A new 750-person venue is coming to the Williamsburg waterfront’s Domino Sugar Refinery redevelopment.
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The independent venue, opening on the ground floor of what is known as The Refinery at Domino, is being developed by Mumford & Sons member Ben Lovett’s Tvg Hospitality and Emerson Hospitality. It is expected to open in April.
The space will total 20K SF, half of which will be below grade.
Located at 20 River St., Domino will host concerts and other events, including club nights, comedy, film screenings, and fashion and art shows. The venue also plans to collaborate with local cultural organizations and nonprofits for artist rehearsals, recording sessions and educational programs.
“Williamsburg was my introduction to New York City, as it was for so many artists and musicians twenty years ago,” Lovett said in a statement. “The neighborhood has changed enormously since then, but for decades, people have sought and found community in places like the one we’re building. Domino is our chance to carry that on: somewhere artists can develop ideas, audiences can discover something new, and neighbors feel they belong.”
Williamsburg’s warehouses became a mecca for New York City artists priced out of Manhattan starting in the late 1980s. Former meatpacking plants and factories were transformed into clubs, where hundreds would gather for punk shows and raves.
But the Williamsburg of the folklore is long gone. In 2003, Mayor Michael Bloomberg moved to rezone the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Glossy towers began popping up. Between 2010 and 2025, nearly 28,000 units were built in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, 77% of which were market-rate, according to the Furman Center.
The area’s median household income, after adjusting for inflation, surged from less than $53K in 2000 to more than $110K in 2024 as artists were pushed deeper into the boroughs.
“Neighborhoods change,” Lovett said. “The need for a place like this never does.”
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Founded in 2016, Tvg operates seven other venues, including in Los Angeles and London.
Emerson Hospitality was founded in 2024 by a group of real estate and restaurant veterans, including from Eataly, RFR and AllianceBernstein’s Real Estate Investments Group.
The venue is part of Two Trees Management’s adaptive reuse project of a factory-turned-460K SF office building. The campus includes a 5-acre park and retail.
“The Refinery was the heart of Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront for more than a century, and preserving that history while creating something new and relevant has been central to our vision for the site,” Two Trees CEO Jed Walentas said in a statement. “Williamsburg has an extraordinary and diverse cultural history of its own, and we’ve always believed that arts, music and creative spaces are essential to what makes the neighborhood interesting and vibrant.”
Independent venues were squeezed by the pandemic and multibillion-dollar competitors that secured exclusive artist partnerships and reshaped the market via venue acquisitions and ground-up development. Earlier this year, Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, reached an antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice, which required the company to sell part of its portfolio.
Domino plans to use Dice, a ticketing platform that advocates for price transparency, for its sales and has made a commitment not to take a cut of artists’ merchandise sales.
The venue also plans to establish a cultural board, made up of local artists, to review and guide its programming.
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