Nicole S.
Yelp
I might maybe have rated The Annex 1.5 stars just to give them credit for booking good talent for Movement weekend, however the experience was so terrible that they're lucky they get one star.
We bought tickets for Sunday night of Movement for the Drumcode after party. We turned the corner to the event and saw a huge line first. We probably waited for 20 minutes because they didn't issue tickets, so there were two men looking up your name on a list for every single person that bought tickets to the sold out event. We were luckily in line early enough because it kept growing and people likely waited longer than we did. Then after they checked your name off, they checked your ID again to give you a bracelet for drinks if you were over 21, and then they were only letting a certain amount of people in at a time. It wasn't even busy, so I don't know why they were making us wait, but I waited at the front of the line for a few minutes before being allowed to go up.
Once up, the space is set up weird with booths along all walls, but a huge bar in the middle so it creates a really small dance floor and cuts off half the bar from seeing the DJ. I thought it was a new place (I could be wrong here), but it looks old.
The biggest issue is that the place was miserably hot. If I had to guess how hot it was in there, I'm pushing 100. I was sweating like a bikram yoga class before the place even got busy, and the busier it got, the hotter it got. It made it impossible to even be near the dance floor with all the hot sweaty bodies. We had to stand near the door to get any type of relief, and my friend and I even went and stood in the bathroom for 15 minutes because it was the coolest place we could find and we could wash our faces with cool water. That's how hot it was. Another friend even had to go to the bathroom to threw up because he was so sick. That's not even safe.
This was night two of Movement, and I was wondering how the previous night's afterparty went and if it was this hot. From other reviews, it sounds like this place might always be hot, so they're clearly not fixing it. It 100% ruined our time and we ended up going outside for a break from the heat. The entire smoking area was packed to the brim and they even had to make it bigger to accommodate all the red faced people just trying to breathe. We ended up leaving because none of us could fathom going back up.