New York City Mayor Eric Adams suggested the city will take action against the organizers of the Electric Zoo music festival. As you surely know, Labor Day weekend was a pretty hectic one for the NYC festival. It all started on Friday, with the cancellation of the whole first day due to supply chain disruptions (some of the stages were not finished yet). As if one crisis wasn’t enough, Saturday had reported 4 hour-will call lines. Sunday was the cherry on top when hundreds of attendees decided to break through the festival’s entrance after the organizers reported the festival had reached its maximum capacity.
Mayor Adams promised to deal with the event’s organizers, which happens to be Avant Gardner owners. The NYPD estimated they oversold Electric Zoo’s 42,500-person capacity limit by 7,000 tickets on Sunday. “It’s unfortunate that the organizers wanted to turn our city into a zoo, and we were not going to allow that to happen”, Adams said during an NYPD briefing on Tuesday.
“we will be dealing with them in the next few days based on their behavior and actions.”
-Mayor Eric Adams.
Adams’ comments about the three-day electronic music festival mark a significant shift for him, who had publicly supported Avant Gardner as recently as March. The facility, which is home to the Brooklyn Mirage, has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks following the death of two concert-goers in the nearby Newtown Creek.
NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell placed blame for Sunday’s gate-crashing directly on Electric Zoo organizers overselling the festival. Chell noted this year was the first year Avant Gardner’s owners — including Juergen “Billy” Bildstein — had operated Electric Zoo on their own. Obviously, there will be more development on this story, as EZoo has been pretty quiet these days.
Stay tuned for more news!
