Pacha New York has cleared its final permits and its liquor license, and it opens this month at 140 Stewart Avenue in East Williamsburg, the industrial block that used to be home to the Brooklyn Mirage. The club is arriving with a $27 million, decade-long commitment, and Pacha has said where the money goes: $24 million over 10 years for transportation, safety, sanitation, and guest services, and $3 million for Brooklyn arts organizations, parks, youth programs, and neighborhood initiatives, as Patch reported.
The State Liquor Authority granted the temporary license on June 2, and the operation that opens is a deliberately smaller one than the venue it replaces. Capacity is capped at a combined 8,145 people, about 5,326 outdoors and 2,819 in the indoor room now called Brooklyn Hall, roughly 2,000 fewer than the Mirage was allowed, owner Kabir Mulchandani told the Brooklyn Paper. Pacha scrapped the Mirage’s elaborate build for a single-stage design, unveiled by Brooklyn Magazine after the license win, and added a 23-foot acoustic wall to push sound off the surrounding blocks, per Greenpointers. The operational pledges include free shuttle service to transit hubs in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, expanded sanitation, AI-powered capacity monitoring, a private ambulance and an onsite infirmary at events, TIPS certification for bartenders, and Narcan and OUTSMART training developed with the city’s Office of Nightlife. Pacha is also running a community hotline and a resident email line.
The site carries a heavy recent history. The Brooklyn Mirage, run by Avant Gardner, never opened for its 2025 season: the May 1 grand reopening was scrapped hours before doors, with camera crews already inside, after the Department of Buildings flagged 109 objections across two audits and called the designers “incompetent,” per Brooklyn Magazine’s reconstruction. Avant Gardner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that August, and the structure was demolished in October. Two years before that, in the summer of 2023, two 27-year-olds, Karl Clemente and John Castic, were found dead in Newtown Creek after nights connected to the Mirage; police found no evidence of foul play or any link between the cases, as The FADER documented. FIVE Holdings, the Dubai-based hospitality company Mulchandani chairs, took over the site in early 2026 in a deal Brooklyn Magazine valued at $135 million.
The license Pacha won is not a clean one. The SLA attached conditions to the temporary permit, per Brooklyn Magazine: one show per night except on select holiday weekends, no pyrotechnics, street cleaning within a three-block radius after events, monthly reporting on ticket sales, complaints, and capacity, and a public walkthrough with the community board. Pacha also formally surrendered Avant Gardner’s old license, cutting the legal tie to the Mirage. The temporary license, the Certificate of Occupancy, and the venue’s two Temporary Place of Assembly certificates all expire around August 30, 2026, per the Brooklyn Paper, so the club is effectively opening on a trial the state revisits at the end of the summer.
At an April Community Board 1 hearing, some residents pressed the operators over noise, crowding, and the site’s safety record, as Bushwick Daily reported. Mulchandani’s pitch was that the building was never the problem. “There’s nothing wrong with the venue or right with the venue. It’s about who runs the venue,” he told board members, as the Brooklyn Downtown Star reported, asking the room for “a chance” and saying “it’s the management that deserves the blame,” per the Brooklyn Paper. “We did not want to take any of those risks, so de-risked it, reduced capacity, to make sure safety is the first priority,” he said of the smaller layout.
The opening is already mostly spoken for. Pre-opening events with Rampa’s UNLOCKED and UNBLOCKED ran June 13 and 14, and the official opening weekend, with Michael Bibi on June 20 and Black Coffee on June 21, has largely sold out, with the venue’s ticketing page for the Bibi night showing only a final release of general-access tickets on the Pacha New York site.
The conditions on that temporary license reset in August. The monthly noise, complaint, and capacity reports, plus anything logged with the venue or the community board, are what the SLA weighs when the license comes up for renewal. Pacha’s community hotline and resident email are on its own site at pacha-nyc.com, and Community Board 1 is where the public record gets built before that August review.
Featured image: Courtesy of Pacha New York
