A Clubstack Production

“Charlotte wants to do something on the bridge.”
“Who?”
“Charlotte de Witte, she wants to do something with me on the bridge.”
“Oh, nice … are you going to do it?”

That’s how I first heard about the bridge rave. Pete and I were smoking a few cigarettes on his porch, shivering in the November chill, while he recited the conversations he’d had with her, slipping in and out of a surprisingly accurate Belgian accent as he got into the details.

At that point, I still didn’t totally understand how it had all come to be. I hadn’t known the backstory that nearly a year earlier, when Pete and I weren’t really speaking, Charlotte de Witte had come across a small renegade party he and a group of friends were throwing on the bridge. No promotion, no headliner; just a speaker, a crowd, and a good day to be outside. She stopped, stayed for a bit, and introduced herself. Then she posted about it.

That moment — brief and casual and completely unplanned — gave Clubstack its first real bump. The following jumped from a few hundred to a few thousand practically overnight. The project was still small and scrappy, but suddenly it had an audience. And more importantly, it had visibility.

Clubstack was never meant to be just another party. It was a platform, a project, a provocation. A way of thinking about dance spaces as more than just events. About floors as ecosystems, as gathering points, as sites of care and intensity and joy. About how we hold each other when the music is loud and the world is too much. The plan had always been to grow slowly, to build a scene from the inside out, allowing meaning to lead, but Charlotte’s involvement sped everything up. She gave the project reach. Her co-sign brought a kind of legitimacy that allowed Clubstack to start promoting the deeper ideas earlier than expected.

Nearly a year after that first meeting on the bridge, while planning her U.S. tour, Charlotte reached out to Pete. She wanted to do something together on the bridge. Something bigger. Something real.

It felt like a long shot when he first told me, but the idea stuck and the plan started to take shape. Over the following months, I checked in here and there as plans slowly came to fruition. Pete would update me on what they were requesting — equipment specs, space needs, cables, and setups that, in those moments, might as well have been in Klingon. As always, underneath it all, the same concern kept coming up: how was it all going to fit in an eight-by-fifteen-foot area that would inevitably be packed with fans?

In the immediate weeks leading up to it, I kept my distance. For someone who presents himself with a cool, go-with-the-flow, “we’ll just see what happens” demeanor, Pete is a type-A person. The equipment rental, the fear of someone getting hurt, overcrowding, or the whole thing getting shut down before Charlotte even rode her bike up to play her one-hour set was something I knew was freaking him out more than he was letting on.

“Bess offered her help,” Pete told me. “She made a whole spreadsheet. Really went producer mode on the whole thing. They think I have my shit together because of it.”

The night before the rave, Pete was playing a set at Dead Letter No. 9. We were walking around in that strange half-hour before he went on, weaving through the usual surreal chaos that fills that place. He was calm but buzzing —  nerves still close to the surface.

He told me how Bess had stepped in when things started to tip from ambitious to unmanageable. She’d hired a couple of ex-military guys for security, brought in some PAs to stand at the bottom of the bridge and keep watch for cops, and helped coordinate everything else in between. Her offer to help was more than generous. It was vital.

By comparison, my offer of help involved picking up a handful of XLR cables from Guitar Center and reassuring him that everything was completely fine as he spent most of the day texting me the same sentence about where and when we were meeting. Sometimes support looks like spreadsheets. Sometimes it looks like showing up, cables in hand, pretending you aren’t mildly afraid of sound tech.

It was one thing for Bess to step in and turn the whole thing into an operation. It was another thing entirely that one of the biggest DJs in the world was even involved in the first place.

For those unfamiliar, Charlotte de Witte is one of the most prominent names in techno right now. A global headliner, label boss, and staple of the major festival circuit, she’s built a career on speed, precision, and sheer sonic force. Her sets are intense and unrelenting, defined by a kind of controlled aggression that has made her a fixture on the biggest stages in the world. She’s closed out Tomorrowland, headlined Awakenings, and regularly performs to crowds on the scale of tens of thousands. Her aesthetic is sharp. Her brand is tightly curated. Everything she does is measured, high-impact, and highly visible.

She’s also part of a very small group of women who’ve broken into the upper echelon of global techno without compromising their identity or sound. Her rise has been deliberate and highly self-directed, and she’s become a symbol of what it looks like to take up space in a genre that still skews overwhelmingly male. She’s not just a DJ. She’s a presence. She’s built a world around herself and holds the center of it with complete confidence.

The idea that she would choose to play a DIY rave on the Williamsburg Bridge, with no barricades, no green room, and no real infrastructure, felt completely absurd on paper, but that’s what made it exciting. It wasn’t about optics or scale. It was about energy. About showing up for something that couldn’t be replicated or bought or streamed. Yes, it was a calculated move. Yes, she understood the value in the contrast between her polished platform and this raw, chaotic setting. But still, she said yes. She showed up.

I’ve never been especially drawn to her music, but that didn’t matter. What moved me was that she showed up for Pete. I’m a fan of my friends’ passions, and anyone who helps bring those passions into the world earns my loyalty. There’s something powerful about watching someone you care about be seen by someone with that kind of reach, not because of status, but because the idea itself was worth believing in. Watching Pete go from spiraling about power supplies and equipment logistics to hugging one of the most in-demand DJs in the world before her set was overwhelming. For that, on that day, I was her biggest fan.

Even if part of it was strategic, it didn’t come across hollow. She didn’t have to be there, but she was. In a scene where authenticity is often curated and filtered, that kind of presence still matters. It was a reminder that not everything has to be polished to be powerful. Sometimes just showing up is enough.

I showed up at 4:00 at the base of the bridge, just like we had discussed, but at the wrong entrance (typical). I was chain-smoking joints near the bike lane entrance when Michael rolled up. We walked down to the pedestrian entrance to find the van emptied out and everyone already on the bridge, with the exception of Jack and Bess, tag-teaming the U-Haul parking job. When we finally joined everyone, we were surrounded by familiar faces and random people who could not stop telling everyone, “We did bridge parties first.”

The upside to having so many people already on the bridge was that I could do what I was always planning to do without feeling guilty: take photos. I am by no means a photographer. Of the 400-plus shots I took on my old, decrepit camera, at least half came out blurry, dark, or completely useless, but I’m someone who needs a task at a party. If no one assigns me one, I’ll assign it to myself.

I gave myself a job — I’d document the day. Not the big sweeping moments, but the small ones. The quiet pride. The joy. The strange little in-between expressions that flicker across people’s faces when they’re laughing and tired and holding it together because they love someone.

Everyone was a little stressed, especially the ones closest to Pete, but the energy shifted as soon as he started to play. That’s when the goofiness kicked in — the kind that only shows up when the pressure breaks and your friend is doing the thing they were meant to do. The kind that isn’t performative or showy, just soft and a little ridiculous and full of love. We were giddy because we were proud, because watching someone you care about pull off something impossible is one of the best feelings in the world. For all the planning and technical stress and moving parts, that feeling is what made it real. That’s what I came to hold onto.

It wasn’t just those of us who loved him who were having a good time. Around 6:00, after Charlotte teased her set, people started pouring in. Dozens turned into hundreds in what felt like minutes. You could see it happening in real time — a steady flood of strangers threaded through the crowd, drinks in hand, drawn by the magnetism of it all. At one point, Sophia and I climbed up onto the fence, trains rattling beneath us, the wind sharp against our faces, and we just stood there grinning, totally overwhelmed. It felt like the city had cracked open. They came because Charlotte was supposed to play, but they stayed and danced because Pete was already doing what he does best.

I think that was the first time I cried that day. Watching someone I’d spent months telling to put himself out there, someone who kept deflecting with “I’m biding my time” standing in front of a roaring crowd, hyper-focused and determined, was too much. He wasn’t just holding it down, he was holding everyone together.

By 7:00, when Charlotte finally rolled up, the entire pedestrian path was jammed. People lined the walkways, crouched on the guardrails, climbed the fencing for a better view. A few held phones above their heads like they were filming a miracle. Bess, Michael, and Andres were doing God’s work, keeping at least one bike lane open, wrangling bodies with gentle urgency as if they’d been training for this job their whole lives. It felt like something holy and completely ridiculous was unfolding in front of us — and somehow, it was working.

At some point during Charlotte’s set, Jack and I climbed into the fenced-off equipment area. We were maybe two feet from the generator, closer to the decks than we probably had any right to be. It was loud and hot and slightly ridiculous, but it felt right, like being at the center of something we helped hold up simply by caring about it this much. I climbed up onto the bridge itself — not the fencing, the actual steel — and spotted Pete standing in the bike lane, just outside the chaos, watching. He wasn’t checking cables or cueing anything; he was just taking it in. I mimed something at him from my perch, and he shot something back — a theatrical shrug. A fake grimace. A perfectly timed “what the hell is happening” look. Even then, in the middle of it all, he was still funny. Still Pete.

Somewhere near the end of Charlotte’s set, I heard a track I recognized. Pete had sent it to me the night before. We’d talked about it in the back of Dead Letter, him nervously half-joking that it might be too corny, then handing me his phone so I could read a poem he’d written in his notes app — the same poem that became the vocal on the track. I had no idea it would be part of her debut album, or that Pete would be featured on it at all. I listened to it on the way home, walking to my Uber in the rain, hearing his voice layered under the beat, soft and sincere, a little hesitant.

It was about the dance floor. About what it can be when we treat it like something sacred. Not just a place to sweat or zone out or look cool, but a space to come back to ourselves and each other. A space that asks for presence. The mission of Clubstack has always carried that energy, even when it’s unstated. That belief that dancing can be a form of care. That how we move and interact with one another can be a kind of prayer.

When I heard it come through the speakers, folded into this huge, roaring moment on the bridge, I lost it. I turned my face away from the crowd just as the rain started to fall a little harder, grateful for the timing. Of all the moments that hit me that day, that was the one that broke me open. Hearing that quiet devotion — the love for dance, for community, for building something real — met by a crowd of people moving together in time was overwhelming. The kind of truth that doesn’t shout, just lingers. If you catch it, it stays with you.

Charlotte’s set was clean and ferocious. Focused. The crowd gave back everything she asked for and then some. People climbed fences, leaned over railings, and tried to make space where there wasn’t any. It could have been a warehouse or a club or a boiler room taping, but it wasn’t. It was the bridge. Even though she was the headliner, it still felt like Pete’s show. Like Clubstack’s show. Like our show. Something that started from a text thread and turned into a pulsing, joyful proof of concept. A reminder that people will show up, even when you’re not sure they will.

The night ended with Pete grabbing the mic and thanking everyone for coming. He told the crowd it was time to go, to leave before they got shut down. Without knowing how precarious the whole thing had been, it sounded like something someone would say before an encore, but it wasn’t. He came back on one last time, and made it clear: it was over. Charlotte was already gone. We had to pack up.

The same crew who had been proudly reminding everyone that they were the original bridge party people ended up leading the breakdown effort, hauling gear with practiced ease and good humor. As the adrenaline wore off, we all softened. People who had been darting around all day with a sense of purpose finally had a chance to laugh, to hang, to enjoy each other’s company. The rest of us lingered, delirious and exhausted, tossing around plans for Thai food, burgers, and pub fries. I got one last photo of Pete, who looked like the most stressed man in New York, but gave a tiny wave goodbye anyway. I walked off the bridge with Ari, talking about the festivals he was working this summer. The sky was still light. My legs were sore. 

I couldn’t stop smiling.

From Our Sponsors

Fact-based news without bias awaits. Make 1440 your choice today.

Overwhelmed by biased news? Cut through the clutter and get straight facts with your daily 1440 digest. From politics to sports, join millions who start their day informed.

Sign up now!