David Sklar was driving a well kept Lincoln convertible through his 50,000-square-foot events space when I first met him. The vintage car had been plucked from his personal collection and was freshly painted the color of red wine. It initially served as a prop for a Spotify party that took place at the space weeks earlier, and eventually as a photo booth during Sklar's son’s bar mitzvah. On a sunny day in June, the 57-year-old entrepreneur carefully maneuvered the vehicle through the halls of the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, just narrowly fitting it through the front door.
The spectacle was appropriate given its surroundings. The Knockdown Center is precisely the type of place where a classic Lincoln might careen through the halls as part of an ambitious performance piece. Since 2012, the former door factory has been operating as a public events center, gallery, and concert venue that takes full advantage of its unique abundance of space. The roughly 30 person staff that keeps the center running also places an emphasis on sharing that opportunity with as many people as possible. The center's curatorial board relies on public proposals for its arts exhibitions, and is known to hosts concerts from a wide spectrum of local promoters. Just in the past year, it has been home to exhibits from the performance art collective Fluct, a packed out Playboi Carti concert, a screening of Jordan Peele's film Get Out, and a VR-art show contained within a converted shuttle bus.
The words “arts center” have become increasingly associated with attempts at reorganizing a neighborhood, often to make it more expensive. The Shed, an upcoming arts space housed inside of the expansive Hudson Yards project in New York, for example, came out of a scrapped bid for the city to host the Olympics. In June, the nation’s oldest nightclub, Webster Hall, was acquired by the developers of the Barclays Center in a deal that will close the iconic venue for up to two years and reopen it under a different name. The Knockdown Center manages to defy cynicism. Located in an industrial patch of Queens, it provides everyone, from artists to fans to community members, a space for possibility.
The center was built in 1903 and first housed operations for the Gleason-Tiebout glass factory. David's father, Samuel Sklar, bought the building in the 1930s and sold paint and hardware out of the facility before eventually transitioning to door manufacturing. The Manhattan Door Company, which was founded by the elder Sklar and remains in the family’s ownership, became a force after it invented the Knock-Down door frame, which allowed contractors to build walls and then add door frames later. For three generations, the factory churned out the frames until the family moved the business to New Jersey in 2010, where it remains in operation.
After the Manhattan Door factory moved across the Hudson River, the building was left with David, who had to decide between selling the space or finding a way to make it pay for itself. He offered a room in the facility to the visual artist Michael Merck as a studio while he worked out what to do with it. “It was a pretty tenuous situation,” Merck, who now works as one of Knockdown Center’s programming directors, told me in the Ready Room, a bar and cafe that’s part of the center. “He was still showing the place to buyers while I was here.”
Sklar, who declined to be interviewed and tends toward secrecy (a point of pride for him, I was told, is that if you search his name in Google, the wrong image comes up), grew up exposed to the bustling New York art scene of the 1980s. His mother, a designer whose metalwork is built into subtle nooks and crannies of the building, would take him into the city where he’d encounter the still fresh work of legendary artists like Warhol and Basquiat. The Knockdown Center, Merck explained, is a continuation of the creative spirit of New York that he experienced at that time. “I think one of the things that motivates Dave, and all of us, is that spirit of collaboration that was present at a particular time in New York City, that today seems harder to come by,” he said.
Discouraged by the prospect of selling the building and seeing it ultimately torn down, as many buyers insisted, Sklar began working informally with Merck in 2011 to envision what exactly the enormous center could be. According to Merck, the space developed organically, serving as a venue for a loose network of artists via word of mouth, before expanding into the more conventionally operated venue that it is today. “It was a long process of figuring out exactly what a use could be,” he said, “lots of people came through the space and were invited to sort of pitch different ideas for the center.”
Tyler Myers was one of those early lab rats for the building’s potential. In 2012, he commissioned the space for a project for Frieze Art Fair, where he was working in the non-profit wing at the time. Myers, who previously spent over a decade helping House of Blues open new locations around the country, often in historic buildings, needed a space where a large tent could be housed, and the Knockdown Center was a perfect fit. Once he actually saw the place, his imagination was sparked. “I just saw so much possibility in the building, and wanted to help it be what we thought it could be,” he said.
Shortly after the Frieze project, Myers decided to stick around and dream up more programming for the space alongside Merck. With financing from Sklar, they put on one of the center’s first public-facing projects in the fall of 2012: a mini golf course in the courtyard, for which they commissioned 10 artists to design unique obstacles. For another early event, called “Bring your own beamer,” they invited visual artists to project their art anywhere they liked on the inside, or outside, of the space.
“That was all a process of figuring out how bodies wanted to flow,” Merck explained.
Today, the Knockdown Center has five separate indoor spaces in addition to a newly built backyard. There’s a gallery right off the building’s entrance, and through a set of wall-sized double doors, a long and narrow events space that’s served as home to various audio-visual installations. There’s a full service bar and cafe that, as soon as licensing with the city is sorted out, will be home to a restaurant. And there’s the main room, a 20,000-square-foot hall that inspires movement if only to make your body take up more space. Behind the main room, through another back door, is a room called Texas, formerly Merck’s studio (Sklar met Merck in Austin). Each of these rooms can serve a different function. Ambient and noise shows tend to happen in the Texas room, for example, because there’s a platform above the stage for the audience to sit, or lay down,a common practice at ambient shows in particular.
“Flexibility is like the opposite of limitation in a way,” Myers explained. “What we want to do is give people who come here, whether it's for a concert or an art show, or a wedding, the same sense of possibility that we saw possibility when we arrived.”
In the years since it opened, the Knockdown Center has remained committed to experimentation. In 2015, it was host to First Person View, an exhibit that invited sculptors to make work to be viewed only via drones that the audience would operate. In January of this year, it was home to Nasty Women, a group art show put on by artists Roxanne Jackson and Jessamyn Fiore to benefit Planned Parenthood. In April, it featured Unseen Hand, a show curated by Nikita Vishnevskiy that explored a certain silliness at the heart of technological consumerism. The show featured Tom Butter’s sculpture, “Rope Trick,” a nine-foot line of painted rope connected to a motor attached to two steel poles. Audience members could press down on a foot pedal and watch the rope flail in the air — a perfect display of inanity.
What makes some of the center’s more ambitious endeavors — like the Suspended Forest exhibit by the artist Michael Neff, which featured hundreds of discarded Christmas trees suspended from the ceilings — possible, is the fact that Knockdown also hosts commercial clients. It’s not often you come across such a well preserved factory, so TV and film producers have taken interest, too. Scenes from the latest season of Orange is the New Black were shot in the center’s basement, and Fleet Foxes’ performance on the PBS live music TV series, The Artists Den, were shot in the main room. The center is also available for weddings and private events. It's a growing trend in the world of large scale arts spaces. The Shed, which is slated to open in 2019, will be available for commercial rentals throughout the year.
The center's commercial viability (it will be able to roughly break even this year) allows it to operate more flexibly, too. As opposed to having a central curator, like many comparable spaces do, it relies on a board of curatorial advisors with a commitment to accepting proposals from the public.
“That was all a process of figuring out how bodies wanted to flow.”
Ali Rosa-Salas, a Brooklyn-based curator on the board was introduced to the space through an opportunity. She was encouraged by another curator working with the team, Vanessa Thill, to participate in one of their bi-annual calls for proposals. A visual artist with interest in dance and choreography, Rosa-Salas saw the center as a perfect location for a collaborative project with the sound artist Dyani Douze called Mami. The exhibition was a month-long series curated as an offering to Mami Wata, a set of water deities in matriarchal faiths from West and Central Africa and black diasporas around the world. The show featured multidisciplinary works like a collaboration between Douze, new media artist Salome Asega, and world champion Floyd Little Double Dutch Team, that turned the Knockdown Center into a testing ground for both spiritual and artistic expression.
“There’s really nothing like it in the United States, really,” Rosa-Salas told me over the phone. “It was the first time I was somewhere where I felt like my ideas had a place.”
After working on Mami, Rosa-Salas kept in contact with the directors at the Knockdown Center, seeing it as an opportunity to let more people, particularly people from marginalized groups, know about the space’s availability.
“In some ways it's kind of like similar to serving on a grant panel, or any sort of funding institution,” Rosa-Salas said of being one of the center’s public-facing curatorial advisors.
“Those conversations can be very hard because you are not only allocating a physical space but essentially money and resources, too... For me, from the outset I’m privileging an anti-racist anti-classist framework.”
As a concert venue, Knockdown embodies much of the same ideas as its arts programming. In New York particularly, but across the country, simply bringing together a crowd of black and brown people can draw the ire of law enforcement, and local residents. Knockdown Center sits in a patch of Queens that is majority white, and has spent years cultivating trust from the community, both in the neighborhood in which it resides and among the artists who do work with them, to strike what feels like an impossible balance. On many nights, each of the center’s sprawling rooms is host to an event serving a unique if not disparate audience. It is not unlikely for attendees of a rap show, for example, to cross paths with guests at a punk show.
“I feel that there is a lot of excitement that can happen from an experience perspective in that context,” Myers told me. “From a traditional promoters perspective, nobody would want that to happen really, but because we're in this space, we're trying to make it conducive for everybody to co-exist in that way. It's amazing how open people are to that experience.”
On a rainy night in June, a local beer festival occupied the center’s main room. Dozens of regional breweries set up booths in the large space while parents sold baked goods to raise funds for the local high school, and neighborhood restaurants sold everything from pierogies to tacos and barbecue. There were American flags strewn across what seemed like every available surface and the crowd of Maspeth locals appeared heartily impressed. “How about this beautiful venue!” one of the announcers cheered into the mic. Meanwhile in the Texas room, pillows were being laid out on the floor for an ambient show later on in the night. The next day, after David’s son’s bar mitzvah, the Jamaican dancehall artist Spice would do a show in the backyard with Chicago rapper Tink. Its an unlikely combination that somehow works. Above all, Knockdown Center provides an optimistic view of what's possible when you give everyone a bit of space.
