Lafayette & Clermont
Two Brooklyn neighbourhoods that have been putting on shows for over a century — in opera houses, Masonic halls, back rooms and on street corners.
The corner this site is named for is Lafayette Avenue and Clermont Avenue, in Fort Greene. Stand there and you are looking at an eight-storey Masonic temple finished in 1906, three blocks from an academy of music founded before the Brooklyn Bridge existed. Very few street corners in New York carry that much programmed sound in one sightline.
This guide covers Fort Greene and Clinton Hill — neighbouring, often spoken of together, and genuinely different from one another. Fort Greene has the institutions: BAM, the park, the historic district, the Lafayette Avenue spine. Clinton Hill is quieter and more residential, with Pratt at its centre and the good bars strung along Myrtle and Fulton.
What this guide is
It is written by hand and it is deliberately incomplete. There is no attempt here to list every bar. What follows is the set of places and buildings worth understanding if you want to know how the neighbourhood actually sounds — the halls with real history, the rooms that book live music consistently, and how to get between them.
What it is not
It is not a listings feed, and it does not claim to know what is on tonight. Programming in these rooms changes constantly and half of it is one-off rentals. Where you need a schedule, go to the venue directly — every page here says who to check with.
Start here
- The Brooklyn Masonic Temple — the building on the corner, and why it looks like that
- Where the music is — the rooms that book shows, and what each is actually good for
- Bars and late nights — where to go before and after
- The BAM corridor — the cultural district on Lafayette
- Getting here — the subway situation, which is better than you expect