Builders and Gatekeepers

Dylan from Minnesota — a huge street mural, three stories tall, watching over a city that gave the world a prophet and didn't quite know it at the time.

By Michael Dorf | June 14, 2026

I'm on a plane to Toronto, flying north to walk a new space with my architect — a room that could, with enough faith and enough fight, become a music venue — a new City Winery joint. And I'm thinking about Steven Spielberg, who said something on NYT The Daily this morning that I can't shake. He jumps off the cliff first, almost blindly, before he knows the story or the characters. He just starts writing. The story arrives on the way down.

So here I am, typing at Newark as the flight is delayed, not yet sure exactly what I want to say.

But maybe that is the thing. Because much of what I care about right now — building more venues like the one I'm flying to see, the rooftop at Pier 57, the fight over performance rights and paying artists and how, the Knicks coming back game after game — every one of these is somebody choosing to jump. And every one of them is being met, at the bottom of the cliff, by someone whose entire job is to make sure nothing lands or if you do, make it painful.

There are builders, and there are gatekeepers. I think that's the only real divide left.

The gatekeeper's instinct is the status quo, because the status quo is where the money gets collected. Gatekeepers don't usually obstruct out of principle; they obstruct because obstruction is the business model. Every signature required, every permit slow-walked, every blanket license auto-renewed is somebody's revenue line. The builder, by contrast, is trying to change something — to add a room, a stage, a table, a song, a night of joy that didn't exist the day before. Builders make the world larger. Gatekeepers make it narrower and charge admission at the choke point.

That's the whole fight. It isn't ideological. It's directional.

The Knicks won the championship last night, and what stays with me isn't the trophy but the tenacity — not Jalen Brunson alone, but the whole team, refusing to lose the room, refusing to lose the night, coming back and coming back. We did something parallel, in our small way, on the roof at Pier 57: 500 New Yorkers, every night of the Finals, experiencing communal joy together. Spike Lee wrote about that joy recently, more eloquently than I can — the way a city remembers itself when it gathers. You would think the people who run a public park would want that. You would think their job description begins with the word "for." Parks are, by definition, for the constituents of the city to use, enjoy, and safely enjoy each other — community building.

Instead it was David and Goliath. Brunson driving the lane against the giant Wembanyama. A hundred approvals to let New Yorkers be happy outside on a summer night.

And the watch party is just the visible tip of it. Pier 57, for me, is years of work — City Winery's new home, and the restaurants we built alongside it: Ofcorsica, Miru, El Bar. Each one a battle. Each one a room that didn't exist before we fought for it to exist. Each one a meal, a glass, a conversation, a first date, a last drink with an old friend, that now happens because somebody refused to take no as the final word. None of those rooms were inevitable. Every one of them had a gatekeeper standing in front of it, and every one of them required a builder willing to keep showing up after the third, the seventh, the fifteenth refusal. I am still fighting daily to put some tables outside.

I'll leave the rest of that fight for another day, for political and business reasons. But I'll say this much: there's a deeper politics underneath the obvious one, and the obvious one is getting more absurd by the week. I'm thrilled the Kennedy Center is being restored. I'm sick to my stomach about a UFC cage on the White House lawn. I build venues for a living. I believe in venues. But the people's house is not a venue for an entertaining barefist fight, and a birthday party costing millions of public dollars on public ground is not a celebration — it's a tell. We need a hundred signatures to let a few hundred New Yorkers watch a basketball game on a pier, and one man can throw himself a coronation on the front yard of the republic. That contrast is the whole essay of this moment. You don't even have to write it down. It writes itself in lights.

I spoke at the NIVA convention last week about the blanket licensing regime — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, AllTrack — and the mafioso, thug-like tactics they use against the independent venues that are, in fact, the ground floor of the entire American music economy. I’ve written about this before on Substack, but I wanted a bigger spotlight, and Billboardgave it one, picking up much of the speech (Billboard). The response has been the most encouraging thing I've experienced in this fight in years. Venue owners I've never met are calling. Artists are calling. People who've been quietly furious for a decade are finally talking out loud.

Because here is the truth nobody in that system wants said: the current model does not pay artists fairly. It pretends to. It performs fairness. It collects in the name of the songwriter and distributes by a formula so opaque that the songwriter, the one the whole edifice claims to serve, is the last person to see the money or understand the math. It is an archaic, inept, and frankly extractive system dressed up in the language of protection. And that is the gatekeeper's oldest trick: to wear the costume of the very people he is taxing. The PROs claim to defend the artist while standing on the artist's neck. The park bureaucracy claims to defend the public while locking the public out. The man on the South Lawn claims to defend the people's house while turning it into his own ballroom. Same con. Different uniform.

That has to end. And I think — I'll go ahead and say it — I think it's beginning to end. I think we are watching the early cracks in something that looked permanent six months ago. Dylan, the mural-sized prophet from Minnesota, once said the times were changing, and they did, and they will again. The blanket is coming off. The cage is coming down. The park belongs to the people in it.

So I'm jumping. Toronto today. A new room, maybe. Five hundred faces on a pier, definitely. Ofcorsica, Miru, El Bar — already open, already alive, already proof. A fight in Washington and a fight in the licensing offices and a fight, every single day, against the bureaucratic instinct that says no before it has even understood the question.

Spielberg was right. You don't need to know the story. You need to start falling, and trust that on the way down you'll learn what you were doing all along.

The builders build the world forward. The gatekeepers hold the world still and charge you to pass through. History remembers exactly one of them.