UPDATED: Oct. 29, 2018 at 11:02 a.m.

A midnight walk down Euclid Avenue reveals block after block of house parties blasting club remixes and electronic house music. The hip-hop rhythms and lyrical geniuses of Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West cover the street in a blanket of bass. Just a few blocks further east on Euclid, “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire booms out of a second floor window.

But one house off of Euclid is different — the muffled sounds of live guitars emerge from the building’s basement. This is The Ark, one of the Syracuse University community’s off-campus music venues.

Last Friday night, the venue hosted a Halloween-themed show headlined by The Thursday Nights, The Ark’s house band. Syracuse-based bands Heroically Awkward and Settle for Sadler also performed for the crowd of nearly 200 people, all of whom were encouraged to dress in costume.

The Ark is the brainchild of two SU junior sound recording technology students, Ryan McKeown and Noah Steinberg. McKeown, who formerly played keyboards in the SU student band FLOTUS, developed the idea for the venue after playing with the band at another off-campus venue during his freshman year.

McKeown bounced the idea off Steinberg during their sophomore year as roommates, and the two began recruiting friends.

“We slowly built up a nice community of people that are all super hardworking and want to make something as close to professional as you can get in an underground space,” McKeown said.

McKeown and Steinberg were then joined by Kyle Smith, an environmental studies student at SUNY-ESF currently taking a semester off from classes, and Zach Pearson, a junior acting major in the SU Department of Drama.

The four students began planning for The Ark over the summer and started cosmetic and audio preparations in August after moving in for fall semester.

“We spent somewhere between 20 and 25 hours between two people just cleaning the basement, which had roughly 100 years’ worth of dirt and decay built up in it,” McKeown said. Other preparations included repainting floors and walls and constructing an audio board in the basement, McKeown added.

The Ark officially opened the weekend before classes started, with a show headlined by Settle for Sadler. Other acts since then include SU artists Max Marcy and Shallow Alcove and groups on independent tours such as The Brazen Youth and Adventure Lost.

Sebastian Escribano, a sophomore jazz guitar major and lead guitarist of The Homeless Preachers, a band made up of SU students, played at The Ark during their second open weekend. Escribano said he prefers live music over the stock music often played at house parties.

“Live music is totally different than there just being background music,” Escribano said. “Anything could happen. You’ve got to go with the flow and it’s more improvisatory.”

This sentiment was echoed by Pearson, who, besides living in the house, serves as the frontman of the house band The Thursday Nights. Pearson said that The Ark’s shows aren’t a “regular party” because it allows artists to come together in a communal space.

The stereotypical house parties Escribano and Pearson referred to are far from isolated occurrences in the Syracuse social scene. The Princeton Review ranked SU fourth in their 2018 list of the nation’s top party schools. Pearson added that a negative effect of SU’s party scene is a lack of social interaction between students of different majors — something the team of students behind The Ark team hope to combat.

“I think I have a role to play that might provide people with a more holistic experience and show people that if you want to be a part of something, you can create it,” Smith said.

Pearson said he believes this is embodied in The Ark, where higher quality social interaction is one of the perks.

“If you’re at a party making music, having a great time, dancing together with these people, then you can see the humanity in them and that’s a beautiful thing,” Pearson said.

Standing in a corner of the venue’s communal room a floor above the stage, Smith explained that the formation of The Ark filled a void in the underground music community left by the closure of Space Camp, another underground music venue, at the end of spring 2018.

“It’s a tradition that I like to think has been carried on since the days of Lou Reed back in the ‘60s,” Smith said. “The music is the backbone of everything, but I think the community is what it’s all for. It kind of gives it an excuse to exist in a way.”

It’s this underground community of artists that Smith argues is a rejection of the party culture that has been so hotly debated in the wake of the expulsion of Theta Tau from the SU campus. The current culture, which Smith describes as superficial, is also destructive to the greater campus community.

“We realized that there were a lot of people that were kind of disenfranchised that didn’t really have a scene where they felt comfortable,” Smith said. “We thought we might as well just make one and give them a safe space to really be who they want to be.”

To McKeown, the ultimate purpose of The Ark isn’t to make money, but to provide a space for people to build lasting interpersonal relationships — Smith agrees.

“It’s an interesting adventure we’ve got ourselves into,” Smith said. “The overall goal is to reconnect people and try to cultivate an environment and subculture that is thoughtful, intellectual and socially fulfilling.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, The Ark was misnamed. The Daily Orange regrets this error. 

Published on October 29, 2018 at 1:45 am

Contact Jordan: jslazins@syr.edu