Ask anyone from Melbourne to Malmö. From Paris to Portland. From Tallahassee to Tel Aviv. If a patch of city pavement is experiencing an upswell of creative activity—often led by young, bearded and/or bespectacled entrepreneurs—then it’ll be called “the Brooklyn of [INSERT CITY NAME].” The Drive lives in Brooklyn, the actual Brooklyn, but you won’t find artisanal beard-oil refineries in our midst.
The Drive can be found in the nether region between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and New York Harbor. Rats grow to two pounds around here. When the flood comes, it won’t spare us. But ours is the kind of raw, filled-with-potential corner of New York that makes you dream big. And that’s what The Drive is doing.
Over 50,000 square feet of loft space in Industry City—a revitalized stretch of warehouses built in the Twenties and Thirties—is The Drive’s nerve center and playground. Here, we wrench on things. We go looking for fun. But ultimately, we build a car-culture website that exists beyond the borders of your smartphone, tablet or desktop.
The Drive’s bunker in Brooklyn will be home for meetups, parties, film screenings and uncategorizable, spontaneous happenings year ‘round. We’ve built an auditorium. We’ve built a state-of-the-art video studio for shooting our Volvo-presented news feature, Drive Wire. We’ve got acres of underutilized concrete wharves outside our windows, ripe for burnouts. It’s part and parcel of the space we’ve chosen to call home. In Industry City, we’re surrounded by makers of all stripes: bakers, pipefitters, confectioners, welders, designers, architects, musicians… and yes, the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets are due here any day. Everyone wants a piece of this place; The Drive already has one. A big piece.
What you see here is just a preview of The Drive’s base as it comes together. Stay tuned in coming weeks as we reveal more of our—and your—new home for car culture.