The Bowery Ballroom opened in 1998 inside a 1929 building designed by Henry Creighton Ingalls for the Tree-Mark Shoe Co., whose name is still engraved across the top of the facade.
The room has a general-admission standing floor plus a mezzanine above with some cafe-style seating, so heading upstairs is the way to get a view over the crowd.
The building went up in 1929 to a design by Henry Creighton Ingalls for the Tree-Mark Shoe Co., a firm that sold orthopedic footwear and staffed its showroom with podiatrist-salesmen; the engraved company name still runs across the top of the facade. A motion-picture house from 1914 stood on the site until it was demolished the year before. After the shoe store's run the ground floor sold carpeting and then lighting, and the building was bought in 1997 and converted over the following year.
Three levels do three different jobs. The lower lounge is built around a fifty-foot mahogany horseshoe bar. The main floor carries the stage under twenty-four-foot ceilings, on a wood floor that passes bass through your shoes. Above it a mezzanine of roughly a thousand square feet offers standing room, some cafe seating and a second bar under a coffered vaulted ceiling. Capacity is quoted variously between 550 and 600, depending on whether you ask the operator or the reference books.
The acoustics were designed, not inherited. Co-founder Brian Swier directed the renovation with sound in mind, and the house system was specified with the loudspeaker manufacturer EAW for even coverage from a stage set in a room only a little wider than itself. Rolling Stone named it the best club in America in 2013. Joan Baez recorded Bowery Songs here in November 2004, and Patti Smith played a New Year's run for fourteen consecutive years, ending after 2012.
It occupies a useful middle rung. Acts outgrow the Mercury Lounge and arrive here; acts that outgrow this room move on to Terminal 5 or the Hammerstein Ballroom. Practically, the choice is the rail at the front of the mezzanine, which gives a clean sightline over the floor without a long walk to the bar, against the floor itself, where the sound is at its heaviest and the crowd decides how close you get.
6 Delancey St, New York, NY 10002 · Official site ↗
The Bowery Ballroom is a live music venue at 6 Delancey Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The venue has enjoyed a fabled reputation among musicians as well as audiences. In 2013, industry insiders polled by Rolling Stone magazine named it the best club in America, describing it as "both intimate and grand, with consistently great sound and sightlines, and touches of old-school class." Consequence of Sound named it the second-best music venue in the United States.
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