Nick Bodor (Cake Shop) & Knitting Factory opening Baker Falls in former Pyramid Club space
Nick Bodor, who was one of the owner of Cake Shop and Bruar Falls, has acquired the space at 101 Avenue A that was formerly The Pyramid Club and plans to open a new rock club there. It will be named Baker Falls, in a nod to those two former indie rock clubs he owned with his brother Andy, and he’s hoping to have it open by March.
Baker Falls is an idea he’s been working for some time and will be a collaboration with The Knitting Factory (who said that when the Williamsburg outpost closed this summer they would be moving back to Manhattan). “They will be booking through me in the performance space,” Bodor tells us. “The performance space entry will have Knitting Factory with their original Knitting Factory logo from 1987.”
“We negotiated a 15-year lease and are in for the long haul,” Bodor told Curbed. “Nothing is guaranteed, but I have a financial cushion for the first time. I am the creative here, but they will help with booking, too. Win-win. I’m also not setting up an Instagrammable corner — that’s always the model now, and that’s bullshit to me.”
Bodor says that “this is not a new Pyramid,” but does plan for it to be something NYC could use more of — small venues. He told Curbed, “There are few venues in Manhattan where you can have a substantial crowd for an upcoming rock band. There’s the Bowery Ballroom; it’s an amazing place, but it holds 650 and that’s too big for many bands. We can do 300, which is perfect.” He also says “The club will be all-inclusive and safe, but it will be a rock club. We’ll have the sickest sound with a kick-ass backline. ”
Nick tells us that Baker Falls will also offer “full coffee and cafe service all day and night (bigger food menu than Cake Shop),” while the downstairs bar “will be called Fever Dream and will look like the decrepit manor house of the beer baron Peter Doelger who was the first to brew Pilsner beer in America and did it right at 101 Avenue A.” He adds it “will be decked out like a 19th century decrepit manor library/study/office with globes, coo-coo clocks, old telephones going off at random times (probably with someone interesting on the other line calling from a payphone). That kind of thing.”
While he’s redesigning the space, he’s keeping the bar where it is, telling Curbed, “I want anyone who has visited this space over the last 40 years to feel like they’re back home. The bones will be there, and the history will be apparent.”
There is a Baker Falls website which currently only has this on its landing page:
One afternoon, an astronaut ran into trouble as her ship was close to landing back on Earth.
After a harrowing re-entry and very bumpy decent, she was forced to eject at the lowest possible altitude. The pilot parachuted down into a forest and landed hard. She was disoriented and concussed.
Unable to think straight, she looked off into the distance and saw a stately Manor House deep in the woods. The pilot staggered toward the Manor, bleary-eyed and off-balance.
As she approached, she realized the Manor House was decrepit and overgrown with vines, and tree limbs poked through broken windows. As if in a fever dream, she managed to keep moving closer to the estate. Finally the pilot leaned up against the house, wiped dirt off one of the windows and looked inside…
She saw the best party in the world
Stay tuned for more Baker Falls details.
