Crowding into the tasting room of the Brooklyn Brewery, in Williamsburg, the nearly 200 painters, metalworkers, writers and self-styled entrepreneurs — all former members of 3rd Ward, the Bushwick arts center, D.I.Y. haven and creative network that collapsed in October — sounded a little like refugees.

Part continuing-education center, part incubator, 3rd Ward, in a 35,000-square-foot former warehouse on Morgan Avenue, was the first, and, it seemed, the most successful of the arts-and-entrepreneurship meccas springing up around the gentrifying parts of Brooklyn. Its co-founder, Jason Goodman, 34, had predicted that within a few years, every big city in America would have one. He told one interviewer that 3rd Ward would be a household name by 2018.

And he seemed on track: A Philadelphia 3rd Ward opened in April, a Las Vegas project was germinating, and the organization had received a $1.5 million grant for a “kitchen incubator,” a program designed to support new food enterprises, elsewhere in Brooklyn. Then, on Oct. 9, Mr. Goodman announced that 3rd Ward was closing, crippled by financial losses.

A failed start-up is nothing new. But 3rd Ward was not an app or a website, but a physical space with hundreds of stakeholders — people who had paid as much as $3,200 for lifetime unlimited memberships, which included free bicycles, free Intelligentsia coffee and unrestricted access to studios, workshops and classes, and who were told by Mr. Goodman that they would not receive refunds. There were also teachers who would not be getting their last paychecks and professionals who had seen it as a kind of creative utopia, now deprived of space to work.