More corporate events are leaving Manhattan for Brooklyn and Queens, and the reason is usually the room: a warehouse in Greenpoint or Bushwick, a brewery taproom, a converted factory in Long Island City, a waterfront space with the skyline behind it. These rooms look different from a hotel ballroom, and they behave differently too. From Jersey City they are also a different drive. This is what changes for the DJ, and for the person booking one, when the event is in the outer boroughs.
The venue types and how they sound
The rooms companies book in Brooklyn and Queens fall into a few families, and each has an acoustic personality that decides where the speakers go before anyone has picked a song.
Warehouses and converted industrial spaces. Brick walls, concrete floors, steel columns, ceilings twenty feet up or more. These rooms are big and hard, and sound in them lasts. Clap your hands in an empty warehouse and the echo runs for two seconds. When the room fills with people the reverb drops, but it never goes away, and the first casualty is speech. A toast delivered at ballroom volume in a raw warehouse arrives as a wash. The approach is to keep the level modest, aim the speakers at the crowd and away from the long walls, and pull them in closer to the people than you would in a carpeted room. More speakers at lower volume beat two speakers at high volume every time in a space like this. That is often where a second sound zone earns its place even in a single room.
Breweries and taprooms. Popular for team events because the bar is already there. The acoustic problem is the tanks: rows of stainless steel that reflect everything, plus a concrete floor and, often, a garage door that opens onto a yard. The tasting-room side is usually smaller and softer, with wood and furniture, and it is where the music should live. Breweries also have their own house music system, generally ceiling speakers wired for background, and a staff that is used to it. We coordinate with the manager on whether we patch in or bring our own, and on the yard, which typically has a hard stop for outdoor sound.
Waterfront spaces. Along the East River in Brooklyn and in Long Island City there are event spaces with the river on one side and a view of Manhattan that does a lot of the decorating. These are often glass-walled, which reflects sound like brick does, and some have terraces where the wind and the residential neighbors across the street set the rules. The pattern is the same as a rooftop: keep the program indoors, keep the speakers facing people, and respect the curfew, which is usually earlier than you would like.
Long Island City lofts and studios. Photo studios and loft spaces that rent for events are usually white boxes with high ceilings and wood or polished concrete floors. They are easier than a warehouse because they are smaller, and harder because they are emptier: no fixtures, no bar, no soft surfaces at all until the rental furniture arrives. The room sounds different at load-in than at doors. We set a level at sound check knowing it will need to come up once the furniture and the people arrive.
Hotel ballrooms and banquet halls. Queens in particular has hotels near the airports with conventional ballrooms, and banquet halls in Flushing and elsewhere with their own in-house systems and a preferred way of doing things. These behave like their Manhattan and New Jersey cousins and are the easy case.
Getting there from Jersey City
A Brooklyn or Queens event is the longest drive in our normal service area and the least predictable. From Jersey City the route is the Holland Tunnel and across Lower Manhattan to the bridges, or through the Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn, or up and across to the Queens side through Midtown. On a good Saturday afternoon it is forty-five minutes to Williamsburg or Long Island City. On a Friday at four it can be twice that. We plan the drive from the load-in window backward, add an hour, and leave early enough that a bad tunnel does not touch the setup time.
This matters more than it sounds because setup takes about 90 minutes to two hours once we are in the room, and the arrival time is the only part of the day we control. If a venue can give us access three hours before doors instead of two, we will take it, and in the outer boroughs we ask for it.
Parking is where Brooklyn and Queens are better than Manhattan. Industrial blocks have curb space, many venues have a yard or a lot, and a fair number have the best load-in there is: a roll-up door at grade, straight from the street into the room. No dock window, no freight elevator, no security cage. The cases roll from the vehicle to the booth position in a few minutes. Where there is no roll-up, there is usually a wide ground-floor door. Freight elevators exist in the multi-story loft buildings in Long Island City and along the Brooklyn waterfront, and those come with the same scheduling rules as a Manhattan load-in, so ask.
Two cautions on the vehicle. Some industrial blocks have alternate-side or commercial-only parking that is enforced in the evening, and a venue manager will know which side of the street is safe. And some waterfront venues are in developments with their own security and a vendor gate that closes; the gate needs to know we are coming.
Power, heat, and the raw-space checklist
Raw spaces are raw about more than acoustics. A warehouse that was a warehouse until recently may have a handful of outlets along one wall and a panel that nobody has labeled. We ask three questions of every raw venue: where are the outlets nearest the booth position, what else is on that circuit, and is there a generator or a temporary power distro for events, because some venues run the whole event off one. A lighting vendor and a caterer on the same distro as the sound is the setup that trips at nine o'clock.
Heat is the other one. Many warehouses and studios are heated for events by portable units, and portable heaters make noise and pull current. A gas heater roaring near the booth is a sound problem; an electric one on the booth's circuit is a power problem. In winter, ask the venue how the room is heated and where the units go, and tell us.
Then the standard items that raw venues sometimes forget to mention: the certificate of insurance (most Brooklyn and Queens venues want one, and the newer waterfront developments want it with the building owner and manager named), the sound curfew for any outdoor portion, whether tape is allowed on the floor, and whether there is a house system we are required to use. On that last point, in a warehouse the answer is usually no, and in a brewery or a banquet hall it is usually yes, and we have a post on how to decide when it is optional.
What the crowd does in these rooms
A warehouse party is a standing party. There may be a dinner, but the room does not feel like a dinner room, and people move. The floor tends to form earlier than in a ballroom and closer to the booth, which is good, and it tends to be loud with conversation, which means the music has to be placed carefully so that it fills the space near the floor without shouting at the people along the walls. The trade-off in a raw space is always between the floor wanting more and the room punishing more with echo. The answer is placement and patience, not power.
The other thing about the outer boroughs is that the crowd has come from somewhere. Most of the guests took a train or a car to get to a warehouse, which means they have decided to be there, and they usually stay later than a Midtown crowd that can slip out to the subway. Plan the end of the night for a room that is still full at the contracted end time, and tell us how strict the venue is about it.
If you are planning a company event in Brooklyn or Queens, send us the date, the venue and the headcount, and a line about the room if it is a raw space. We will reply within 24 hours with whether the date is open and what the room is going to need from us. Reach us through the contact page; our New York City corporate event DJ page covers the rest of the city.