We built the list we couldn’t find

Why a studio owner built this

I’m Nurullah. I run KraftStories, a craft studio at 93 Pearl St in the Financial District, where we teach mosaic lamp making, moss walls, terrariums and a handful of other things people book for a birthday or a first date.

Running a workshop space teaches you something uncomfortable about this industry: the reason people don’t come to your class usually isn’t price or interest. It’s that they never found out it existed. I watched that happen to us, and then noticed it happening to studios far better than ours — Greenwich House Pottery has been teaching clay since 1909 and its term calendar is a PDF; UrbanGlass runs one-day glassblowing tasters that sell out to the same forty people; the Billion Oyster Project will hand you waders and a clipboard on a Tuesday afternoon and almost nobody knows.

So this started selfishly and turned into something else. If the whole city’s creative and civic programme were in one place, and it were actually correct, more people would take a class or turn up to a cleanup. Some of them would come to us. Most of them wouldn’t, and that’s fine — a directory that only worked when it sent people to me wouldn’t be a directory.

What makes this different from the other lists

Everything here is read off the venue’s own website by a person. Not scraped from an aggregator, not copied from another blog, not generated. The one automated feed on this site is NYC Parks’ own open data, which is licensed for exactly this, and even those listings pass a reviewer before they publish. When a studio prints a term date with no year on it, someone works out the year from the printed weekday. When a registration page says a session is full, we say it is full.

That work is unglamorous and it’s the entire product. The editorial standards page spells out the specific rules, including the ones we wrote after getting something wrong.

The obvious conflict

I own one of the studios listed here. That’s disclosed on every page of this site, our own workshops are marked as ours, and our competitors are listed in full — including when they’re cheaper. There’s no paid placement and nobody can buy a better position. If you want the longer version of how we handle it, it’s on the standards page.