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City development brings new performance space to Sunset Park
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Ryan Kailath
Published Dec 9, 2025
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By
Ryan Kailath
Published Dec 9, 2025
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If you’ve ever dreamed of seeing a German electronic musician, or a percussion ensemble of Indonesian gamelan musicians, in a city-owned warehouse in Sunset Park, prepare to get your wish.
The team behind Public Records, the Gowanus club known for its eclectic avant-garde and experimental music and arts programs, is opening a new 1,000-person music and arts venue at MADE Bush Terminal, the sprawling waterfront redevelopment project from the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).
The Public Records team will run the operations and program the shows, said Waverly Neer, vice president of asset management at NYCEDC. The space is expected to open in late 2026.
“This will be of the spirit [of Public Records’] live music and arts events, but will be an entirely new brand,” Neer said.
Public Records co-founder Francis Harris said booking the venue’s calendar was months away, but he imagines using the much bigger space to lean more into live music than at Public Records.
“It’s just a broader audience, and it could provide opportunities for shows that are all-ages, more opportunity to do interesting things that we can’t do at Public Records,” Harris said.
The yet-to-be-named venue will anchor the ground floor of Building A at the 36-acre property, a historic former industrial site built in the late 1800s. The broader complex was once known as Bush Terminal, an oil refinery turned shipping terminal turned manufacturing hub for printers, book binders, coffee roasters, candy makers, and more. During and after World War II it was briefly used as a military base.
Now, the site has been rebranded as MADE (Manufacturers, Artisans, Designers, Entrepreneurs) Bush Terminal.
Programming at the new arts venue will span large-scale ticketed events as well as more community-oriented uses, Neer said, including, for example, local high school graduations, food and toy drives, health screenings, ESL classes and more.
The MADE campus includes more than 800,000 square feet for manufacturing and cultural uses. NYCEDC recently broke ground on a new five-acre waterfront park and announced a new ferry landing is in the works nearby.
It’s part of the city’s broader plan to reimagine the Brooklyn waterfront as a working creative and public space, similar to the changes at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in recent decades. NYCEDC is working to attract “ideally Brooklyn-based or New York-based companies” as tenants, Neer said.
Shane Davis, another co-founder of Public Records, said his team shared values with NYCEDC , which he described as “not purely commercially-driven.”
NYCEDC is a quasi-public nonprofit that manages city-owned land and often provides below-market-rate rents to its tenants, such as the city’s public retail markets. Neer and the Public Records team both declined to comment on the financial arrangements of the deal. Davis said they’d initially connected on the opportunity because some friends of Public Records were involved in the project.
Neer said there was considerable community outreach and input throughout the ongoing MADE Bush Terminal project, including partnerships with local workforce development groups.
“Our goal is to check as many boxes as possible, in terms of a community-oriented space,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the nature of the new venue. It is a performance space. It also misstated the acronym for the NYC Economic Development Corporation. It is the NYCEDC.
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public records
Ryan Kailath
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