Knockdown Center

52-19 Flushing Ave, Maspeth, NY 11378

Knockdown Center is a vast former factory in Maspeth, Queens, around 50,000 square feet of repurposed industrial space that bills itself as New York's largest independent music venue. The site has been in continuous use for something like 130 years, first as the Gleason-Tiebout glassworks and then as a door factory, the source, fittingly, of the knockdown doorframe that gave the place its name. It comes with an outdoor space, The Ruins, that opens the programming up to the elements. Indoors it holds up to around 3,200, with the outdoor area adding well over a thousand more, a scale that suits its taste for the adventurous and the heavy. Wu-Tang Clan, LCD Soundsystem, Frank Ocean, Turnstile, Fred Again, James Blake, Animal Collective and Sunn O))) have all played here, a line-up that maps neatly onto the more forward-leaning corners of dance, hip hop and experimental music. It is the kind of warehouse room New York keeps proving it still needs.

About Knockdown Center

Indoors it holds up to around 3,200, with the outdoor area adding well over a thousand more, a scale that suits its taste for the adventurous and the heavy. Wu-Tang Clan, LCD Soundsystem, Frank Ocean, Turnstile, Fred Again, James Blake, Animal Collective and Sunn O))) have all played here, a line-up that maps neatly onto the more forward-leaning corners of dance, hip hop and experimental music. It is the kind of warehouse room New York keeps proving it still needs.