Night and day raves Mister Saturday Night and Mister Sunday are, after years of nomadic party-throwing throughout Brooklyn, leaving the borough for good and heading just across the Kings County border to Ridgewood’s Nowadays.
“After almost a decade of growing a community in temporary spaces, the Mister is building a permanent, year-round home,” reads Mister Saturday Night’s Kickstarter to create an indoor space at Nowadays, the venue where the parties spent this last summer.
Nowadays (956-06 Cooper Ave.), an outdoor beer garden a few blocks from the Halsey St. L train stop, is reminiscent of the halcyon aughts days of Williamsburg, when pop-up fun and industrial neighborhood remnants co-mingled in the fleeting summers of Brooklyn’s still vaguely recent gentrification (oh, the days).
Misters’ owners, Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin, have already nearly reached their base goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter (their second goal is $100,000). The money will go towards building a 5,000-square-foot indoor bar, communal dining room and dance floor expansion at Nowadays, allowing the venue to begin staying open year-round. Renderings of the proposed space show an open, loft-like venue apparently inspired by “the live/work spaces Mister Saturday Night has called home for the past decade.”
Construction is already underway, with a goal to open in the late spring of this year (seems ambitious, but power to them).
In addition to becoming the permanent home to the Mister weekend parties, the venue will also begin hosting Planetarium, a live music series started by Carter and Harkin. Based on the Kickstarter’s description, Planetarium will consist of listening to high quality music curated to a theme while you lie on the ground in stoner-chic bliss and appreciate the tunes. As well, there are plans for a film series and classes.
After nearly a decade of constant relocation through a variety of Brooklyn venues including Industry City, the news that Mister Saturday and Sunday are alive, well, and finding a permanent space is more or less objectively good news. But that the space they’ve found is across the border, in new-Bushwick (and of course, that Bushwick is new-Williamsburg, and Williamsburg is new-Manhattan is way old news) is a clear sign of the times. Indeed, the Kickstarter launched in the same week that Shea Stadium announced it was closing, yet again, due to getting lost in the bureaucracy and expenses of being a DIY venue in Brooklyn.
So raise a glass to Mister Sunday’s, but then maybe go ahead and pour it out for the end of an era where there existed the ability to be a nomadic party in Brooklyn: you’re better off moving to Queens than constantly searching in BK, would seem to be the clear message here.