Creative Campus Opens in Former Kickstarter HQ on Kent Street, Awash in Ambition

An ex-crowdfunding giant’s warehouse now houses Brooklyn’s bold new experiment in creative infrastructure.

The sight of tattooed designers and synthesizer-toting producers queueing outside a drab brick building on Kent Street could only mean one thing in North Brooklyn: another attempt to catalyse the city’s creative spirit. This month, 58 Kent Street, once the headquarters of the crowdfunding titan Kickstarter, began a new chapter—as the self-described “campus for creatives,” a members-only hub whose ambition matches the scale of its past occupant. Whether it can do for artists and start-ups what its predecessor did for begoggled inventors and would-be auteurs remains to be seen.

The new campus, nestled in the heart of Greenpoint, promises more than co-working desks and oat-milk lattes. Operators bill it as a haven where artists, writers, and code tinkerers can meet, mingle, and siphon inspiration—part clubhouse, part incubator. Membership is priced competitively for the borough, though hardly at bohemian rates. Only those invited into its inner circle will gain unfettered access; their monthly dues unlock podcast booths, rehearsal spaces, and even a rooftop for what one hopes will be urbane, not cacophonous, gatherings.

The relaunch comes at a delicate moment for New York’s creative classes. Since the pandemic, the city has noisily debated the fate of its “creative economy”—that constellation of freelancers, design studios, producers and makers that generated, pre-Covid, some $110bn for New York’s GDP, per the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Remote work has tugged at the city’s centripetal force, luring talent to upstate hamlets or Miami’s palm-fringed start-up scene. Manhattan rents remain stratospheric, studios perennially unaffordable; even Brooklyn’s fêted creative clusters groan under the weight of rising costs.

The hub’s emergence thus answers both a need and a challenge. On the one hand, it is a living retort to the naysayers who pronounce New York’s days as an artistic mecca numbered. On the other, it must justify its own exclusivity. For every creative soothed by a curated community, there lurks another for whom monthly fees and application forms evoke anodyne WeWorks, not the fabled Chelsea Hotel. Will this model nurture radical art or merely cosset the already-connected?

For Greenpoint, the opening is a sign of the times. The area’s transformation, from derelict industrial backside to home of creative ambition, has been noisily chronicled and roundly debated. That Kickstarter itself decamped from the property underscores the churn: once the poster child for digital-age democratisation, it shrank during the pandemic, laying off staff and going fully remote. The new campus hopes to invert this trend, making physical spaces matter once more—at least for a curated few.

Politically, city boosters will likely seize on the opening as an upbeat artifact. Mayor Eric Adams has made much of “City of Yes” zoning reforms meant to nurture creative industries, though results have been uneven. Greenpoint’s new hub is the sort of low-controversy win policymaking craves: no tax breaks appear to have been offered, and NIMBY opposition—long a Brooklyn specialty—has been muted, at least for now.

Economically, the risks and rewards are more tangled. A “members-only” concept portends a degree of insulation from market tremors and the tepid recovery in commercial real estate. But that model rests on a delicate balancing act: enough buzz to attract paying members, but not so much as to tip into exclusivity-for-exclusivity’s-sake. The proliferation of “creative campuses,” here and in cities like London and Berlin, hints at unmet demand—but also a hunger among landlords to steady retail and office income after Covid’s shock.

More broadly, the hub’s opening invites questions about what passes for urban renewal in the 2020s. Are such spaces catalysts—seeding start-ups and art collectives that spill dynamism into neighbourhoods and, eventually, to city balance sheets? Or do they merely starch the collars of gentrification, rendering edgy communities safe for hedge-fund offshoots and the children of dot-commers? This is an old dilemma in New York, which can never quite decide whether it wants to incubate the avant-garde or simply memorialise it in a press release.

There is also the matter of who gets left out. Invitations and dues, necessary to cover the not-inconsiderable rents of a 29,000-square-foot building, will stymie entry for many. Critics point out that the city’s most consequential creative breakthroughs have come despite such barriers, not because of them. Yet optimism persists—perhaps in the faith that what begins as a club for the well-heeled may, if successful, generate knock-on effects: mentoring, partnerships, the cross-pollination of ideas outside its walls.

A creative laboratory or a velvet-roped bubble?

Nationally, New York’s experiment is hardly unique. Across American cities, private “creative clubs” have sprouted to fill the perceived void left by shuttered institutions and crumbling arts funding. Hollywood has its hothouses, Portland its collectives, Paris its ateliers. Yet none face the same pressure-cooker mix of sky-high costs, diversity demands, and cultural self-image as the Big Apple. London’s similar ventures—Soho House for the creative set—have drawn both adulation and derision, admired for their networking power, derided for their lack of true openness.

Globally, the notion of a “campus” as beacon for the creative classes is gaining currency, but the risk is clear: such efforts may ossify into status symbols, not engines of serendipity. In New York in particular, the symbolic weight of 58 Kent Street is not nugatory. It was, after all, the launchpad for Kickstarter-funded creators whose projects ranged from Oscar-winning documentaries to genre-defining gadgets. The task now is to ensure the new venture matches that legacy in impact, not merely in buzz.

The new project’s fate may in the end be decided not by its founders’ ambitions, but by the unpredictable chemistry of members forced into proximity. Many a “creative lab” has been launched in the city, few have lasted beyond landlords’ next rent hike. The current incarnation has location, some cachet, and a hint of historical destiny; whether this alchemy can overcome economic realities—or the city’s own insatiable drive towards exclusivity—remains hotly uncertain.

For now, the former Kickstarter HQ stands as both experiment and object lesson. In championing curated communities, New York continues its time-honoured habit of trying to engineer the elusive lightning strike that powers its creative economy. If the members-only model succeeds, it might just offer a template for others; if not, the city will merely have witnessed another stylish pivot in the ever-revolving door of gentrification.

We reckon the best hope for this new “creative campus” is not in who it keeps out but in whom—and what ideas—it lets in. As ever, New York’s future will be crafted by those bold enough to build now, but canny enough to remember what has worked before. ■