Slow Factory Center for Radical Imagination & Systemic Change

Since the inception of the Slow Factory, we always dreamt of opening a physical space.

Part Willy Wonka / Dr. Suess (without the racism), part culture hub, part art center, part performance space, part media studio, part school, and part residency: the institute would be a place where we would host, inspire, and make tangible ideas come to life. It will be a space where our community can gather and where we would host our programs.

A Broken Promise

In 2019, Slow Factory was invited to apply to an RFP to occupy a space in a huge public real estate development in Brooklyn that led us to “winning” the opportunity to negotiate a lease. Slow Factory was to be the anchor tenant and was assigned a large capital allocation towards building out the space with the developer’s contractors (not a grant to Slow).

It was very exciting and a lot of people wanted to cover the story. The incoming mayor of New York, a certain Eric Adams who is now embroiled in corruption scandals, had just been elected and he wanted to tie himself to this major “sustainability” moment—despite having nothing to do with it—by saying “Slow Factory will be an anchor tenant of this project for sustainability.”

In 2020, COVID set us back even further with everything from delays, material scarcity, and more, but we remained hopeful, consistent in our approach, and diligent in building towards this goal. We had no control over the building of the space and relied on the timeline provided to us.

In 2023, close to three and a half years after “winning” the lease, we weren’t any closer than we were in 2019—the floors were still dirt, and there was not even a timeline given for the rest of the project, so even when our space would be “completed” we would be occuying a space within a massive construction site for years to come. Since after a number of years, there had been little material progress — we decided to remove ourselves from the project. This was done privately, given that we had signed NDAs and we couldn’t publicly share anything with anyone. Sadly, a slanderous piece of press circulated lies that we legally couldn’t respond to, lest the landlord withhold our deposit on the space without refunding us. We couldn’t afford losing our space and our deposit.

A New Hope

In 2024, after another year of project planning, and with the promise of a significant grant from a major US granting foundation, we launched a new search and found a new space in Manhattan to establish the first location for the Center.

We found an incredible (albeit much smaller) space and negotiated the lease, and began moving towards finally establishing our space. However, at the last minute, and outside of proper due process, new executives at the Foundation informed us our grant was no longer approved, even though we had already received official notice of approval (this may have been a case of discrimination).