LIVING
be adapted for anything from general co-working, to galas, panels, breakfasts, and four-course seated dinners. It’s a flexible area, with milk crates, modular furniture, and room dividers on wheels. The cafe, also on the ground floor, will hopefully open later this year. Expect sustainability to be a big theme. Winding upstairs, there’s a light-filled meditation and yoga room, conference rooms, a cybernetic library “meticulously organized by an interdisciplinary team including technologists, architects, designers, academics, activists, and artists” … and, in the corridor, a homemade mushroom incubator, built using an open-source design from items anyone can pick up in Home Depot. The main co-working bullpen is a shoes-off situation, with more desks, sofas, and lots of light. And to the roof – filled with a labyrinth of milk crates holding ‘mums,
buddleia, sweet potato, sage, rosemary, echinacea, grasses … and the buzz of neighborhood bees. Butterflies, too, are drawn to the roof. They’ve even seen a hummingbird. At the moment, it’s a magnet for pollinators, but they hope to start planting produce next year. “This project has been in the works for a long time,” says Jerone. “We started the renovation process in 2013. Before we were here, it was a construction company on one side and, on the other side was retail and then an office space. “As part of the renovation, we [re-]connected the two buildings. It was very intensive, especially because the downstairs is zoned for public assembly, which means there’s a lot of important safety fire code stuff that we had to do, as well as adding a lot of bathrooms. So that meant there was a lot of plumbing, a lot HVAC that had to be done. It was supposed to be a year, but ended up
DIGITAL EDITION
Above and below: Bees, butterflies, and other pollinators are drawn to the roof garden.
taking us four years.” He describes potential members as “people who would want a place to work from, or a place to cultivate whatever their practice is, whether it’s performing arts or whether it’s visual arts or conceptual art or organization-building or enterprise. But also people who are interested in cultivating relationships. We really want people that are showing up here looking to be a part of it and not just be like a client.” But they’re also open to the neighborhood, for anyone with a hankering to host a large dinner, game night, or movie night. The location, says Jerone, and the building in particular, “just spoke to us. Logistically, it’s centrally located. The double footprint of the building made it plausible to have a meaningful events space. Then you have the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, one that is storied, and that does feel like a neighborhood.” primeproduce.coop
IT’S THE LAW!
One of Prime Produce’s longest running initiatives is PreProBono, which aims to affect social justice by changing the representation of JD [Juris Doctor degree] holders coming out of top-tier law schools. “A lot of people that hold seats of power are lawyers,” explains Jerone. “But if you look at who’s actually graduating from these places, they are, by and large, privileged white men. “So PreProBono cherry picks high-aptitude students from underrepresented backgrounds and we support them to get into law schools. “We provide them with LSAT instruction, admissions consulting, and they connect with a group of like-minded individuals so that they can stick to their values as they matriculate the law school.” The program started in 2008, they started a special fellowship in 2011, and Jerone estimates it has touched a couple of thousand young people. preprobono.org
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