Ten years after it opened, the beloved East Williamsburg music venue Our Wicked Lady will permanently close its doors on July 21.
The COVID pandemic and its aftermath left the gritty but thriving venue with significant financial struggles. Late last year, owners Zach Glass and Keith Hamilton started a fundraising campaign, hoping to raise enough money to keep the venue open while they found a buyer who could keep it running permanently.
By May they had found a group who wanted to buy the venue, and thought it would be saved, Glass said in a video posted on Instagram.
“We were getting ready to make the offer to our landlords when we were kind of thrown a curveball and our landlords told us they were not interested, they did not want the offer, they did not want the venue to continue in this space,” Glass said in the video.
That left them with no choice but to permanently close Our Wicked Lady on the week of its 10th anniversary.
“Obviously it’s not the way any of us wanted this to go,” Glass said. “It’s been an amazing ten years of being here in the community with all of you, and we want to thank everyone, of course, for everything that has happened for the past ten years.”
Hamilton and Glass first met working as managers at Brooklyn Bowl, and opened Our Wicked Lady in what was then an unfinished warehouse with no plumbing or electricity in 2015.
By 2020, the venue had come a long way, and was popular both for music lovers and for up-and-coming bands hoping to break into New York City’s music scene.
Then, the pandemic hit, forcing Our Wicked Lady to close. When it reopened, Glass told Brooklyn Paper in January, people’s behavior had changed — fewer people were going out, and when they did, they spent less money and went home earlier.
“ There’s still a vibrant scene,” he said at the time. “There’s still amazing music being made. There’s still great people going to see those bands. But then they’re just not staying as long afterwards.”
But less income coupled with rising costs of doing business meant Our Wicked Lady couldn’t go on. The venue received an outpouring of support earlier this year — the GoFundMe raised more than $42,000 and a local record label assembled a “Save Our Wicked Lady” charity compilation — but the landlord’s decision to refuse the sale left the venue “dead in the water.”
The venue is going out with a bang. Its final week is packed with performances, with more than 30 bands and musicians slated to appear on its stage over just a few days. One band, Haybaby, was scheduled to play a reunion show at OWL, three years after its members disbanded.
By Tuesday evening, most tickets had already sold out as fans prepared to catch one last show on Morgan Avenue.
Our Wicked Lady’s final night on July 21 is billed as “a final hang” where friends and family can “come share a drink, a laugh, a story, and a good cry.”
The venue’s owners have said they want to stay active in the local music scene — Hamilton said in the May video that they “plan on doing a lot of cool things in the future” — but their exact plans are not yet clear.
