Once typically in warehouse buildings on the edges of towns, the rehearsal-studio business has become like the boutique hotel sector in recent years. As the music industry’s revenue stream has shifted from recordings to live performance, the live show has taken on new importance and new expectations. Even weekend pub bands show up with MIDI-run light fixtures, backing tracks and mini line arrays, emulating the prodigious spectacles that tours now routinely truck from stage to stage, all programmed and tuned during rehearsals that increasingly take place in nicely appointed spaces with concierge services just outside the studio door.
Pursuing a high-end rehearsal business in Manhattan’s turbulent real estate landscape can be challenging. At Boulevard Carroll Entertainment Group, Anthony Cioffi and Kevin Curry oversee the ultimate luxury in Manhattan: space. Seven rehearsal rooms (ranging from a 235-square-foot practice room to a 2,050-square-foot hall with its own lounge and windowed production room) cover most of the 17,500 square feet on the sixth floor of the loft-like former warehouse building on West 55th Street. Curry says this location brings the city’s musician corps down from their suburban homes in Rockland and Putnam counties, whereas they were once clustered on the island’s West Side during New York’s glory days of record making (the now-gone Media Sound, Hit Factory and A&R Studios had been a few blocks from here). It’s bigger than Carroll’s first rehearsal spaces at West 41st St. and 9th Ave. in 1945, when they were frequented by big bands, Manhattan’s jazz elite and the casts of Broadway shows whose theaters were a few blocks away.
Any high-end touring musician or pit player in the last half of the 20th century would have spent some time in, or with backline rental items from Carroll’s, who in 2016, joined with Boulevard Professional. The latter, founded in 1986 by Cioffi and his late brother James, provided 20,000-plus square feet of space across the Hudson River. Also, its live sound and backline gear (from L-Acoustics, DiGiCo, Avid, Yamaha, Shure and two dozen other brands) has regularly been out on the road with artists including recent clients Mumford & Sons, Michael Bolton and Darlene Love, and installed into scores of regional theaters, houses of worship and offices. In other words, Cioffi, Curry (and Kevin’s brother Tim, also a partner in the business) established businesses in the two most robust pro audio service sectors of the moment, rehearsals, rentals and installations. In terms of inventory and space, it’s a formidable array, yet faced with New York’s insane real estate market.
Since 2005, the music industry’s fortunes shifted towards live performance over record sales and meanwhile, the infrastructure for show production has undergone a seismic shift. Soundcheck, Nashville’s massive 162,000-square-foot rehearsal palace on the Cumberland River, in recent years has added another 30,000 square feet of rehearsal space in Austin; Los Angeles’ Swing House celebrated its expansion to 22,000 square feet of space; Chicago’s Fort Knox has grown to a massive 165,000 square feet, with 125 rehearsal “suites” that range from 250 square feet to a canyonesque 5,000, and two years ago opened a second location in Nashville, where Silver Point Studios operates a 40,000-plus-square-foot rehearsal facility. Finally, the 52,000-square-foot Rock Lititz Studio production rehearsal facility in Lititz, PA actually has its own boutique hotel. These all attest to the live music market’s need for high-level rehearsal spaces.
A Modular Approach to Space
“There was such a demand for rehearsal space developing at the time that we decided it made sense to combine what we had,” says Cioffi of the venture, which he characterizes as “a merger of equals.” “The idea was to locate the equipment inventory in New Jersey, where it’s just a short drive away, and use the Manhattan space to expand the rehearsal business.”
A reconstruction of the floor minimized noise and vibrations to the floor below and provided the new spaces with a high degree of flexibility. Copper, Cat-5/6 and fiber cabling run between the rooms through the walls, with HMA, Dante and BNC panels on the walls, allowing AV connectivity between the seven rehearsal rooms. For complex productions, this allows musicians to rehearse in one room while dancers review choreography in an adjacent studio, with the FOH and monitor consoles set up in one of the smaller practice spaces or in the production “control room” space next to Studio 6, the largest of the rooms. This kind of modularity is one of the ways that a rehearsal facility in space-challenged Manhattan can compete with some of the emerging rehearsal palaces in the Midwest, where space is less of a premium.
Walk to Work
On the other hand, says Cioffi, just being in Manhattan is its own advantage. “People like Paul McCartney and Sting like to walk to work,” he says, referring to two of the artists who’ve used Boulevard Carroll since it opened. Others include Phish, Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar and Chance The Rapper, with U2 the first users of the largest studio just ahead of its 2017 tour marking 30 years since the release of their Joshua Tree album, adding that many top touring artists have residences in the city. That certainly also applies to the Broadway shows that rehearse there regularly, most recently West Side Story and Waitress. In fact, adds Curry, the city’s pre-eminent position as the locus of theater in America is another advantage of having a Manhattan location. “There are also network television shows that originate on the island.” He points out that, as the music segments on shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon become as important for selling tickets as they once were for selling CDs, artists doing fly dates at these shows will often book time the day before the programs’ tapings to hone a new song or two, or to rehearse with some local artists who’ll perform with them on the show.
As typical touring productions have become more complex, to maximize space, Boulevard Carroll takes advantage of the building’s loading docks and its two car-sized freight elevators to make load-ins fast. Then its small fleet of box trucks can move bulky items such as road cases to the NJ warehouse. “They keep only what they need for rehearsals, and we send the rest out to the warehouse until they need it,” says Cioffi. “You don’t need to be fighting a 53-footer in Manhattan.”
Plusses such as fantastic restaurants and other great glitz go with being in Manhattan, but the costs are never far behind. A condition of many commercial leases in New York is that tenants are asked to pay their portion of a building’s real estate taxes — one-sixth, in their case — on top of a six-figure annual rent. It contributes to the facility’s rates, which average $85 to $275 per hour, depending on studio size — more than what customers in non-coastal cities pay. Curry says for most of their clientele, that’s not a barrier. “When you’re in New York, you know what it costs to be in New York,” he says. On the other hand, “you never know when someone is going to offer your landlord $120 million for the building and, boom, just like that…” Curry says with a flip of an upturned hand. “That’s New York.”
There is local competition. Lititz is 160 miles from Times Square; S.I.R. has backline rentals in a dozen U.S. cities and rehearsal studios in five of them, including its flagship NYC location, where the 13,600-square-foot Stage 37 is used for event production; production rehearsals have taken place at Hangar E at the old Stewart AFB 50 miles north of NYC and the armory in Teaneck, NJ. “Places like those have the height you need to do production rehearsals, but you still have to get there,” counters Cioffi. And Curry points out that while most of the large rehearsal facilities are geared towards touring, much of Boulevard Carroll’s work is preparing for major shows that will take place in the immediate area, such televised Christmas and New Year’s live events at Rockefeller Center, Radio City and Times Square, and regular events for Saturday Night Live’s musical guests. “We can also set up production facilities elsewhere for artists who want to do the music rehearsals here,” he adds. That they did just that for David Byrne’s American Utopia, a limited-run Broadway show for which they found a theater 80 miles away in Pennsylvania for its production rehearsals while the television front man and his musicians and actors worked out parts in the city.
Dealing with Changes
Most recently, with the pandemic descending on the country and in particular New York City and the live-music industry, the Boulevard Carroll Entertainment Group has partnered with Michael Andrews AV to create a turnkey broadcast studio, intended for live streaming, virtual conferences and other applications. All are controlled remotely, so clients can host their next webinar from Boulevard Carroll’s completely sanitized environment that meets all CDC and federal requirements.
Boulevard Carroll’s thriving secondary businesses include being a prop house supplying items for department-store window displays and for TV productions done at local soundstages like the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Silvercup in Queens. Like all New Yorkers, they known how to maximize the limited spaces the city offers. And Cioffi and Curry also have enough of the native Damon Runyon charm needed to leverage that location at a time when rehearsal studio competition is red hot. “I’ve seen some of the really big places, and they’re nice,” says Cioffi, standing in front of the studio’s autograph wall with signatures by Janet Jackson, Dion, Beyoncé, Shaggy and others. “But you still want to be back in the city for dinner.”
For more info, visit www.boulevardcarroll.com.
