9.11/The Lived Worlds/Nightlife and the Underground

Closing Time: The Crackdown on the Night, 1994–2001

The Question Asked Under Oath

New York City had licensed dancing since 1926. The Cabaret Law, codified as Administrative Code §20-359, required any establishment with three or more musicians, or any dancing at all by its patrons, to hold a cabaret license from the Department of Consumer Affairs.² By the count later produced when the statute finally came up for reconsideration, fewer than a hundred of the city’s roughly twenty-five thousand eating and drinking establishments held one; the equivalent count for 1989 was never reliably compiled, but it was almost certainly smaller still.³ Most bars did not have a cabaret license. Most bars had dancing anyway. Under Ed Koch and David Dinkins, the gap between what the law required and what actually happened on a Saturday night was closed by simple non-enforcement — an inspector who did not come, a summons that was not written. The 1988 case Chiasson v. City of New York struck down a companion provision, the three-musician cap, as an infringement on live performance, but left the dancing restriction itself intact.⁴ The tool sat on the books, unused, for most of a decade. What made it dangerous was never its wording. It was that a mayor’s administration with the will to enforce it possessed, in a single obscure ordinance, the legal authority to walk into any club in the city and find a violation before it had looked at anything else. A law that had sat dormant through two mayoralties needed no amendment, no new statute, no vote of any council to become, within a single administration, the most efficient tool in the city’s enforcement kit. It only needed someone willing to read it literally.

The Instruments

Rudolph Giuliani took office January 1, 1994, and installed William Bratton as police commissioner, importing the “broken windows” theory of order-maintenance policing Bratton had run on the transit system.⁵ The cabaret license was one lever among several the new administration assembled into a single enforcement apparatus. A joint operation nicknamed MARCH — Multi-Agency Response to Community Hotspots — sent the police department, the fire department, the Buildings Department, the Health Department, the State Liquor Authority, and Consumer Affairs through a club’s door together, on the theory that a venue clean enough to survive one inspector was rarely clean enough to survive six.⁶ The Nuisance Abatement Law, a 1970s ordinance originally aimed at brothels, allowed a civil padlock order without a criminal conviction; the State Liquor Authority could suspend a license on a single drug arrest on the premises; quality-of-life summonses for open containers and public urination thinned the sidewalk crowd that had once made a club’s exterior part of the night. None of these statutes had been written with dance clubs in mind. Run together, they did not need to be. Bratton left the commissionership in April 1996 amid friction with the mayor over credit for the crime decline; the enforcement posture he had installed survived his departure and continued under his successors for the rest of Giuliani’s two terms.⁵ Elsewhere in this part of the record, the geography of Giuliani-era quality-of-life policing and the gentrification it accompanied is treated at length; here the same administration’s machinery is trained on a narrower target — the room, not the block.

1994–1996: The Squeeze Begins

The first cases were small — summonses at bars too minor to make the papers, a reorganized NYPD vice unit working the door lists. The first big room to go was Sound Factory, the members-only, no-alcohol Chelsea temple where Junior Vasquez had played Saturday night into Sunday noon since 1989. It closed January 12, 1995, under a combination of a lease takeover and FDNY pressure in its final weeks — not, as sometimes remembered, a single drug bust.⁷ Eight months later, on September 30, 1995, fifty NYPD officers raided Limelight, the deconsecrated Episcopal church on Sixth Avenue that Peter Gatien had run as a club since 1983 and whose rooms and rivals at their operating height are chronicled elsewhere in this part.⁸ The raid produced only three arrests; a tipped-off officer with ties to the club had warned the dealers off in advance.⁹ The heat kept building without a case that made the enforcement stick.

That case arrived on March 17, 1996, inside an apartment at Riverbank West on West 43rd Street, where Limelight promoter Michael Alig and his roommate Robert “Freeze” Riggs killed a drug dealer named Andre “Angel” Melendez over an unpaid debt.¹⁰ The body sat in a bathtub packed with ice for days before Alig and Riggs dismembered it and put it in a box in the Hudson River; the box washed up at Miller Field on Staten Island in April, where children found it, and dental records identified Melendez that November.¹⁰ Michael Musto had floated the killing as a blind item in his Village Voice column on April 26, 1996 — an unnamed “club personality” and a dead dealer — months before the police moved.¹¹ Alig and Riggs were arrested December 5, 1996; Riggs confessed four days later.¹² Both pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter on October 1, 1997, and were sentenced to ten to twenty years. The murder did not create the crackdown — the MARCH raids and the cabaret summonses predated it by two years — but it supplied something the city’s lawyers had lacked before: a story that made the case for enforcement uncontestable, even to the people who had loved the rooms.

Alig’s own arc through the years leading up to the murder ran in the opposite direction from the crackdown’s, and then met it. He had promoted at Limelight since 1988, and by the early 1990s the costume-driven Club Kid scene he ran through the Wednesday-night “Disco 2000” party had crossed from downtown curiosity into daytime television, with appearances on Geraldo, Donahue, and Joan Rivers between 1989 and 1993.¹² Three years separated the talk-show bookings from the arrest. The same mass culture that had found the Club Kids colorful enough for an afternoon slot found the murder colorful enough for a tabloid front page, and the second story buried the first.

Selective Enforcement, Reported at the Time

The 1926 statute had never applied itself evenly, and it did not begin doing so in 1994. The cabaret card, a separate performer-registration requirement layered onto the license from 1940 to 1967, cost Billie Holiday her ability to work New York clubs after 1947 and cost Thelonious Monk his in 1951; Charlie Parker lost his the same year and died still trying to get it reinstated. Frank Sinatra, denied a card in 1939, received one later without comparable difficulty — the case NYU law professor Paul Chevigny used across two decades of scholarship and litigation to argue that a racially neutral statute had never been enforced in a racially neutral way.¹³ The pattern held through the 1994–2001 crackdown by the account of the Village Voice nightlife beat, which covered the raids as they happened: the Sunday hip-hop night at Gatien’s Tunnel drew metal detectors and repeated inspection, while a Saturday rock night at the same address, under the same ownership, did not.¹⁴ Frank Owen, the Village Voice’s nightlife beat reporter through the crackdown years, was the pattern’s most consistent chronicler — the raids, the racial split in who got frisked, and the financial squeeze on club owners were subjects he returned to for the length of the decade, later gathered into a single account of the era’s rise and fall.¹¹ The discretion the city exercised in applying a facially neutral ordinance to some rooms and not others proved difficult to challenge in court; a 1999 suit arguing that dancing was expressive conduct protected under the First Amendment failed at the trial level.³ The pattern was legible to anyone who read the club listings against the inspection reports. It was not actionable.

Gay Infrastructure, Rebuilding Twice

AIDS had already thinned the city’s gay nightlife infrastructure by 1990 — the Mineshaft closed under a city public-health order in 1985, and the Anvil and the International Stud had gone the same decade for reasons of their own. What operated into the 1990s — Splash, the Roxy’s Saturday night, Boots & Saddle, the Eagle — was already a reconstruction, built by the survivors and by a generation too young to have buried as many friends. Squeezebox, the Friday-night queer-punk party Michael Schmidt and Patrick Briggs ran at Don Hill’s on Spring Street from 1994 to 2000, was the clearest case of the pattern: a room built specifically to hold a community the epidemic had thinned, closed in the end by the same cabaret enforcement and lease pressure closing the straight clubs on the same blocks.¹⁵ The rebuilding and the crackdown ran on the same clock. A room the reconstruction opened was, sooner or later, a room the crackdown found a reason to close.

Where the Night Went

The rooms that survived past 2000 tended not to be in Manhattan. Cheap manufacturing-zoned space in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, a thinner police presence than midtown or Chelsea, and a single L-train stop’s distance from the East Village drew promoters priced or padlocked out of the island; Galapagos Art Space opened in 1995 in a former mayonnaise factory at 70 North 6th Street, one of the earliest Brooklyn rooms built on the “private party” logic that let it skip the license entirely — invitation only, a donation at the door instead of an admission charge, no public establishment being operated on paper.¹⁶ The migration preserved something of the underground’s texture and very little of its mixing. The crowd at a Manhattan room that had drawn a citywide, cross-class, cross-race audience through the early 1990s gave way, in a Brooklyn warehouse charging cash at a card table, to a narrower one — younger, whiter, more likely to have come from art school than from the outer boroughs the earlier rooms had actually served. The clubs that had been the specific targets of the crackdown’s racial pattern were, for the most part, the clubs that did not reopen thirty blocks east.

1997–2000: Convictions and Contagion

Peter Gatien stood trial on federal narcotics conspiracy charges in Manhattan and was acquitted in February 1998 — the jury found that drugs had been sold inside his clubs without finding that Gatien had run the trade himself.⁸ The city did not need the federal case; it pursued Gatien in parallel through cabaret and liquor-license actions that did not require a criminal verdict, and in 1999 he pleaded guilty to state tax evasion, served ninety days, and paid a $1.9 million fine.⁸ The Palladium, the old Academy of Music that Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had reopened as a club in 1985 with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat installations on its walls, was sold to New York University in 1997 and demolished the following year for a dormitory — the crackdown’s cleanest illustration of the developer pipeline running underneath the enforcement pipeline, the two systems working the same real estate without ever needing to coordinate.¹⁷ Smaller rooms went the same way on smaller headlines: Squeezebox and Mother, both downtown rooms built around drag and performance, closed under the combined weight of cabaret summonses and rents that no longer forgave a bad month.

The drug landscape inside what remained had shifted by the time Twilo, Sound Factory’s successor in the same West 27th Street building, became the flagship room for Sasha and Digweed’s progressive-house residency. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, sold over the counter through the mid-1990s as a bodybuilding supplement, had migrated into the clubs as ecstasy’s purity declined, and a string of overdoses followed — among them the July 2000 death of a Johns Hopkins undergraduate found unconscious in a Twilo back room after staff had already moved him off the dance floor.¹⁸ The federal response arrived that winter: the Hillory J. Farias and Samantha Reid Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act, signed February 18, 2000, placed GHB on Schedule I.¹⁹ The scheduling did not touch the cabaret law, the SLA, or the Nuisance Abatement Law directly, but it closed off the substance whose overdoses had given the city’s inspectors their last, most persuasive argument for showing up.

May 2001: The Last Certificate of Occupancy

Twilo’s cabaret-license renewal had been stalled at City Hall since October 2000. The club closed on May 6, 2001, on the stated ground that its certificate of occupancy had lapsed; the sound system and the disco ball were sold off separately not long after.¹⁸ No single room’s closing carried more symbolic weight. The building sat empty for years afterward, its maze of rooms undisturbed by any tenant willing to take it on. By late summer, Manhattan below 14th Street had a different sound after 3 a.m. than it had carried at the decade’s start. The corner where a line had once formed at midnight now closed to an empty sidewalk instead of a thinning one; the smell that had once carried a few blocks from the river was mostly gone with the industry that produced it; a passerby at that hour was more likely to be alone than to be one stranger among several already talking to each other. The accidental conversation, the overheard argument, the offer and the refusal that had once made the 3 a.m. street its own kind of public space — these required the density that the decade had spent closing down block by block, and no ordinance had ever been written with the intention of preserving them. Within four months, an attack on lower Manhattan gave every remaining closure a new and unrelated reason to happen faster; the two processes braided together without either one causing the other, and neither the mayor’s office nor the clubs themselves ever fully separated them again.