($10) and one-and-one-quarter-pound Maine lobsters ($29) served on paper plates — and include free cruises. Mason jar cocktails run $12, and a bucket of beer is $24.

“When we started this thing, we didn’t know what we were going to get,” said Jason Hackett, the chief marketing officer for New York Cruise Lines, who said that because of the harsh winter, the crew had only two months to prepare for the late-April opening. “We were targeting New Yorkers, and thank goodness that’s what we got. People are really digging just being on the water.”

Jamie deRoy, 68, a producer, and her friend Sandra McFarland, 52, working in insurance, took a late lobster lunch. “I got some coupons in the mail and I thought it would be fun to try it,” Ms. McFarland said.

They had an array of raw bar selections, corn on the cob and the Maine attraction.

Like the other patrons, they had ordered their food and drinks on the enclosed second deck (air-conditioned) and taken a wooden buoy with a number. They sat on the top deck with picnic tables and white and red trash cans, as Top 40 radio crackled and Columbia Business School students celebrated the end of exams.

With three long blasts of the horn, the ship backed out of Pier 81 for one of its 35-minute jaunts up the Hudson, turning around at 72nd Street, almost over before it had really begun.

“That’s O.K.,” Ms. deRoy said, her long silver hair flowing in the wind. “It’s the gimmick.”

Of the three, the Water Table has been operating the longest. It opened in December and ran until ice clogged the East River and a ferry walkway collapsed in February at Greenpoint’s India Street Pier, where it had been docking. The boat resumed East River service in April from a seaplane dock at the Skyport on East 23rd Street. Kelli Farwell and Sue Walsh have spent their first year of marriage starting the business, dogged in their dream that began in 2011 on an East River ferry ride.

It was then that Ms. Farwell, a former wine director at Brooklyn’s DuMont, Dressler and Rye, who trained at Gramercy Tavern and Craft, decided to get her captain’s license. That led to the dinner boat idea.

“It would be very simple — just good ingredients, New England tavern food, on the water,” Ms. Farwell added.

In late 2012, the couple launched an Internet campaign, raising $26,956. After the purchase of a tugboat in Michigan fell through, the couple found a 62-foot Navy yard patrol craft, the Revolution, working as a tour boat in Boston in 2013. The ride back through Buzzard’s Bay in May was so rough, Ms. Walsh recalled, she thought they might not make it back for their June wedding.

Today she serves as first mate, filling in as server and deckhand, and designing the website and the menus, in addition to her full-time job as a graphic designer. A photo of Ms. Walsh’s grandfather, a former Navy lieutenant, hangs on the wall, with other vintage artifacts, maps and photos.

Ms. Farwell, 42, learned how to do many of the repairs herself, with help from YouTube. “You’re making changes to the wine list, and then you have to rewire a pump, and then you’re making the salad dressing,” she said.

Because of the 80 hours a week that her wife spends on the boat, Ms. Walsh, 35, has a cocktail named after her: “Captain’s Widow.”

The boat offers two-and-a-half-hour dinner cruises Thursday through Saturday, offering three courses for $75; a two-hour Sunday supper ($50) is just two courses: lobster mac and cheese or panzanella salad, followed by a root beer float.

On a recent Sunday night, a group of friends had booked passage to celebrate Lara Naaman’s 40th birthday. As the boat motored under the Roosevelt Island Bridge, the revelers made their way to the top deck to snap photos of the city skyline, as Stevie Nicks, George Michael and Bruce Springsteen played over the sound system. The Revolution went as far up as the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, until dinner was served, and then it turned back south.

As the boat pulled close to the dock, the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believing” came on. Passengers cheered wildly and honked their birthday horns.

Ms. Walsh smiled and looked for the captain.

“That’s our theme song,” she said.

No Place Like Home: Three New York City Waterfront Hotspots This Summer

Via The New York Times, written by Alex Williams:

Summer in the city used to mean open fire hydrants, barbecues on fire escapes and those dreaded street fairs. Lounging by the water? You were lucky if you made it to the freak show called Coney Island once.

But now, thanks to the revitalization of the city’s waterfront, it’s possible to spend a summer by the water without leaving New York. There are locavores at the Smorgasburg tents at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 5, taco-eating surfers at Rockaway Beach, clubgoers on Governors Island and TriBeCa moms pushing fancy strollers along Hudson River Park.

New Yorkers no longer feel compelled to ditch the sweltering city every weekend. Indeed, for some, there is a reverse snobbery to shunning the South Fork and enjoying the traffic-free attractions at home.

And just as Bridgehampton draws a different crowd from East Hampton, the city’s sun-kissed waterfront playlands are developing their own distinct tribal affiliations. Here are snapshots of three waterfront spots and the cosmopolitan creatures drawn to them.

Fort Tilden beach

Fort Tilden beach is remote, graffiti-scarred and a bit industrial; in short, it’s Bushwick by the sea. No wonder that this mile-long stretch of sand on the Rockaway Peninsula, which closed after Hurricane Sandy, has re-emerged this summer with an artsy makeover.

“It’s like a beer garden in Williamsburg transposed to the seashore,” Susannah Kalb, 28, who works in film production, said on a sunny Friday.

It does not take a Brooklyn sense of irony to appreciate the natural wonders of Fort Tilden. Ignore for a moment the nonnative fauna (that is, the two-legged visitors in aviator shades), and the landscape could be borrowed from a Hopper painting. Rolling dunes are blanketed in wildflowers. Battery Harris, a former concrete Army gun emplacement, offers stunning vistas of sun-dappled waves.

Part of the charm is its ruins; hollowed-out military buildings and machine shops from its Army days. Fort Tilden is beautiful in the complicated way that Detroit is. It’s a “Mad Max” aesthetic that feels like home to the average L train denizen.

Thanks to the efforts of the Rockaway Artists Alliance, as well as the much-publicized efforts by Patti Smith and Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, those ruins are now a canvas for artists. Old barracks house photographs by Ms. Smith, sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas and a sound installation by Janet Cardiff.

The fact that nude sunbathers have long favored this remote beach also lends it an air of art-world edginess, as if beachgoers are participating in their own Marina Abramovic performances. Last Friday, a burly man in his 30s with a red beard had flipped his bicycle onto its handlebars to perform seaside tire repair in the buff. On a nearby blanket, a topless woman chatted blithely with friends, as blasé as if she had just kicked off her sandals.

While clothing is optional, literature, it appears, is not. At Fort Tilden, Stephen King will not do. Reading options that day included The Paris Review, “Slaughterhouse Five” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” with two young actors thumbing through “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” for their book club.

Musical pursuits are welcome, too, so long as they are obscure and idiosyncratic. One 20-something Brooklynite sat alone on a blanket, plucking on his ukulele while staring out to sea.

To some beachgoers, the scene is a little too familiar. “You come down here and you’d see everyone you’d see on Bedford Avenue,” said Mikael Kennedy, 34, a photographer from Greenpoint.

And that, ultimately, may be its undoing. North Brooklyn creative types hate nothing more than when word gets out about their secret haunts. With Rockaway Beach, about a 30-minute bike ride to the east, already brimming with urban surfers, bohemian day-trippers and young partygoers, it may be a matter of time before Fort Tilden is declared over.

“Four or five years ago, you would come down here and it would only be fishermen — it was awesome, it was pretty much abandoned,” said Mr. Kennedy, who was tanning with friends. Then, “it blew up.”

“On Saturdays and Sundays,” he added ruefully, “you can barely fit on the beach.”

 

Pier 25 in TriBeCa

Aboard the Sherman Zwicker at Pier 25 in TriBeCa. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times 

Golf. Sailing. Celebrities. Throw in the conspicuous display of luxury timepieces and you have New York’s closest waterfront equivalent to Sagaponack.

For the young hedge-fund managers and analysts who inhabit the nearby finance dominions of TriBeCa and Battery Park City, Pier 25 — which juts out into the Hudson River near North Moore Street — has become the de facto spot to pregame for the Hamptons during the week, and to bring the South Fork closer to home on the weekends that they can’t make it out to their summer shares.

During the day, scrubbed young professionals with perma-tans and perfect teeth congregate at the pier’s myriad outdoor-sports opportunities like sand volleyball and outdoor dance-cardio. A mini-golf course, opened in 2011, is Manhattan’s only 18-holer. It’s the perfect place to give future traders a taste of Maidstone culture on their ninth birthday. The aspiring preppy class can also hone their yachting chops with the Offshore Sailing School.

Even the pier’s Eurocentric playground has become a place to see-and-be-seen, thanks in part to the celebrity parents. Ed Burns and Christy Turlington, Karolina Kurkova, and Leelee Sobieski have been spotted there. They are joined during the day by the freshly blown-out TriBeCa moms, with their Céline bags and their Valentino Rockstud sandals, who transform the playground into a Concours d'Élégance of high-end strollers, with displays of four-figure models by Bugaboo and Stokke almost de rigueur.

One thing that Pier 25 lacked was Hamptons-worthy night life. That’s no longer the case with this month’s opening of Grand Banks, a seasonal oyster bar aboard the Sherman Zwicker, a historic 142-foot fishing schooner docked at the pier’s tip.

During a soft opening over the Fourth of July weekend, the schooner was packed with young professionals with Panerai wristwatches, pink polo shirts and box-fresh boat shoes, who chased down sustainably harvested oysters and fried squash blossoms with nautical-themed cocktails like the Engine Room (lager, aquavit, ginger, lemon). Also spotted were the fedora-and-tattoo types, perhaps lured by the Brooklyn bona fides of Mark Firth, a former owner of Marlow & Sons and Diner.

The owners insist that they were not looking to create a floating version of the meatpacking district.

Continue reading the main story

“Up until about 1900, the entire downtown waterfront was surrounded by these little oyster barges, some guy selling oysters,” said Miles Pincus, another owner, sipping a negroni during the opening party last Thursday. “It was the everyday, common man’s food. It was not the elevated thing it is now. We thought, ‘Why does that not exist?' ”

Alongside the $3.50 oysters from the Long Island Sound and Huntington Bay, diners can fork over $17 for a small plate of fluke crudo.

Governors Island

“You have to take a ferry to get here, and you can’t leave unless you go by ferry,” said Quinton Kerns, 29, an architect from Harlem who was on his third summer outing to Governors Island last Sunday. “You have to want to get here. You have to earn it.”

Like most visitors to the island that day, Mr. Kerns did not look as if he was straining terribly hard. Wearing black Wayfarers, he stared into a cloudless blue sky from a supine position in one of the island’s 50 new red-rope hammocks, the much-publicized centerpiece of a 30-acre expansion this summer.

The hammock, in fact, is a fitting symbol for what Governors Island has become for many New Yorkers: a shared suburban backyard, a private sanctuary for quiet reflection and unfettered play. Situated only an 800-yard ferry ride from Manhattan (and a seven-minute ferry ride from Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park), the centuries-old military base — currently midway into its seemingly endless transformation into a 100-plus acre recreation area — offers a striking absence of cars, noise, grime and, seemingly, tourists.

The spirit of mass urban decompression was in evidence in every corner of the island last Sunday.

A 40-something dad in camouflage shorts lounged quietly on a blanket, nibbling on water crackers and Brie, as his two young children clambered on a steampunk-inflected sculpture by Oreen Cohen called “A Sharper Lens,” fashioned from reclaimed materials like tires. A Hasidic family in a six-person pedal surrey wheeled down a nearly deserted bike path toward the immaculate new ball fields, the Statue of Liberty looming on the horizon. Twenty-somethings in floral-print Vans browsed the foodie carts, sampling goat-and-fig jam baguettinis and maple grilled cheese sandwiches in the cool shadow of a red brick former Army building.

But as the sun begin to sink, the legions of solace-seeking New Yorkers began to depart, and an entirely different tribe emerged to make the island its own. A tide of 1,000-plus ravers in their early 20s poured off the ferry and streamed into the Gov’nors Beach Club, an open-air club that has held summer dance parties on the island for the last few years.

As Pan-Pot, a Berlin duo, played techno music from a stage at the far end of an open-walled tent, two leggy blond women in micro-cutoffs and white, eight-inch platform high-top sneakers strode toward the dance floor, where the crowd began to undulate as a single, 500-headed organism.

From time to time, the crowd, many sporting plastic bead necklaces and Day-Glo sunglasses, would part just enough for an enterprising young dancer to step out on his own and bust a few moves.

A young man in black sunglasses gyrated in dreamy circles beneath the giant disco ball, a three-foot inflated giraffe perched on his shoulders. A burly raver in a sweat-drenched tank top then broke free from the stonewashed mass and began stomping around furiously near the stage, as if trying to repel an invasion of ants.

“It’s totally B & T,” one man said, as he boarded the ferry back to Manhattan. “I mean, is anyone there from the city?”

As new columns of flesh-baring techno acolytes filed toward the club entrance, the sternum-rattling beat droned on, its internal dramas and crescendos a mystery to the uninitiated. (“It’s the same song, over and over,” said a fire department paramedic on duty, shaking his head.)

Such opinions would be lost on the assembled. Lulled by the hypnotic tempo, they bobbed on toward midnight.

Sherman Zwicker Serves Up History—and Oysters

Via The Wall Street Journal, written by Andy Battaglia: 

Floating off the edge of Battery Park City, past the miniature golf course and beach volleyball courts on Pier 25, is a new home for old history of the New York waterfront.

Her name is the Sherman Zwicker, and in her service as a schooner, she has traveled the Eastern Seaboard since 1942. With the boat's looming masts and a hold big enough to store 320,000 pounds of catch, its original purpose was fishing for cod. Now, it is a museum and a restaurant with a mission to fulfill.

"We're working with people putting out interesting responses to maritime history. Not just the state-park model of representing it with a plaque but filtering it through a lens to make that history something you can actually feel, that can have a presence," said Alex Pincus of the Maritime Foundation, the group behind the vessel's move to its new home.

The deck of the ship is now occupied by Grand Banks, an open-air oyster bar and seafood restaurant run by Mark Firth, the founder of Diner and Marlow & Sons restaurants in Williamsburg. Underneath, down a ladder into the hold, is an unconventional museum space where many tons of cod were once assembled. In their place is an exhibition by New Draft Collective, a group devoted to answering the mandates of both history and art.

"The history of the Sherman Zwicker is really rich," said Libby Pratt,one of the collective's two main members, "so when the Maritime Foundation asked us to put together an exhibit, we thought: how?"

They have responded with a mix of archival materials and new creations to evoke the boat's more than seven decades of lore. One bay beneath the deck includes an illuminated display of 150 pounds of salt, to show how cod were preserved. Another features vintage photographs of the boat and its crew. Yet another features a sort of sculpture made from rope.

"Rope hasn't become obsolete," said Michi Jigarjian, New Draft Collective's other founder. "It's one of the only materials that was on the boat that is still viable and not taken over by some sort of technology."

When it was built in Nova Scotia, the Sherman Zwicker—touted as the largest wooden vessel now floating in New York—was a sister ship to the Bluenose, a famously fast schooner memorialized on the back of the Canadian dime. It spent the prime of its life fishing for cod and ferrying the fish for sale to South America, before taking up as a historical museum boat for decades in Maine.

When in need of a new home, the boat was gifted to Mr. Pincus and his brother Miles Pincus, who had collaborated before on the sailing company Atlantic Yachting. They struck a deal with the Hudson River Park to dock it at Pier 25, as a not-for-profit historical attraction supported by a for-profit restaurant on board.

"I don't know what the answer is, but it seemed like an interesting question to approach presenting a historical and cultural narrative through a more experimental, curatorial lens," said Alex Pincus. "I was interested in creating a certain atmosphere that brings forth life on the water."

In addition to the exhibition space and the restaurant, there will be talks and lectures during Sherman Zwicker's residency through the end of October. A pre-opening trial run last week featured Paul Greenberg, author of "American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood." During a dinner devoted to salmon, he talked about risks attending world-wide fisheries while attendees descended below deck to check out the art and history in the hold.

"That was the most spectacular setting I could ever imagine," Mr. Greenberg said.

Now Docking Downtown: An Oyster Bar on a Boat

Via The New York Times:

For Alex Pincus, the question wasn’t whether Manhattan needed a floating oyster bar and mini-maritime museum on a 72-year-old codfish schooner, but rather where to put it. Now, his vision has become reality in the form of Grand Banks, which will begin serving food and drinks Thursday afternoon on a boat docked off Hudson River Park in TriBeCa.

Pincus, who grew up sailing on Lake Pontchartrain and founded the Atlantic Yachting school on the Upper West Side with his brother Miles, had been reading about the city’s 19th-century oyster barges a few years ago when the idea occurred to him to build a modern-day version. Piled high with just-dug Crassostrea virginica, says Pincus, the vessels would sell their wares to hungry New Yorkers directly from the docks. “We thought, ‘why don’t we have that here?'” he says of a conversation with Miles that followed. The two gathered their restaurant-industry friends — including Mark Firth, a co-founder of the Brooklyn restaurants Diner and Marlow & Sons and Adrien Gallo, a former owner of downtown bars including Palais Royale and Double Happiness — and “started looking around for the spot.”

That spot turned out to be the park’s Pier 25, where the partners have a yearlong lease to park a 142-foot-long Nova Scotian wooden fishing vessel called the Sherman Zwicker. (Tentative plans are to stay until fall, says Alex Pincus, and then sail down to Florida for the winter.)

The Sherman Zwicker was once the property of the Maine Maritime Museum, where four decades ago a sailor and nautical-history buff named George McEvoy (“the ultimate old soul,” says Pincus) lovingly restored it. As of last week McEvoy’s pride and joy — the last of its kind used to fish among the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and now the largest wooden vessel in New York City — was docked in Red Hook, Brooklyn. There the Pincuses and their partners hustled to outfit the kitchen (formerly bunks where sailors slept) and to prepare marine-education exhibits in the stalls where just-caught cod was once buried in salt for the trip to South America.

Above decks, they also built out two bars, one for drinks (such as daily nautical-themed cocktails and ales from Red Hook’s Other Half Brewing Company), and another topped with zinc for a rotating menu of sustainably sourced oysters. Those, as well as the rest of the Grand Banks menu — lobster rolls, small plates of seasonally and locally available seafood — will be overseen by Firth, who is also the owner of Prairie Whale restaurant in the Berkshires.

It was in those landlocked mountains, where both Firth and Alex Pincus had moved a few years back, that the seed for Grand Banks was first planted. The two men, old friends from the city, crossed paths at the gym and got to discussing how they shared both a love of the urban waterfront and a desire to connect the rest of the city to it. It was that conversation that spurred Pincus to research old New York’s oyster barges. Now, both are splitting their time between the boat and the Berkshires. “It’s kind of ironic that we had to move away,” says Firth, “to figure this out.”

Factory Conversion Moves Forward

Via The New York Times, written by Michael Cooper:

The effort to turn a century-old sawdust factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, into an acoustically sound concert hall, recording studio, nightclub and center for composers is moving ahead, with organizers saying that they have raised the $16 million needed to finish construction. The space on North 6th Street, called the Original Music Workshop, has already drawn respected musicians and celebrities inside its weathered brick walls for concerts, even before it had a roof. Now its founder, Kevin Dolan, said that he had lined up what he called “philanthropic investors” to put up the money needed to finish construction. It is an unusual arrangement. Mr. Dolan said that the investors would become part owners of the building, which they would allow the Original Music Workshop, a nonprofit, to use rent-free. In the future they could then give their shares to the workshop, sell them to the workshop, or sell the building. Mr. Dolan, 62, said this would reduce the risk to people who might be reluctant to put money into a new organization without a long track record. He added that the space could open as soon as the fall of 2015.

Intel and Vice Magazine's Creators Project Interviews Eli Sudbrack about Original Music Workshop

The Creators Project blog just posted a great interview of Eli Sudbrack of Assume Vivid Astro Focus about his new work on the facade of Original Music Workshop.

Brooklyn's Original Music Workshop

The Huffington Post recently published its second profile on Original Music Workshop.

Performing Inside a Box Within a Box

The Wall Street Journal features Original Music Workshop for a third time.

Money Talks

Money Talks, our most recent project, is featured on the design blog NOTCOT. 

Kinesthesia Physio on Curbed

Curbed makes note of our design for Kinesthesia Physio at The Whitman: "where Chelsea Clinton might exercise..."

Original Music Workshop in New York Times, Again

Original Music Workshop's creative director, Paola Prestini, and the OMW Ex-Situ series are praised in this review by The New York Times. 

Scene Last Night: Bono, Edge, Vega at Unfinished Venue

Via Bloomberg News, written by Amanda Gordon:

Bono whistled loudly when Zimbabwean singer Netsayi and band finished their cover of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” 

“He wants to perform with you,” said the concert’s creative director, Paola Prestini, to Netsayi after the unusual fundraiser. 

Billed as “An Experience in the Ruins,” the dinner party for about 60 guests and 50 musicians took place at the future home of the Original Music Workshop, a former sawdust factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. 

Kevin Dolan, a tax attorney and OMW’s founder, has put in $8 million to demolish, excavate and reconstruct the 100-year-old building’s core. His money has also paid for Prestini to serve as creative director. 

Now he needs $7 million to complete the complex. Dolan is seeking donations or money from investors who will get a stake in the building. 

So the evening was a soft-sell springboard to the missing millions for a select group of invited guests including the Edge, Julianne Moore, Alan Fishman, a former bank chief executive, and David Ford, co-founder of Latigo Partners. 

Among the musicians, who performed throughout dinner, were Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega. 

The best argument for investing was music. Anderson’s violin produced the sound of the wind. Vega sang “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner” and a new song, “Don’t Uncork What You Can’t Contain.” 

Hole Covered

“This will be the entrance, that’s the restaurant over there,” said Dolan, standing next to a hole in the floor, covered with planks and fenced in orange netting for the occasion. The finished complex will include a performance space and a recording studio. 

Helena Christensen, the model, actress and artist, worked on the decor, sweeping floors, providing photographs projected in the space, and artfully arranging bags of pavement mix, wheelbarrows, cement mixers, power tools and hard hats. 

She was particularly excited about the giant mushrooms from upstate New York she had surrounded with moss and placed on the tables. 

Valerie Dillon, who has a namesake gallery in Chelsea, corralled 500 candles from 360 Design that flickered atop concrete walls and a work table displaying the architectural plans. 

Great Acoustics

“This place is going to have great acoustics,” said Peter Zuspan of the Williamsburg-based design firm Bureau V. The project is Bureau V’s first building. Arup and SLAB Architecture are also part of the project team. 

Dillon’s husband, Alvaro Perez Miranda, brought in members of Black Ship, an artist’s collective he created. Christophe Laudamiel, the event’s scent director, replaced the smell of concrete with a sweet floral fragrance. 

Miranda flew in Paladar Underground from Los Angeles to prepare the meal: ceviche, a salad with baby carrots, braised chicken leg with truffle apple puree, and yogurt panna cotta with berries. 

In Kentucky, Tomorrow Comes Today

Via Hyperallergic, written by Yasmeen Siddiqui:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Since moving here with my family a couple of years ago, Land of Tomorrow (LOT) has been on my mind. It is a provocative production and exhibition space established by Drura Parish and Dmitry “Dima” Strakovsky, first in Lexington (2009) and then in Louisville (2010), Kentucky. Louisville is a city where the aesthetic approach of business is palpable, infusing the development and design of small, local shops, companies and restaurants with a look, if nothing else.

What should amount to strength – given the design-oriented commercial sector – spirals into weakness when that trait morphs into a vacant valuation system, a contrived metric ladled onto artists to determine who and what should be encouraged, supported and facilitated. LOT is a counterpoint, challenging this citywide problem through its work as a cultural producer and presenter, a creator of spaces and moments. I have asked Drura and Dima to address a few questions to shed light on what appears to be a pragmatic, responsive, rigorous mode of working with and for artists.

*   *   *

Yasmeen Siddiqui: What is the story behind LOT? Who are the players?

Dima Strakovsky: Drura and I were standing in the front space of what became PR&VD (Parrish, Rash, Van Dissel). He claims that I convinced him that we should start a gallery. I claim he convinced me. I am afraid we will never know the truth.

Speaking from a personal perspective, I come from Chicago, which is an incredible hatchery — so many great art programs, spaces and apartment shows! Going through the program at the Art Institute, I constantly showed my work with my friends and there was this sense of community. I don’t think it really translated up to commercial galleries or museum institutions but that might have actually been a blessing. Anyways, when I got to University of Kentucky in 2006, I didn’t see those opportunities for my students. Starting a space was the most real and vital thing I could do as an art educator. Also, I had to make a decision on how to make a home here in Kentucky and my home has gotta have at least one or two adventurous cultural institution. Bringing amazing artists in was the most natural thing to do on many counts.

Both of us were just super hungry to do something big and different. We gave ourselves room to experiment and try things out. The fabrication component paid for the art exhibition and slowly (OK, actually not that slowly almost within a year) things began to move and congeal into a more of a symbiotic relationship between production and exhibition.

There is an amazing list of collaborators and interns who have made LOT flourish over the years. I might leave some of the folks out (apologies), but people like Rives Rash, Bart Van Dissel, Angela Torchio and the current crew both in Louisville and Lexington have done some really amazing things to get the spaces live.

Drura Parish: My former business partner Rives Rash and I moved from a small space on Maxwell to the current space on third street in Lexington. He and I went crazy and converted the building that was previously a refrigerator supply store and church into an open front and small shop in back. We put in a table and then Dima walked in and asked us what we were going to do with all the space.  We‘d met Dima at UK. He was in the art department and we were in architecture. He suggested that we use the excess space as a gallery – Will Tucker and Paul Simmons was our first show and I was blown away with the ambition of one person to articulate a vision in an empty room.  Through the years we were fortunate to have many people pitch in on the effort, Will Sizemore, Joey Yates, Nathan Hendrickson, Charlie Campbell, J.R. McClenny, Paul Michael Brown, and more.

YS: In your view how would you analyze the relationship between cultural production and exhibition in 1) the traditional commercial gallery as compared to LOT 2) the alternative project-based space as compared to LOT?

DS: LOT has changed modalities of operation about a thousand times as we tried different things along the way. So at times we mirrored aspects of the more “traditional” models that you have mentioned. Though we have to remember that from art historical point of view both are very new and strange beasts in the cultural landscape. They are adaptations to the market condition and the market has made dramatic shifts in the last decade.

There is a natural fabrication base in Kentucky, which has always been the cornerstone of our enterprise. Commercial galleries manage reputations. Alternative spaces create community-based consensus. We can collaborate with both to produce shows all over the world. In some very real ways this liberates the artists that show in our space because we are not as interested in current cultural capital maintenance but rather in asking the “What if?” question through production and presentation of material artifacts.

DP: Whoa.  I am still new to galleries per se, and their modes of operation. I think the focus on economy is much different.  Through the years we are drifting to an area where production is a means to give artists’ objects, things, moments they can transfer and sell while the economic element rests in us locating, hiring, securing fabricators and craftspeople to produce work for the artist.  Exhibition is the place where all production and economics meets. It is the project so to speak.

I think we have much in common with most project spaces.  Generalizing the two, I would say that we rarely separate economics from art.  This does not mean sales — rather the metrics of understanding success-which is hard to quantify in art.  With that said, we are very focused in what we are trying to “get” out of an exhibition. This very rarely has dollar signs attached to it, but has always fascinated me in terms of the commoditization of a moment in a space. I come from architecture so the economics of a project are inescapable, and the indirect value of a project is hard to quantify and qualify. Art and project spaces are the opposite, here the mission of the artist at best is honed and clear, but the VALUE and economics are hard to define. With that said, I have always viewed our exhibitions as a way to observe true market demand and desire. After all we are in Louisville, Kentucky and our press budget is nill, so to see how work is received without the hype machine is priceless.

YS: To date, how has the paradigm LOT asserts served artists? Are there projects that have been more successful than others?

DS: We really do shift our gears a lot depending on an artist: in some cases it’s purely production support, in some, it’s full on-site project management and then, some come in a very straight-forward exhibition production sort of way. I think financially, Freeman and Lowe stand out very clearly. They are able to effectively orient the production process in a similar way to many of the mega-brand artists of today (Murakami, Hirst, etc.) Yet, at the same time, they playfully throw in a utopian hallucinatory trip or two that allows for an uneasy critical distance from the objects conjured up by their production pipeline. At the same time we have worked with art group Voina, who are absolutely not interested in production capabilities and have very antagonistic relationship with the art market. Relative success is kind of hard to judge when the cultural scope of the game we play is so loosely defined.

DP: No project is the same. Luckily our team has a very diverse background that can facilitate the many different projects we have taken on. On any given project we finance, produce, manage, and / or just place the exhibition. Sure there are more successful projects work flow wise, but there are kernels of value in each project that are completely amazing. It’s fascinating how intense it is to produce objects that are intended for cultural consumption.

YS: What would you claim as your moral position and ideological stance in connection with the production and circulation (exhibition/sale) of art?

DS: I still teach. That’s my day job and a half. I went to academia from a great design job because I wanted the freedom (albeit relative one) to play with various ideas — to discuss them with some of my students and colleagues. My own work is not particularly commercial in nature. I am saying all this to try to define the position from which I am coming to the answers to your question.

For the most part contemporary art world is a plutocratic sphere. There is a lot of lifestyle branding going on that has very little to do with the supposed content of the work. I personally don’t mind this specific feature, since it has much more historical traction then anything else about art that I can think of right now. Some of the most amazing collections: Louvre, Hermitage, Uffizi had to do as much with the status projection, as with any ideas about transcendent beauty. However, and here I am channeling Lewis Hyde, there is a gift element to the artworks in play – a reason, a drive to put a unique experience out there for everyone to see. The gift and commodity economies exist in parallel: very often one is faced with the hard cash to pixie dust ratio calculation when selling a work. As long as there is a little bit more pixie dust in this equation the work is worth producing and selling.

DP: I use info from this article, which cites info from TEFAF report on art market.

The art market is the largest unregulated market in the world next to illegal drugs and I do not know if needs to be. I think the production of art, design, and architecture is the most necessary non-biological function humans can do. The platform by which these goods are sold, however, needs to be figured out. I do know that they need us more than we need them (producers vs. sellers), however the fiscal scales on this matter are skewed.

Think the global art market has a rough value of $60 billion with contemporary and modern art accounting for 70% and with the top 5% of galleries accounting for 70% of sales. I don’t want to turn this into an issue of inequality blah blah blah, but I do think that the art market would benefit from a check where we focus more on sustainable economies for the makers rather than suffering as a whole by continuing to pretend like we are all doing okay.  It appears no one is winning and no one is happy.  The artists are frustrated, the galleries are suffering, and the buyer is exhausted. Recently, we were discussing this and Dima likened it to living in Russia where you either you drive in a black car with security and a siren that stops traffic or you dream of being in that car. No one wants to step outside of this model.”  No one, however, is really pressing for reform — and I am not sure what that would look like. However, it feels like the system is getting stagnant.

In a business where everything relies on emotions and perception, though, it would help if the rules were a bit clearer, and the transactions more uniform.  We have unfortunately made a market where the seller has the majority of power.  They seem to control the buyer, often times employing draconian tactics to ensure a sale.  If the market was opened up (which fairs ironically may be the last bubble mechanism and first level playing field at the same time) and the best sold and the worst didn’t, we would all win — without all the snake oil, bad suits, and fear.

YS: What factors allowed for the establishment of the Louisville chapter?

DP: One amazing developer and core group of supporters that believe in what we do.

OMW's Vocal Electrofolk in New York Times

The Original Music Workshop’s upcoming performance, Vocal Electrofolk, is mentioned in the New York Times today. The performance is this Saturday night at the Greene Space.

Squarespace Features PINC.US

View fullsize

PINC.US is a featured Squarespace website.

Year in Culture Top 10

New York Magazine's Justin Davidson names Skyful, the preview performance at the Original Music Workshop, one of the top 10 classical performances of 2012.

 "On a perfect summer night in a roofless Williamsburg factory, the keening of Kinan Azmeh’s clarinet ricocheted off the century-old brick walls, kicking off construction of the Original Music Workshop."

Butterflies Roam at a Concert Hall in Infancy, Still Without a Roof

Via The New York Times, written by Zachary Woolfe:

You will not immediately be able to know, when it opens a little over a year from now, that there is anything very special about the Original Music Workshop. Aside from a few large windows, from the outside it will look like any of the old factory buildings scattered throughout Williamsburg.

Appearances can be deceiving. Nestled inside the building’s weathered brick shell will be a small concert hall with translucent ceiling and walls set at dozens of jagged angles: “a radiant jewel,” its architect, Bureau V, promises, in a scruffy postindustrial box.

On Thursday evening all that was still many months in the future as dozens of people gathered, surrounded by the factory’s looming brick walls under a clear, starry sky, for a glimpse of the raw space and a preview of the hall’s programming plans, which will be fleshed out in a series of concerts at the Greene Space over the coming year.

There has recently been a boom in fresh spots for new music in Brooklyn, including the brand-new BAM Fisher at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Galapagos Art Space (which moved from Williamsburg to Dumbo in 2008); Roulette; and the Issue Project Room, situated, like the Original Music Workshop, in a kind of modern ruin.

PhotoA performance designed by the artist Erika Harrsch, with butterfly-shaped kites, was among the acts at Original Music Workshop in Williamsburg on Thursday. Credit Marcus Yam for The New York Times 

The workshop — led by the creative director Paola Prestini, herself a noted composer — will have in common with these other halls an emphasis on variety. Anchored by a select group of resident ensembles and artists, the programming will span opera, indie rock, electronica and Baroque. On Thursday, in a concert called “Skyful,” the quartet Brooklyn Rider’s performance of Gyorgy Kurtag’s icy, potent “Microludes” shared the bill with the sexily smoky voice of Magos Herrera, paying tribute to the great Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, who died last month.

Despite the high walls, the outside world was never too far away. One of two pieces written and performed by the excellent clarinetist Kinan Azmeh used melodies sung during the recent demonstrations in Mr. Azmeh’s native Syria. In a performance designed by the visual artist Erika Harrsch, butterfly-shaped kites were printed with blown-up images of American currency, a beautiful but melancholy accompaniment to works for flute duet by Mario Diaz de León and Julian Wachner. The intense soprano Tony Arnold sang fragments of popular song lyrics in a stratospheric register in the Talea Ensemble’s performance of Bernhard Lang’s “DW 16: Songbook 1,” her piercing notes matched by bursts of Geoff Landman’s saxophone.

The founder of the Original Music Workshop, Kevin Dolan, has donated $8 million of the project’s $14 million cost, but there are still significant fund-raising hurdles to clear. On Thursday, though, it was easy to feel hopeful and excited that the evening’s richness and range would be a fixture of the city for many years to come.

WQXR Interviews Founder Of Original Music Workshop

Kevin Dolan, our client and the visionary founder of Original Music Workshop, talks to WQXR about OMW and the future of music in Williamsburg.

Original Music Workshop "Skyful"

Original Music Workshop’s preview performance, Skyful, is recommended by the New Yorker.

Original Music Workshop Starts Programming This Month

Original Music Workshop is featured on Brownstoner.