A very, very delayed update: I've closed down the space and moved out.
It took me a long time to come to this decision, but existing in Brooklyn is super expensive, and there are some other things I'd like to do that I couldn't do as long as I had to pay for this space. I also realized that, when it comes to building a self-sustaining community space, I'd made some mistakes right at the beginning that were going to be very hard to rectify after the fact. The two main mistakes were:
- Starting the space completely on my own, without partners, and
- Being incredibly un-specific about what the use case for the space was.
#1 became a problem because no one else was ever as deeply committed as I was to trying to make it work, and although I got a ton of help from my friends, I just couldn't sustain the level of energy required to keep the space running when no one else was willing to put in a similar amount of time and thought and energy. The very idea of starting a community space by oneself is kind of silly, if you think about it
I don't regret how I went about things, because at the time that I got the space I didn't have anyone else to start it with, but I do think that was a limiting factor in the longevity and success of the space.
#2 was a problem because that lack of specificity and purpose made it so that everyone else's desires for what would happen in the space got put before mine, which made it harder for me to stay engaged, and also made it much harder to convey the value prop of the space since it wasn't for a specific thing...and so once I got to the point of realizing that I
needed the space to start paying for itself in order for it to continue, it was hard to construct a clear message about what people would be paying for if they supported the space financially.
Again, I don't regret any of it – I'm really glad I just pulled the trigger and got the space and worried about the details later, because otherwise I never would have gotten started. Having the space, and being a part of all the incredible things that happened there, was definitely the highlight of my life so far. I just needed to free myself up financially a bit, escape from the city, and give myself some room to figure out what the next part of my life looks like (including professionally, since I don't feel great about making money from writing code to help people sell stuff on Amazon). So at the end of May, I decided that we'd shut down at the end of October.
But lots more cool **** happened between my last post and when we closed, so here's some of that!
Sometime in January of last year we hosted our first real electronic music event, a dubstep album release show. I'm a huuuuge EDM guy, so I was pretty stoked, and decided to figure out how to do custom lighting for the whole album. I spent a solid 10 days doing nothing but figuring out how to program lights, and ended up with something I'm actually pretty damn proud of. I pretty much only have videos of the event itself – if you want to see the lights in action, there's some clips
here. I had a blast figuring out the lights...I'd love to do more lighting for EDM shows.
It was cold as hell in the warehouse, so I did most of the work from inside a sleeping bag...
In April, we hosted a premiere for the movie my friends Jonah and Danny made of our motorcycle ride from LA to southern Mexico. Friends and family came from all over the country, and we rented a high-quality projector and screen for the occasion. It was really cool having so many new faces in the warehouse, and also really cool seeing everyone's reaction to the movie. It's actually done pretty damn well on YouTube, which is wild...it just won the audience choice award at the PDX Motorcycle Film Festival. Crazy. Here's the link:
We made a lot of misc upgrades, including installing some big roll-down photo backdrops so people could do shoots on the stage when there weren't concerts going on, and neatening up the tool storage.
And as always, lots of different random projects were being worked on. My friends Sean and Anna spent a long time restoring a dresser they found on the street.
And made a banner for our monthly trash pickups:
In the summer, I ran a 6-session introduction to motorcycle repair class. I'd never taught anything in a structured way before, and it was a really interesting experience. I was nervous as hell going into each class. I'm no expert mechanic, but I know my way around a motorcycle well enough.
Here's the syllabus I wrote, in case anyone's curious.
It actually went really well! I got a guy named Matthew who owns a nearby moto repair shop to come hang out during each class to help the students with the hands-on parts and fill in the gaps in my knowledge. People seemed to have a really good time, and by the end of the 6 sessions, the blue Honda CM400A that had been sitting in the warehouse for the previous 18 months was finally working. It was cool seeing some of the people who'd never used hand tools, or gotten covered in oil, or had the experience of fixing something, experience those things for the first time. (I also met a girl I've been seeing through the class, so that was also definitely an upside of the whole experience
A few weeks after we got the CM running, I gave myself a Hulk Hogan mustache and some of my photographer friends decided it was prime time for a photoshoot...so I ended up with these absolutely hilarious pictures of me looking like a ******** biker on a baby-blue automatic motorcycle.
The two big ongoing shop projects were the Bridgeport and the Mercedes. I decided to make a bracket to mount the VFD to the Bridgeport as a welding practice project (I am shamefully terrible at welding), and started making this ugly piece up out of some misc scrap I had lying around.
Unfortunately, I made a pretty gigantic mistake while switching my angle grinder from a wire wheel to a flap disk, and managed to wire wheel a good chunk of the back of my left pointer finger off. I'll spare you the pics, but it was down to the tendon. I forgot to unplug the grinder while taking the wire wheel off, and accidentally activated the double trigger with my chest while my finger was inside the guard. It got trapped by the guard, which made things much worse. It was pretty gnarly. I luckily didn't end up needing a skin graft, but it was a close thing.
Anyway, that delayed the project for about a week, and then I got sick of waiting and made myself a little finger protector so that I could finish the job.
It ain't pretty, but I made it! And it works! **** yeah.
I also added a 2-gang 110V outlet on the side of the mill to accommodate the work light, power feed, and DRO. Once I did that, I was able to remove a hilarious amount of wiring.
The clutch master and slave cylinders on the Mercedes were both in sorry condition, so I rebuilt both of them, too. The master took a while to figure out, since the new rubber didn't look the same as the old rubber, and it was pretty tough to find a rebuild kit for the slave. It wouldn't have been that expensive to replace it, but I'd way rather avoid throwing away a fixable part if I can.
I also bought a new master-to-slave clutch hose since the old one was obliterated, but the threads on one side were the wrong size...I just threw a M14-to-M12 female adapter sleeve in there and then it worked fine.
All rebuilt:
We threw one final show, too. It was a bittersweet moment. The best times of my life have been spent in this place, and some of the worst times as well. We had the 4 bands who'd played here the most play that final show. The outpouring of love I heard from people that night about how much the space meant to them really blew me away. I knew people cared about it, but hearing how they talked about it when it was going away for good was truly wild. People told me it was the place they'd met their friends, the place they'd found their voice artistically, the one place they felt truly comfortable and accepted. Damn. I was in the front row alternately dancing my *** off and crying for most of the night.
Right after that show I left for a month, and when I got back it was time to pack up shop. It was a biiiiig job. I also needed to sell the Bridgeport, which meant I needed to finish rebuilding it. I spent a looong time finishing up cleaning the whole machine, putting everything back together, and getting it aligned as best I could. Then I ground it down to bare metal and Sean painted the whole thing. I only ever made a couple cuts on it, sadly...I wish I'd gotten it put back together sooner. Luckily it found a good new home, nearby at a community bike repair shop. It was pretty worn out, but still good for a lot of small jobs.
I had a bit of a move-out marathon where in a 60-hour period, I:
- Noticed my 4Runner was misfiring and did plugs and wires on VERY short notice
- Rented a Uhaul box trailer, discovered my trailer harness didn't work and jerry-rigged the wiring well enough for Uhaul to let me take the trailer, packed up 90% of the warehouse, drove it 4 hours to MA, and unpacked everything into my parents' garage attic
- Rented another smaller Uhaul trailer to pick up a free motorcycle that I'd been given (a longer story, but it's a 1994 BMW R100R Mystik that works but was given to me in pieces), grabbed the bike, brought it to my parents' too, and returned that trailer
- Returned the big trailer to NYC, then picked up a drop deck trailer to move the milling machine. Moved the mill to its new home, stored the trailer at the warehouse overnight, then returned it
- Packed the rest of the warehouse into my 4Runner and drove that stuff to my parents' too
It was a period with very little sleep, a lake of coffee, and way too many miles with overloaded trailers pulled by a reluctant 4Runner. Whew.
Sean and Anna made the three of us dinner the second-to-last night. I think we definitely spent more time together in the warehouse than anyone else, by far.
And the very last night, a bunch of us went to a show together and then finally fulfilled the joke we'd made for years about sleeping on the roof.
Moving out was extremely weird. I put nearly everything I had into this space – my time, my energy, my money for the past few years were mostly poured into improving the space, developing the community, learning to manage and build and invite people in. Now that I'm a few months out from it, I still feel like I made the right choice. It's been good to get some space, to do some thinking about what's next.
I have no doubt that I'll create another space in the same spirit as this one at some point in the not-so-distant future, and use what I've learned here to make that one better.
(The Mercedes is still an ongoing project – there's more to that story, but I'll probably move that to another thread for the sake of closure.)
One final fun lil thing: Sean lived at the warehouse for a while (can't remember if I mentioned that), and when he moved out, he drew me this card:
Before I moved out, he drew me up this version on the computer...
And I got it permanently installed. At the risk of being melodramatic, this place totally changed my life. I know this isn't really standard GJ content, but it's the truth.
Thanks for following along, yall
Highside Workshop over and out.
