Emma Green

For a period of two and a half years I ran a cultural event space, Sovereign House (sovereign.house), in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a neighborhood known as Dimes Square. 35,000 people attended across 200+ events that we hosted. Sovereign House, for me, became a task of coordinating events and people that have high openness paired with low agreeableness. In other words, contrarians and artists. To manage that chaos in a real life setting, night after night for years was a challenging but a very rewarding experience for me and I want to thank everyone that attended or hosted an event at Sovereign House. I tried my best to only host events that were genuinely culturally valuable and existed outside of the mainstream political or corporate narrative, without being too edgy or cringe. It was a difficult needle to thread. But, hopefully seen throughout the history of events, I got it mostly right. My default mode was to say yes to any group, artist, author, playwright or speaker that needed a venue for free to get their work, art, performance, magazine or ideas out and with an audience of good faith patrons that were genuinely curious.