New York City Mayor Eric Adams suggested the city will take action against the organizers of the Electric Zoo music festival on Randall’s Island, where a weekend of chaos ended with an estimated 1,500 ticket holders crashing the gates Sunday evening after the event reached capacity before they got inside.
The NYPD estimated event organizers oversold the festival’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. “And we will be dealing with them in the next few days based on their behavior and actions.”
The event’s organizers are the same people behind Avant Gardner, an 8,000-person music complex in East Williamsburg that has a history of overselling shows by as much as 33%, according to reports from an independent monitor obtained by Gothamist.
Adams’ comments about the three-day electronic music festival mark a significant shift for the Democratic mayor, who had publicly supported Avant Gardner as recently as March. The facility, which is home to the popular outdoor concert space known as 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 event organizers overselling the festival.
“That caused the issue of some people not getting in,” Chell said Tuesday. “That’s what caused the issue of some people storming the gate, if you will.”
Chell noted this year was the first year Avant Gardner’s owners — including Juergen “Billy” Bildstein — had operated Electric Zoo on their own. The investors behind Avant Gardner purchased Electric Zoo and Made Event, the company that runs the festival, for a reported $15 million just before last year’s festival, according to Billboard.
Following Adams’…
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