A Fairly Exhaustive Oral History
Four Loko parties, falling maggots, and first-floor strip clubs.
I .In the late ’90s, New York City’s economy was booming. Many of the 20-somethings who were working at dot-coms were using their paychecks to scoop up apartments across the East Village and in Williamsburg. With rents quickly rising, in 1997, Dan Nuxoll, Lars Williams, and Sam Marks—recent grads who had met at Stuyvesant and the Village Community School—decided to look further down the L-train line for something cheaper with more space, where they could build out their own commune like spaces without too much oversight.
Dan Nuxoll, currently Rooftop Films president, arrived in 1997: Lars got a Realtor, this crazy guy. I think his name was Tony. He was old school and had a cheap but flashy pin-striped suit. He was showing us around warehouse spaces in Williamsburg, mostly along the water, which we were like, “No, too small, too expensive,” so he took us in his car deeper into Brooklyn.
Sam Marks, playwright, playwriting lecturer at Harvard, 1997: It did not feel like the Bedford stop. There were some artists’ spaces, but it was mostly Spanishspeaking families. The Bushwick projects were right across the street; there was a video store that sold drugs.
Nuxoll: Tony showed us the entire fourth floor. It was dirty, like years and years of industrial slop had soaked into the wood floors. But it was 10,000 square feet, 16-foot ceilings, and from three feet up to the ceiling, it was all bay windows. It had unbelievable light.
Marks: I believe it was Lars who had the idea of building out apartments. I don’t know exactly what the law was, but if the
landlord was collecting rent off people he knew were living there, we figured we wouldn’t be held liable.
Lars Williams, distillery founder, 1997: I had postulated a scenario in which we built two extra apartments in the space and we could live there rent free. It turned out people were pretty excited about that.
Greer Goodman, interior designer, 1997: Lars’s dad had been doing this for decades in Tribeca, getting properties in various ways, so Lars was the only one who knew how to do anything when it came to construction.
Nuxoll: They were asking for $3,200 a month for 10,000 square feet, and we got a ten-year lease on the space.
The building’s new fourth-floor tenants incorporated their venture as Peter’s Car Corp., and for the first several months, they spent their days wiring the space with electricity and installing plumbing and drywall.
Nuxoll: There was what was essentially a sweatshop in the basement; the first floor was vacant. The second floor was Mr. Yee, this totally wonderful guy. He owned a big warehouse space called Mr. Yee’s Treasure Chest filled with the little plastic animals and robot frogs they used to sell on Canal Street. The third floor was half vacant, and a group we called “the Europeans” moved in less than a year after we did. They were like the old kids on the block—28 while the rest of us were all 22. And on the other side of the fourth floor, there was a woman who had signed a lease on another 10,000-square-foot space. She wasn’t living there; she was just building out apartments to rent.
Williams: The people below us were Swiss German filmmakers. In the back of their apartment, they built a giant glass swimming pool, and they were making an underwater film for six months.
Nuxoll: I was actually the first person who moved in, before we had walls. I’d just wake up in the morning, do drywall and then go to work—one of us was an actor, another a chef. We built all the walls by hand, we did all the floors by ourselves, we did most of the electrical, even. I went back there a few years ago and was like,
That’s the shitty outlet I put in. We did a good job—there were no disasters, no electrical fires, no burst pipes. Our plan was always to take about a quarter of it and rent it out immediately.
Goodman: In October ’97, I was living on 14th Street between First and Second Avenue. I had dreams in my head of Flashdance, being Irene Cara in a loft with broken windows, somewhere industrial, and Dan said, “Hey, we just got this space.” I immediately got on the L train. Looking back on it now, it was like a closet that had a toilet and a plank with a kitchen sink. Dan and I ran down to the ATM, and I got the cash.
Nuxoll: A clear indicator that this was a vacant area—other than the pack of feral dogs that lived down the block—was that
livery-car drivers seemed to think our block was a good spot to take prostitutes to do whatever they were going to do. It was happening a lot, and it was a problem because they would throw their condoms out their windows.
Marks: The first year was not that different from squatting. It was still a factory. There were still people working in the building, like garment workers, so the heat would run out on Friday at like six, and you would have to get through the weekend.
Williams: Literally, the glass of water next to my bed would ice over.
Marks: We built these units, and the first person who lived there was a guy named Rand and his girlfriend, Katrina, and they had a dog. The dog was weird-looking. And the other tenants were these two sisters.
Goodman: They were tough; they had two ferocious-seeming pit bulls. They drove a yellow SUV. They built this funny situation—three rooms, then space above—and lived there for a while before subletting it out to this other guy. He was super-fun but totally a cokehead, gambling addicted, definitely dabbling in some notaboveboard shit.
Nuxoll: In less than a year, we had a place that we could also throw just, like, massive parties in. We did screenings on the roof of early work, what would become Rooftop Films—Debra Granik, who did Winter’s Bone, Sean Baker’s early short films—and we had live music beforehand.
Marks: We made these flyers for parties and would hand them out to our friends. In June ’98, I remember going to the corner to get a 40 and looking toward Bushwick Avenue and seeing people just streaming toward me. I was like, Oh fuck.
Nuxoll: We charged $5, but when there’s 700 people, that’s enough to pay for the free beer. We’d have bands like Parts & Labor and variations on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing in different rooms. We hired security that was all Golden Gloves boxers. One of the landlords actually came to one of our first parties.
Within six months of us moving in, there were a couple of real-estate professionals who got long-term leases throughout the building and had hired contractors to build out spaces, but more like straightup for-profit endeavors—just building like nine 1,000-square-foot apartments. It was fly-by-night, get-rich-quick mini realestate deals, and there was tremendous churn. I considered us responsible for our tenants; I was making sure these people were good people. But that wasn’t happening in the other spaces.
By the early aughts, the members of Peter’s Car Corp. had all left 255. Meanwhile, the building filled with new young tenants who tended to treat it like a dorm.
Jeff Sharlet, writer, professor, 2001: Dan had a utopian ideal for this thing. He thought there was a correct way, and the correct way was to do really cool things like screen films on the roof. And then there
was a frivolous way. And he was frustrated by people who were being frivolous and not really doing the kind of utopian art things he imagined for that space.
Nuxoll: There was a brief period of time when someone opened up a strip club in the building—it was around ’99 or 2000. These guys had a duplex on the first floor, and they were actually good neighbors; they were just bros. But at least like three nights a week, their place became a strip club. It looked like some sort of mix of ’70s strip club mashed up with a Williamsburg loft space. On more than one occasion, we came home and saw the women doing more than just stripping in the stairwell with the clients.
Sharlet: I remember at one point, someone was having a party and they put up signs in the halls asking for women who lived in the building to volunteer to—well, as I recall, they were gonna set up cages, and they were going to have the women be cage dancers. I was like, Oh, great. Ironic misogyny.
Nuxoll: In the early stages, it was mostly people who wanted to be artists in New York City who needed some space to work, who didn’t have a ton of money and were willing to explore. The second and third groups of people who moved into the spaces below us were just, frankly, spoiled brats. There were so many different parties happening—the cacophony could get numbing. Saturday morning, Sunday morning, there’d be vomit in the stairwells. It was Lord of the Flies.
II . Around 2000, as 255 was becoming packed, young people began moving into the building across the street, 248 McKibbin. Like 255, the apartments were flimsily arranged loft spaces where three residents might each pay around $500 a month plus utilities for a 900-square-foot apartment.
Goodman: When other building owners caught wind of what was starting to happen out there, everybody started realizing they were sitting on cash cows.
Michael Stout, designer, 2002: My friend Ben was moving up to start grad school at NYU, so I said I’d look first for places for us to live. I don’t remember how I found 248— probably The Village Voice—but I saw a topfloor corner unit and thought we could build it out the way we wanted to.
Ben McClure, wine brand ambassador, 2003: There were basically two walls of windows, so the light would just pour in. Michael at the time was working for a photo agency, so photographers would come do shoots—and that would supplement our income. Cat Power did a photo shoot with my cat.
Francis Stallings, circus performer, 2004: Some people left their spaces all open and big, and some people cut them into these hobbitlike, Fraggle Rock–type things. I ended up finding everything I needed here, and by “everything I needed,” I mean friendships. And there was an endless rotation of attractive people to sleep with.
The new residents quickly discovered just how hands-off the management companies—Carnegie Management at 248 and Bamboo Hills at 255—were.
Chris Carr, photographer, artist, 2008: I first came to visit 248 in 2005. There was a party on the roof with fire-spinners and DJs and live music; people were hanging out on top of the elevator shafts, where you could easily fall right off the building. I went downstairs and ran into these crust punks who were living six or seven people per twobedroom apartment with graffiti all over that read, you know, your mom licks dog
nuts. There was a music studio upstairs; there was a film studio on the bottom floor. I’d never seen anything like it.
Ryan Hunter, writer, director, 2005: I moved into the basement that year. My rent was $300, and the apartments down there didn’t have their own bathrooms or kitchens—there was a communal bathroom and a communal kitchen down the hall. There wasn’t a proper bedroom area, either. We had to build a little four-foot second floor ourselves.
Tom McDonough, schoolteacher, 2007: There were concerts multiple times a week on the roof in the summer. There was a half-pipe or a quarter-pipe in one of the second-floor lofts, and skateboards would routinely fly out the window. There was a speakeasy in the mix.
Aaron Watkins, actor, former bric TV host, 2004: As soon as I moved in, I noticed that it smelled like weed—but not just a whiff. It made you think of neon green; it was offensively odorous. Then one day, there was a leak in the basement that was so bad that water was coming into my downstairs neighbors’ apartment. The super found out the leak was coming from the apartment next door, opened the door to the place, and said, “I wish I didn’t see that.” Turns out the whole apartment was a grow house.
Carr: In between when they got found out and when the cops came and took the rest, they forgot to lock the door, and people raided it. I got sent photos of people walking out with branches of weed, garbage bags of weed.
Hunter: There was this guy that went by the name of Dirt who was a performance artist—you’d see him in the hall inside of a latex bubble or jumping around on industrial stilts. He ate fire, he spun fire. He had been on Letterman for “Stupid Human Tricks” or something.
Stallings: I saw one guy shoot bottle rockets out of his butthole on the Fourth of July. I was kind of impressed.
Chris D’Acunto, art director, painter, 2009: Soon after I moved in, I turned 24. My roommates and I decided to have a “TwentyFour Loko” party—this was soon after they’d banned the real stuff, but there was a liquordistribution center down the street, and they had some left. I woke up on the roof the next morning wearing this denim outfit that the super used to paint the apartments.
Carr: One year, on New Year’s Eve, I rented a coach bus and brought people up from D.C. to party. It was spread out over three floors, and we had performers and live events in every apartment. Once you got in the building, if the door was open, it was like, Go in and rock out.
Watkins: The bus left D.C. at 6 p.m., got to New York at 10 p.m., and at 4 a.m., the DJ announced, “If you’re going back to D.C., the bus is leaving. Everybody else, let’s party!”
The trouble with the hands-off approach was that the buildings, whose warehouse floors had been converted into living spaces by a mix of 20-somethings and sloppy contractors, were basically inhospitable. (Both management companies said any alterations to the apartments that violated building code occurred without their consent.)
Stallings: Once, the guy upstairs tried to move his toilet, and we had urine leaking through the ceiling. And whenever his dog peed on the floor, it would leak. After they finally kicked that guy out, they did major demolition, and our ceiling started cracking. Things started falling on us, including maggots. [Carnegie denies this.]
Hunter: It would flood if it rained hard. The apartment next to ours was especially susceptible, so they were sort of our canary in the coal mine. If we heard them freaking out and, you know, throwing sandbags in the hall, we knew the water levels were rising and coming our way. I think probably everybody in our apartment had a computer that was arranged to sit a few inches off the ground. [Bamboo Hills says the leak was repaired.]
Carr: All types of things would go wrong. Once, some people had snuck into a room to make out during a party, and they fell through the floor right into the karate studio downstairs.
Stallings: The whole place used to be an old sewing factory, and sometimes my socks get caught on needles stuck in the floor. I get a tetanus shot on a regular basis.
D’Acunto: Those giant windows would cook the place in the middle of the day. I woke up on that roof a couple of times with my feet in a kiddie pool.
Stout: Once, during a heat wave, our candles were melting. We called our friends downstairs and told them about our candles and then they told us their records were melting. I went down there, and they in fact were.
D’Acunto: And the walls were paper, paper thin. I had my parents crash with us for the night once. Our neighbors at the time were these dubstep-tech freaks. They were always reading Wired magazine, they sold drugs, they were renting out this bunk-bed loft space above their refrigerator—just total friggin’ weirdos. Anyway, my parents in the morning were like, “I couldn’t sleep all night. These people were playing this terrible piano next door!”
McKibbin’s bedbug issues became public knowledge in 2007, shortly after residents posted about it on one of the building’s now-defunct Myspace pages.
D’Acunto: Those dubstep guys kept cycling through people, and one of my Australian roommates came up to me and said, “Uh, hi, Chris. Do you know what these little dots are here?” I knew what they were because they were in a perfect straight line. Everybody had to bag up their clothes; it was stupid. That’s when we had to leave.
And then there was crime—both in the building and outside it.
Goodman: For the first couple of years when we were up there on the fourth floor, nobody paid us a lick of attention. As there was more and more gentrification, more and more people being ostentatious, that’s when there started being altercations. Our car was broken into. I was mugged at gunpoint.
Hunter: One night, two or three people broke into our place while we were asleep.
They stole this prop revolver, which I’m sure they thought was a real gun; one of my roommates, Johnny, was a prop master. I hope they never used it because I think if someone tried to load it, it could actually hurt someone.
But robberies weren’t the only reason law enforcement showed up at the lofts. In 2011, the FBI searched a top-floor 255 McKibbin apartment as part of a wider raid across the city and beyond on the international hacker group Anonymous. The hacker was not found, although the New York ‘Post’ reported that the apartment’s previous tenants had included members of the band Broken Glow.
Garrett Deming, music teacher, former Broken Glow member, 2010: About a week before our lease was up, we found this place out in Bed-Stuy next to the Marcy Projects. We had been in the apartment for about a month when my bandmate got this message from someone on Facebook that said, “I think someone was looking for you at McKibbin—and they looked official.”
Dave Colon, journalist, 2010: I came home early one morning, like 6 a.m., and I saw these guys in FBI hats running in with extremely large guns. I was thinking, Am I hallucinating this? It turned out this person [they were looking for] was somehow maybe involved in Anonymous.
Deming: The rumors were spreading around. Some thought we were dangerous underground guys; some thought we were underground heroes. It’s a good story—a vigilante rock band running two steps ahead of the FBI—but no one in the group was tech savvy. We could use Pro Tools and mix a record, but as far as getting involved in cyberespionage? Nah.
III .
Muggings, flooding, and infestations aside, the McKibbin Lofts’ reputation kept growing. In 2008, the New York ‘Times’ put a story about the lofts on its front page. With the attention came a mix of locals and out-of-towners who were willing to pay nearly $1,000 a month to “live the Brooklyn lifestyle.”
Stout: We were subletting one of the bedrooms in our place and noticed we were getting a lot of inquiries from Europeans. One girl who moved in was, it turns out, Mick Jones’s daughter. Roberta’s opened around 2008, and I think that was kind of the tipping point.
Watkins: Around 2010, thanks to Facebook events, suddenly every single person was throwing a party. There was an uptick in the amount of people, but people
weren’t vibing the way they used to. All of a sudden, the sense of community was gone. It went through the roof, the amount of people, and you didn’t know anyone. It was not a good time. Residents soon found the buildings’ management companies were attempting to rein in the anarchy. In 2013, Bamboo Hills posted flyers in 255 threatening to call the police on unsanctioned parties, and two years later, complaints from 248’s neighbors led to a shutdown of tenants’ access to the roof. Everyone has a different story about why it got shut down.
Carr: People threw TVs, bicycles, all types of stuff off the roof. Someone threw a mattress out the window; he didn’t feel like carrying the mattress down the steps, and I guess the elevator was broken at the time.
Jason Donovan, karate instructor, 2003: I mean, you’ve got a mom walking her kid to the train for school and a television set comes flying off the roof at 6:30 in the morning because somebody’s still partying up there? That’s not ideal. That actually happened more than once. Plus, there was a suicide attempt. [Carnegie denies that anyone ever jumped off the roof.]
Stallings: And there’s a church right behind the building, so a lot of the stuff that came off the roof would land on the church.
Jose Diaz, 248 superintendent, 2010: The priest would get very mad.
Jason Troisi, fashion designer, 2014: I think the story goes that our roof at 255 got shut down because somebody supposedly decided to shave their dog up there and its fur clogged the drains. Many factors changed life at McKibbin: Facebook events, the surge of new lofts elsewhere in the area, rent hikes (by 2016, the average rent had shot up to somewhere around $1,200 per person), the roof shutdown. But the consensus among several residents is that everything shifted when people started realizing they could make real money renting their lofts out on Airbnb. By the middle of the decade, city inspectors were making regular appearances on the block.
Watkins: Everybody had an Airbnb account in case they needed it. So if your roommate up and left, you could just rent the room out for a while—that kind of thing.
Carr: But eventually, it turned into a commercial endeavor. People were renting apartments just to Airbnb them, and the landlords had to know what was going on because you could see all the people with their luggage out front.
Bamboo Hills: Not to our knowledge.
Carnegie: Not to our knowledge and not with our consent ... there were a handful of
times DOB came to investigate tenants renting out their apartments with Airbnb.
Carr: So I think they started raising our rents to accommodate for that fact.
Troisi: There was this one guy who had 30 of those Ikea bunk beds in his loft, and at any given time, there’d just be like 15 to 20 people living in there. He was essentially running a hostel.
Watkins: His name was Frankie, and don’t get me wrong—he was a cool guy. But one day, I looked out the door and realized the whole street was people getting out of cars, looking up at the building, and walking in. There’d be five or six Ubers at a time—German couples, families, strollers. At one point, I believe he had an entire loft in 248 rented exclusively for people’s luggage.
Carr: One time, these people carrying suitcases walked right into my apartment. I said, “How can I help you?” They said, “Uh, where’s the hostel, McKibbin Hostel? Where can I check in?” I’m like, “This is my apartment.”
Watkins: He was approaching people to be a part of his scheme, too—offering to put bunk beds in other people’s apartments. And they were taking him up on it and dividing their places up. A year later, everything shut down. The Department of Buildings basically said, “Oh, hell no.” In recent years, everyone from Blue Bottle Coffee to Netflix has signed a lease in East Williamsburg; the nearby Milk Factory has a unit on the market for nearly $2 million. The companies running the McKibbin buildings have apparently taken notice.
Skot Video, video editor, 2017: The basement is sort of the touchstone for what they’re trying to do with the rest of the building. They’re not just trying to clean it up; they’re trying to modernize it. There’s construction everywhere, and on the top floor, which has great views, they turned three apartments into one huge apartment.
Phen Grant, graphic designer, 2019: In the unit across from mine, they put in a new floor, the kitchen has subway tile, and they completely gutted the bathroom—there’s a freestanding bathtub plus a shower.
Video: Now we have two Project Runway contestants living in the building.
McDonough: I remember seeing the first stroller in McKibbin—this must’ve been around 2011—and being like, What?! Now there are children I see regularly who know my dog’s name and say hi.