Live-music venues worth the trip in Brooklyn, New York

The 1928 movie palace that hosted Ella Fitzgerald and Chuck Berry, a college gym for sixty years, restored in 2024 as a 2,700-cap concert hall.

A 1929 Loew’s Wonder Theatre in Flatbush, dark for 38 years and restored in 2015, now a seated room for over 3,000 that hosts touring acts.

Prospect Park’s WPA-era bandshell, home of the free Celebrate Brooklyn! series since 1979, where summer nights pair national headliners with the trees.

BAM’s 1908 opera house books a handful of touring musicians a season, from Natalia Lafourcade to the Philip Glass Ensemble, in a gilded 2,100-seat room.

Brooklyn’s arena, opened by Jay-Z in 2012, is the borough’s stop for arena tours, with a steel-latticed oculus over the plaza.

A skatepark under the Kosciuszko Bridge that Bowery Presents turns into a 10,000-cap outdoor stage each summer, with dance headliners and the CBGB Festival.

Bowery Presents’ 1,800-cap room in a converted East Williamsburg steel plant, the venue LCD Soundsystem has used for multi-week residencies.

A Polish National Home ballroom in Greenpoint where pierogies are sold at the bar and the wooden dance floor draws a steady run of indie and metal tours.

Since 1978 the home of New York’s improvised and experimental music, now in a restored Art Deco YWCA theater in downtown Brooklyn.

The Williamsburg room where Billie Eilish played an early New York show, still the city’s bellwether for breaking indie acts.

A Park Slope back room the size of a living room that has presented global, jazz, and Balkan music nightly since 2002.

A church-pew folk theater in Red Hook that is the city’s roots and old-time hub, where Jake Blount and Nathan Salsburg play to a hundred people.

Todd P’s second-floor room where the elevated train rolls past the stage, a surviving flagship of Brooklyn’s DIY era.

The three-tier 650-cap room that began as Northsix, where arena acts still book warm-up shows.

A musician-owned Bed-Stuy bar with two sets nightly, where kora master Yacouba Sissoko and Seamus Blake play for a suggested donation.

Sixteen lanes, fried chicken, and a 600-cap stage in a Williamsburg ironworks, the original of the chain, with jam, funk, and tribute bookings most nights.

A multi-room Bushwick warehouse from the Glasslands crew, with a 200-cap Zone One for rising bands and a bigger Hall for club and live headliners.

A Wilson Avenue bar-venue with a proper stage and vegan kitchen, booking punk, cumbia, and garage bills up to seven nights a week.

A downtown Brooklyn nonprofit theater for experimental and avant-garde music, presenting artists like the No-Neck Blues Band and its own residents.

A spring-isolated concrete hall inside a Williamsburg sawdust factory, built for new music and hosting John Zorn and Questlove alike.

A railroad-car-shaped back room in a former Williamsburg candy store, with free nightly sets from songwriters and small bands.

A Gowanus hi-fi listening room whose custom sound system draws ambient and experimental headliners like William Basinski and Suzanne Ciani.

A queer-owned room on the Bushwick–Ridgewood line whose bills run from indie pop to noise rock, with touring acts like Lomelda passing through.

A Williamsburg honky-tonk with free country, bluegrass, and western swing every night and touring Americana acts dropping in.

A multi-floor Bushwick bar with a stage that runs cheap, near-nightly bills of touring punk, garage, and indie bands.

A three-room East Williamsburg complex that books hardcore, R&B, and Latin nights, with the main Monarch stage landing acts like Quicksand.

The velvet-lined room behind Turk’s Inn in Bushwick, where World Music Institute and indie promoters book global acts.

A Williamsburg bar with a back-room stage, a taco truck in the yard, and Rev. Vince Anderson’s Monday-night residency, booking new indie bands nightly.