To enter, attendees were led through a hallway that sat adjacent to a loading dock, then they were to take a freight elevator and ride it to the top floor (9 stories) of the building.
During the Lunatarium's final months on the top floor, the landlord made a unilateral decision to divide the space into smaller rooms to accommodate the electronics refurbishing company.
At the end of 2003, Dumboluna made an agreement with another landlord in the building and moved the Lunatarium to the bottom floor where it produced one-off events for almost one year.
Due to its high ceilings and noncombustible brick walls and steel rafters, the Lunatarium became known as a fitting exhibition space for projections, large sculptures and pyrotechnics.
Much of the furniture was either found or donated, filling the space with couches, mattresses, hammocks suspended from the steal rafters, and large mounds of fabric, supported by garbage bags stuffed with paper retrieved from the recycling plant located around the corner on Plymouth Street.
Occasionally, art collectives left behind specially constructed furniture and decoration pieces (one notable item included a 20 ft (6.1 m).
During the early period of the Lunatarium, the deposits required to secure use of the space often left Dumboluna in a scramble to gather funds at the last minute and allowing little time (in some instances, less than 4 days) to book, organize and promote an event.
The Lunatarium was shut down on January 11, 2002 by the New York City Social Club Task Force for fire code and other permit violations.
We ask you, what kind of venue would allow a man in half-unbuttoned overalls to light this "Simon" device, while a volunteer stood in a square cage of metal tubing, the corners of which were spouting 7-foot (2.1 m) flames in random succession?
What kind of venue, indeed, would conscientiously let its warehouse-raw brick-oven space cool down for 20 minutes before a kickball-pregnant woman with a makeup black eye dragged The Device out again, in the middle of a faux-redneck party, her thin, sweat-drenched wifebeater nearly slipping off?
When we first went there to hear DJ Spooky spin, it wasn't like they had flame dancers on a midlevel platform, while below a portly gentleman with a very large fire extinguisher was hardly obscured by sozzled loungers twirling in dangling cloth chairs.