9.7/The Lived Worlds/Nightlife and the Underground

The Big Rooms: Limelight, Tunnel, Sound Factory, 1989–2001

The License Nobody Had

The building at Sixth Avenue and West Twentieth Street had been consecrated in 1846 as the Church of the Holy Communion, a Gothic Revival sanctuary designed by Richard Upjohn, the architect of Trinity Church downtown, and it was the first asymmetrical Gothic Revival church built in America.³ By the late 1980s several thousand people a week moved across its nave on a Wednesday night, under stained glass the club’s designers had backlit so the windows glowed after dark much as they did by daylight.⁴ The confessional booths survived; they had been rebuilt as private banquettes, sold by the night. Peter Gatien, a one-eyed Canadian club operator who had run a chain of discothèques in Ontario before crossing into Manhattan, bought the deconsecrated building in 1983 and named the club after his first Florida venue, the Limelight.⁴ What made the building a nightclub was not disguised as anything else. The altar end of the room held the DJ booth; the side chapels held bars; the vestry held a back room. A dance floor needs a large open volume with good sightlines and no interior columns, and a nineteenth-century sanctuary, built to hold a congregation’s collective attention on a single point at the front, satisfies both requirements without adaptation.

The interior renovation, credited to the designer Ari Bahat, kept the shell essentially intact and added five separate staircases running down from the sanctuary floor to a warren of smaller rooms — a gothic chapel bar, VIP lounges, and by 1998 an upstairs chamber Gatien commissioned from the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who filled it with backlit biomechanical sculpture and furnished seating cast from the same aesthetic as his film work for Alien.⁵ The room functioned as a private space reserved above the general floor, reachable by its own staircase, a chapel within the chapel. Four stories of open ceiling ran over the main dance floor below it, and from the sanctuary floor a dancer could look straight up into the original roof trusses. The crowd underneath them by the early 1990s ran wider than any other room in the city: goths in vinyl and black lace beside Wall Street men who had come from a late dinner, drag queens beside NYU freshmen, a scene that in 1988 a Manhattan magazine’s cover story had already found a name for — the Club Kids — months before Michael Alig’s Wednesday party, Disco 2000, existed to give the name a fixed address.⁶

Twelfth Avenue and the Freight Line

A mile north and over toward the river, on Twelfth Avenue at Twenty-Seventh Street, stood a different kind of building entirely: the Terminal Warehouse Company’s Central Stores Building, an 1891 freight depot that had once let railroad sidings run directly into its ground floor, so that boxcars ferried across the Hudson on car floats from Hoboken could be unloaded under cover.⁷ Gatien opened the Tunnel there in 1986, and the name was literal — a length of narrow track, sunk into the floor, ran the length of the main room, a relic of the loading days left visible rather than paved over. At roughly a hundred thousand square feet the building held a long straightaway bar worked by as many as ten bartenders on the busiest nights, and a unisex bathroom converted from the terminal workers’ old locker room, with a small circular bar built into its center — a room where the line for the toilet and the line for a drink were the same room, and neither line moved quickly.⁷

What made the Tunnel a hip-hop room rather than the multi-genre space it had opened as was a single Sunday-night party. The promoter Jessica Rosenblum, who ran a hip-hop party called Mecca, brought the young DJ Funkmaster Flex to the Tunnel’s Sunday night around 1993 — a slot Gatien had regarded as commercially dead space, a night no other promoter wanted, and had no objection to filling.⁷ Flex’s prime slot ran roughly from one to two-thirty in the morning, and by the middle of the decade the Sunday-night crowd, several thousand strong, had made the room the most consequential stage in New York for a record about to break — Wu-Tang Clan, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z before his first album, DMX, Mary J. Blige — acts that played the Tunnel’s floor before radio caught up to them.⁷ The room’s other nights ran rock, industrial, and mixed programming to smaller, quieter crowds; none carried the density or the consequence of the Sunday hip-hop room, and by the back half of the decade Sunday was simply what the Tunnel meant.

Five Thirty West Twenty-Seventh

A third kind of room, smaller and stranger than either, occupied a converted warehouse at 530 West Twenty-Seventh Street: the Sound Factory, opened in 1989 by the owner Richard Grant with the DJ Junior Vasquez as resident, and built around a decision that set it apart from every other big room in the city — it served no alcohol at all.⁸ Without a liquor license there was no last call, no state-mandated four o’clock closing, and no bar staff to manage; the room opened Saturday at midnight and did not close until Vasquez stopped playing, which was often noon on Sunday, a twelve-hour set on a wooden floor built specifically to move under dancing feet.⁸ The sound system, engineered by Richard Long, was the same audio house that had built the Paradise Garage’s system a decade earlier on King Street, and the lineage ran further than the equipment. Vasquez had been a regular on the Paradise Garage floor through the early 1980s, a devotee of its resident DJ Larry Levan, and when the Garage’s lease ran out in 1987 much of its crowd — gay, Black and Latino, unmixed with any of the neighboring straight clubs — followed Vasquez to the Sound Factory in the years after.⁹ Levan himself, largely sidelined in New York by the early 1990s, made occasional guest appearances on Vasquez’s floor before his death in November 1992; the marathon set Vasquez built his reputation on, running past dawn into the following afternoon, was explicitly modeled on the all-night sets Levan and Frankie Knuckles had pioneered at the Garage and Chicago’s Warehouse.¹⁰

Because the room ran without a bar, its only point of commerce sat inside the bathroom rather than beside the dance floor, and by four in the morning the line for it moved as slowly as the line for anything else in the building.

The Academy of Music

Uptown of both, at 126 East Fourteenth Street, stood the Palladium, converted in 1985 from a nineteenth-century theater, the old Academy of Music, by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager — the pair behind Studio 54, rebuilding a second empire on a different block after the first had closed and its owners had served time for tax evasion. For the interior they hired Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect, who gutted the theater’s shell and built into it nearly ten thousand square feet of nightclub arranged across seven stories, each floor keyed to a distinct room rather than a single undifferentiated volume.¹¹ The main dance floor sat at the building’s center, lit from behind by a mural Keith Haring painted directly onto the wall; the Mike Todd Room held a mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat and functioned as the club’s more exclusive inner chamber; the Kenny Scharf Room, smaller again, carried Scharf’s day-glo cartoon canvases across every surface a body could brush against on the way through. A grand illuminated staircase ran up the front of the building, its risers frescoed by Francesco Clemente, so that the climb from the street to the dance floor was itself routed through the era’s downtown art world before a dancer reached the music. Andy Warhol designed the drink tickets. The room seated, by the club’s own licensed capacity, something over three thousand.¹¹

The Palladium’s crowd never sorted itself as cleanly as the Tunnel’s Sunday room or the Sound Factory’s Saturday one; a mainstream dance-club audience filled most nights, drawn by the address and the art rather than by any single DJ’s residency, and hip-hop nights ran there too, in a room built for spectacle rather than for the specific, hours-long trance the smaller music-first rooms cultivated. A visitor entering off Fourteenth Street passed through Clemente’s frescoed stairwell before reaching any music at all, a sequence no other room in the city required of its crowd, and one that made the Palladium read, in a way the others did not, as an art project that happened to sell tickets. What it offered its crowd was the fact of having been inside a room four separate downtown painters had marked, in the same year those painters were, for the first time, becoming publicly famous in their own right.

The Latin Rooms

The Palladium’s name was itself a borrowing from an earlier New York dance economy. The original Palladium Ballroom, at Broadway and West Fifty-Third Street, opened in March 1946 and closed in 1966, and from 1948 on it was the room where the mambo became a New York music — Machito’s orchestra, Tito Puente’s, Tito Rodríguez’s, playing to a floor that mixed Puerto Rican, Black, Jewish, and Italian dancers on the same nights, a mixture almost no other midtown room of the 1950s permitted.¹² The ballroom was long gone by 1989, but the circuit it had anchored was not. Latin New York in the 1990s ran its own set of big rooms, on its own calendar, largely invisible to the downtown press that covered the Limelight’s Wednesdays, and at its center stood the oldest continuously famous nightclub name in the city.

The Copacabana had opened in November 1940 at 10 East Sixtieth Street, and by the late 1980s the room that had once booked Sinatra and Martin and Lewis was running Latin dance nights for a crowd the midtown supper-club era had never served.¹³ In 1992 the club left the East Side altogether for 617 West Fifty-Seventh Street, a far larger space near the Hudson — owner Peter Dorn’s stated reason for the move was a landlord dispute — where it ran through the rest of the decade as the flagship of the Latin dance circuit, two rooms under one roof on the big nights, salsa and merengue live in the main room and a DJ floor beside it, with Tito Puente among the orchestras still working the bandstand and younger singers coming up through the same scene, Marc Anthony among them.¹⁴ In 2001 the club moved again, forced out when its landlord terminated the lease early to build office towers on the site, to West Thirty-Fourth Street at Eleventh Avenue — its third address in a decade of Manhattan real estate that kept pricing a dance floor off whatever block it occupied.¹⁵

The Bronx built its own flagship in 1993, when Jimmy Rodríguez, a restaurateur who had started in his father’s seafood business, opened Jimmy’s Bronx Café on Fordham Road near the Major Deegan — a restaurant, banquet hall, and nightclub running as one continuous establishment, seating on a scale no Manhattan Latin room matched.¹⁶ The room’s specific achievement was its crowd: Yankees and Mets ballplayers at the tables, salsa and merengue headliners on the stage, and elected officials working the banquet floor, in a borough whose nightlife the Manhattan papers otherwise covered as a police blotter. Politicians campaigning for Latino votes learned the room’s address quickly, and its guest register through the middle 1990s carried names that made the club a Bronx institution rather than a Bronx bar.¹⁷

Below the flagships ran the circuit proper: rooms like the Latin Quarter on Broadway at Ninety-Sixth Street and the salsa and merengue nights that rotated through midtown and upper-Broadway ballrooms, where the economics were governed by the bandstand.¹⁸ A working salsa orquesta carried twelve to fourteen musicians — a full brass and rhythm section, two or three singers — and a merengue band little fewer, so a club that booked live music on a Friday was meeting a payroll several times the cost of any DJ in the city. The standard solution was the split night: one or two orchestras alternating with a DJ, the bands playing shortened sets, the cover charge and the bottle service on the tables carrying the difference. The dress codes at the door were the strictest in New York nightlife — no sneakers, no jeans, no work boots, collared shirts on men — a formality the downtown rooms had abandoned and the Latin rooms enforced as policy, because the night was understood as an occasion and the clothes were part of the occasion.¹⁹

Two currents fed the rooms from outside. The first was freestyle, the drum-machine dance music built by Puerto Rican and Italian-American producers in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the late 1980s — TKA, the Cover Girls, Judy Torres, George Lamond — which by 1989 filled club nights and radio playlists in equal measure and gave the circuit’s younger, English-dominant crowd a music that was theirs rather than their parents’; its chart presence faded in the early 1990s, but its records held the floor at Latin nights for years past their release dates.²⁰ The second was the radio. WSKQ-FM at 97.9 had broadcast a Spanish-language format since February 1989, and in 1993 it relaunched under new management as “La Mega,” a tropical format built on salsa and merengue at full commercial scale; the station functioned as the circuit’s assignment desk, with the artists in heaviest rotation the same artists on the weekend’s bandstands.²¹

The Hours

Across all four rooms the clock ran on the same statute: last call was four in the morning statewide, unchanged through the period, and a licensed room’s night ended there whether or not its crowd wanted it to.²² Doors opened at midnight and nobody came before it; the line did not form in earnest until one, the floor did not fill until half past two, and the room’s most crowded hour — the true peak, the one the resident DJ built the set toward — arrived in the last ninety minutes before closing. Rooms without a bar to regulate escaped that clock entirely. The Sound Factory ran past it by design, and the after-hours economy that filled the gap between four and ten in the morning — Save the Robots on Avenue B, the last of a lineage of unlicensed rooms that had operated since the early 1980s — opened precisely when the licensed rooms went dark, so that a determined dancer could move from the Tunnel’s four o’clock closing directly into a room that had been waiting for exactly that crowd.²³ By ten the after-hours rooms closed too, and whoever remained walked out into a city already at work.

The four rooms did not compete for the same hour so much as divide the night into shifts: the Palladium’s early-evening spectacle, the Tunnel’s one-to-two-thirty peak on Sunday, the Limelight’s midnight-to-four Wednesday run, the Sound Factory’s refusal to close at all. A single week’s calendar, read room by room, described less a set of separate businesses than one continuous room the city kept lit somewhere between midnight and ten in the morning, seven nights running, its address changing by the hour.

The route changed with the hour as much as the crowd did. A body that started the night on Fourteenth Street, under Isozaki’s staircase and Clemente’s frescoed risers, could be on Sixth Avenue by one, inside the nave under the backlit glass; by three it could be on Twelfth Avenue, past the old freight tracks sunk into the Tunnel’s floor; and if the night had not ended by four, the only room left open ran without a liquor license at all, ten blocks south on West Twenty-Seventh Street, its floor still full at an hour when every other room in the four had already gone dark. Each building held its crowd at a different density — the Palladium wide and lit, built for being seen; the Limelight compressed under four stories of open church air; the Tunnel narrow and straight, a single corridor run the length of a converted freight bay; the Sound Factory windowless and close, with no bar and no spectacle to sell. A dancer moving between them in a single night crossed four different buildings’ worth of purpose-built spectacle without ever leaving a six-block radius of the West Side rail yards that had, a century earlier, unloaded produce and dry goods rather than people.