Flatiron Festival | June 11-22, 2025
The venue
Gotham Arts
In the midst of the pandemic, Gotham Arts' Founder & Artistic Director Jonathan DePeri went on a search — to find the ideal space that could serve both as concert hall and as home. In the serenely grand Ladies' Mile historic district in Flatiron & Chelsea — so-called over a century ago because it was considered safe for society ladies to shop there alone — was found an old building, with old bones, formerly a department store annex —that could be converted to a new use in the twenty-first century.
Thus was Gotham Arts Loft conceived as a new venue, a temple to music as well as a place where musical inspiration could reach new heights of intensity, forging more a intimate bond between the performer and the audience than could ever be possible in a large hall, and harkening back to the grands salons of the past, those residential great rooms of arts patrons for which chamber music, and so much of Western art music right into the 19th century, was created.
As serendipity goes, one fortune tends to follow and build upon another, and so it was that Gotham Arts managed to acquire a historic model D Steinway piano made in Hamburg and resident for a number of illustrious years in Carnegie Hall's celebrated Stern Auditorium in the halcyon days of concerts the decade leading right up to the pandemic. We are delighted to be able to present our art form on an instrument that is able to serve as a supreme vehicle for musical expression and ensemble.
Whether you pick a chair on the 50-seat ground floor, or in the even more superb acoustics on the 20-seat mezzanine perched comfortably above the action, we hope you will feel amid your fellow music lovers a unique and special kind of connection — to the music, its interpreter artists, and one another — and that this remarkable energy will inspire you in ways new and unforeseen, as great artistry is meant to.
