by Peter Gatien
CHAPTER EIGHT
King of Clubs
By the early 1990s, I felt myself caught once again in the familiar position of being both successful and restless at the same time. New York Limelight had become an iconic symbol of the whole era, with a worldwide reputation for sexual energy and flamboyant outrageousness.
But at times I felt as faded as Bilbo after too much of the ring. I missed out on the day-to-day experiences of my family. I had long realized that my personal relationships were in trouble. There was no way I could just blow in for two weeks a month and not represent simply an interruption of the normal routine. Settling down and repairing the damage was always something I intended to do eventually, but the right time never seemed to come around.
So I decided to draw in my claws, so to speak, concentrate all my energies in one city, if not on a single club. I wanted to have a home base. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I really knew how to exist anymore in just one place, not to be always lusting after a new horizon. But New York was the place I loved, and even though I had never really left, I wanted to come back.
I sold the London Limelight. The million pounds I’d bought it for just a few years earlier turned into three million because of the escalating value of London real estate, and the exchange rate favored me, so my profit ballooned even more. In place of operating a far-flung, multi-time-zone empire, I sank those profits into creating additional venues in Manhattan, where I could spend more time with my kids and at the same time be able to keep a closer watch on day-to-day club operations.
Part of the decision was based in economics. In those days, to ask people to work in Manhattan for anything less than a thousand dollars a week didn’t make financial sense. In one of the most expensive urban areas in the world, my staff had to earn rent money and be able to show up looking sharp. They needed to make their nut; they needed a thousand-dollar base income every week, and in turn that meant I needed the kind of cash flow that could keep everyone afloat.
In the eyes of the outside world, New York Limelight was the wonder of the nightclub world, an Energizer Bunny that just kept going and going even in the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. I could have closed all the other Limelights, stood behind that single club, and still retained my standing among the most successful nightlife entrepreneurs in the world. But as usual, I was restless.
In the dim pre-internet past, the wooden-faced showbiz impresario Ed Sullivan had one of the most popular television shows on the planet, a Sunday-night variety program that featured singers, comics, dancers—and novelty acts. Among the performers there were often plate spinners, usually from Uzbekistan or some other place where circus acts are born. Their routine consisted of balancing a collection of swirling dinner plates atop a series of long poles. The pace was mad and manic, since the spinners had to keep every plate going even as they moved on to start others. Check YouTube, children, to see this ancient form of entertainment, still as wack, corny, and diverting as it was a half century ago.
The early 1990s were my plate-spinning years, my crazed, exciting, impossibly lucrative years. Money rained down. I bit off more than I could chew, then choked it all down anyway. I sold not only the London but the Chicago Limelight, too, at a profit, aiming to focus all my energies on New York City. But I never slowed down—in fact, I pushed the pedal down all the harder.
My clubs weren’t just clubs, they were megaclubs. In the space of nine fast-and-furious months in 1992, I opened Club USA in Times Square, took over the lease of the fading Palladium on Fourteenth Street, and revived Tunnel on the West Side. All the while, Limelight in Chelsea was still packing them in.
In all, the four clubs represented over a quarter million square feet of prime Manhattan real estate—251,000 square feet, to be exact. Their official capacities totaled 18,000 party-till-you-drop club-goers, though because of exits and entries and crowd turnover, we often went well beyond the rated capacity. For example, Palladium was rated for a 6,500-person occupancy, but we once did 9,200 entries on a single night, a record for my career as a club owner.
We crunched the numbers once, years ago, and estimated that twenty million people have passed through the doors of my clubs at one time or another. To analyze that figure another way, a full one-quarter of the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut tristate population in the twenty-one-to-forty age demographic had been patrons of mine at least once.
My clubs might not have been Sunday schools, but they weren’t drug dens, either. They mirrored their home turf: fathomless, fabulous, and flawed New York City. There never was a time, and there probably never will be again, when a single person controlled such a large percentage of New York nightlife.
Of the three new acquisitions, Palladium came to me first, in spring 1992. The place had opened with a huge media splash on May 14, 1985. Studio 54’s Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell took over the old Academy of Music, located on a stretch of Fourteenth Street that enjoyed a celebrated nightlife history. During the Gilded Age, there were so many entertainment venues jammed into the neighborhood that it was referred to as “the Rialto.”
Rubell and Schrager hired Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, who transformed the building into an art-and-architecture fairyland. Keith Haring did an enormous mural that loomed over the dance floor, Kenny Scharf decorated a phone booth and a bathroom, Jean-Michel Basquiat contributed a piece for the VIP room, and Francesco Clemente painted ceiling frescoes.
Seven years after the opening, the art remained in place but much of the glory had faded away. Riding a lambada craze gripping the nation, Palladium had turned into something of a salsa club. Rubell and Schrager moved on. Rubell had been diagnosed with AIDS, the disease that would kill him. He and Ian Schrager opened the Morgans, the first of their boutique hotels that revolutionized the business. The original club twins exited the nightlife scene.
I took over Palladium, with the place’s then-current leaseholders giving me a sweetheart deal. I was obligated to pay the venue’s rent only for the first month and the thirteenth month, about $100,000 in total, an amount that was more than canceled out by the $10 million sound systems and lighting arrays I inherited, not to mention the art. In essence, I paid zero key money and tripled the nightclub square footage I controlled.
Walking through the club on an inspection tour prior to signing the contract, I could feel the specter of the glory days still haunting the premises. Some of the features that seemed revolutionary in 1985 appeared campy and outdated, like the gigantic bank of TV monitors that overlooked the dance floor. But the sprawling place still offered superb possibilities, and it was especially great as a venue for live music. After refurbishing, we were able to attract Prince, Jay-Z, and A Tribe Called Quest, first-class acts that rocked the Palladium’s epic, hallowed stage.
Then Ian Schrager brought me to Arthur G. Cohen, a real-estate mogul so big that for any deal in New York, the joke question would always be, “So what percentage did Arthur have?” Cohen had a theater available on Forty-Seventh Street, Minsky’s, formerly an infamous burlesque house. In 1992 Times Square had yet to become sanitized, and it wasn’t the magnet for tourists that it is today. Taking the old theater over and christening the place Club USA, I tried to stay true to the building’s history and surroundings when we underwent an $8 million redo. I offered club-goers an extravagant adult playground accented by S/M touches, graffiti tags, and futuristic Blade Runner tableaus of urban decay.
The concept spoofed Manhattan in the Reagan ’80s, everything larger than life, with huge signs and billboards throughout the venue, including a memorable automated one for Hoover vacuum cleaners. Fashion superstar Thierry Mugler created the top-floor VIP room, and the eminent Jean-Paul Gaultier did the furniture. Eric Goode and Serge Becker, the geniuses behind Area, consulted on the overall club concept. Preoccupied as I was running Tunnel and Limelight, I told them to go ahead and go nuts with the new venue. “Just be sure it’s fun” was my only direction, and the two really came through.
One mezzanine wall was sto
cked with twenty-five-cent peep-show booths running old porn loops. A splashy modular graphic that I could change at will loomed over the dance floor, and a lounge on the lower level featured retro shag-carpeting décor. But the element that really stood out was the tubular, 120-foot amusement-park-style slide that delivered people from the mezzanine to the dance floor. We had an attendant stationed up top, handing out squares of burlap fabric to smooth the journey downward.
With Club USA under renovation and Palladium up and running, I remained hungry for more. On a late-fall afternoon in 1992, with a chilly wind coming in off the Hudson River, I found myself in front of a century-old redbrick industrial warehouse facing the docks on Manhattan’s Far West Side. The neighborhood felt almost creepily empty. The old produce and meat markets that had once thrived on what was then called the Lower West Side had moved elsewhere. Nothing else had come in to take their place.
The warehouse on the Hudson was about as close to Moon Base Limelight as I could find. The depopulated, postapocalyptic feel of the neighborhood actually appealed to me. I’d come to realize that I wasn’t running ice-cream parlors, where success depended largely on foot traffic. I operated huge venues—destination clubs that patrons would go out of their way to visit.
Outsiders flocking in always put pressure on the full-time residents. With my other clubs I had been dealing with community boards on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis, fielding concerns about noise, litter, and the normal and unavoidable disruptions that always happen when a couple of thousand visitors rub up against the locals. Along the barren wasteland of Twelfth Avenue in those days, there was nobody around to offend.
Brian MacGuigan and I had been through a lot together since he began as my systems guy at the first Limelight. He understood everything there was to know about the physical plant of a nightclub, from floor plans, lighting arrays, and sound systems to plumbing and electrical infrastructure. I relied on him heavily as a coworker and a friend. Usually “genius” describes people in the scientific or artistic realms, but Brian was a genius of brick and mortar and nuts and bolts. There was no way I would vet a new club without him.
As he and I stood outside in the cold, Brian said, “I don’t think there’s a single residential building within a five-block radius.” He spoke as if that were a positive state of affairs, and both of us were almost dizzy with the thought. No one had to tell us about the headaches we could avoid, or how much simpler operating a nightclub would be in the vacuum of a sparsely populated neighborhood. Smoothing feathers in Times Square and on Fourteenth Street, the respective sites of Club USA and Palladium, had been taking up a considerable amount of my time.
The real-estate agent, Alex Picken, unlocked the front door of the building. He made a grand motion with his arm like a restaurant maître d’ showing diners to their table. From the street-level entrance, the floor opened to a huge space with sprawling rectangular dimensions.
As with a lot of people in the real-estate biz, Alex liked to chatter. “This place is the old Central Stores Building of the Terminal Warehouse Company,” he told Brian and me. “Built in 1890. They called it ‘the Barn’ and used it as a receiving dock that had freight trains pulled up and parked right inside here, so the teamsters and stevedores and whatnot could load and unload the stuff straight from the boxcars.”
He gestured across the cavernous space. “You can still see the steel rails down there, embedded in the floor.”
I barely heard what Alex was saying. I had been in the club business long enough to learn how to size up a space, understand the possibilities, and visualize what it could become. Central Stores reminded me not of a railroad station but of an airport hangar, as if you could fly down and park a little speed racer inside. I stood there at the threshold, gauging sight lines and crowd flow, imagining new floor plans, summoning up design ideas. Sparks were shooting out of the top of my head. I looked over to Brian and Brian looked back at me, an almost imperceptible nod passing between us.
We proceeded deeper into the rectangular main room.
“Built like a brick outhouse,” Alex was saying. “Steel-girder superstructure, totally overengineered all around, the way they used to build things, like why use a two-by-four when an eight-by-eight beam will do, you know? This place has very good bones.”
The room we had stepped into was long and narrow, with a vaulted ceiling that had a few blackened patches—from century-old locomotive smoke, I guessed. Empty and gloomy as the atmosphere was, the place had an Aladdin’s-cave vibe.
“Hey, boss,” Brian said softly, flicking his eyes toward the makeshift barrier where the tunnel-like space dead-ended.
“The previous tenants closed that part off,” said Alex.
In 1986, just a couple of years after New York Limelight opened, the Central Stores Building had debuted as a club called Tunnel. Rudolf Piper helped open the club, with the longtime operator of Danceteria signing on to transform the rail warehouse into a destination dance hall. Rudolf, coming out of the music underground of Germany, looked like a silver-haired hipster and was very popular with the downtown crowd.
Tunnel had done well in its first year or so, but then it fell off a cliff. Slowly the owners started to shift the atmosphere toward salsa, and the club tumbled further downhill. Rudolf departed the scene in 1988. By the time we took that first walk-through, the place had been shuttered for four years.
My spider-sense tingling, I peeked behind the barrier at the end of the room. The vault extended farther, making the already large room potentially enormous. It really was a train tunnel, and I imagined seeing light at the end of it.
“Is there more?” I asked, not quite believing what I was seeing.
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. The original lease represented only a quarter of the building’s available square footage. There were basement rooms, a mezzanine, the old washroom where the rail laborers used to clean up after work, and a half dozen other smaller spaces. As Alex Picken led Brian and me through the building, I realized where the original owners had gone wrong. They hadn’t thought through the possibilities. Large as the space was, their nightclub had wound up being too small.
This space had the potential to dwarf all my other venues. I could do things in a larger club that I couldn’t do in a smaller one—radical, cutting-edge things. The old rail warehouse inspired me to dream big. I imagined art installations, live concerts, elaborate themed events. Where the former owners leased less than a quarter of the available space, I would take over three-quarters, a full 85,000 square feet.
To my mind, there’s a clear difference running a club with 3,500 entries a night as opposed to 1,000, but it’s a question of creativity, not money. The trick is filling a large space night after night. You need a few more staffers, of course, but the overhead for the infrastructure remained pretty much the same. Tunnel was humongous. I’d just have to figure out how to attract enough patrons.
A large-capacity nightclub was an extremely rare phenomenon, tough to pull off, tougher still to maintain. But the megaclub was my sweet spot. Gross receipts can be incredible at a big club, but more than the money, I was accustomed to hosting parties with large crowds. Nothing could beat that. Looking over the balcony at Limelight, and seeing the floor below crammed with wild-ass dancers, gave me a physical thrill like no other. I kept coming back to the feeling, wanting to duplicate it, a junkie mainlining a packed nightclub.
With the light dimming outside on that cold afternoon, Brian and I took a last look back as we left the Central Stores Building.
“Lot of work,” I said.
He shrugged. That kind of work was what we did. Big projects, big rewards.
I nodded, still peering back into the dim recesses of the vaulted space. “All right,” I murmured, speaking to myself as much as to Brian and Alex. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
“Sure thing,” Brian said.
“OK!” Alex jumped in. “All right!” I think he actually rubbed his hands together at the prospect of
making the sale.
The Tunnel was mine to do what I could with it.
CHAPTER NINE
A Half-Pipe on the Dance Floor
In 1992, when I took over the lease for the Central Stores Building, we hit the ground running. The job of developing Tunnel animated my whole staff. Everyone had a new toy to play with. The three hundred or so employees in my company were all acting like Keith Richards right after he went to that place in Switzerland to have his blood purified. We had a fresh infusion of life.
From the start, I was wary about siphoning off any patrons from my other three clubs, of which Limelight was the closest. I wanted to double my fun, not have two venues in the same area that split the action between them. Somehow, Tunnel had to have a distinctive vibe and draw a different crowd than Limelight. I knew there were plenty of warm bodies to go around in the local nightlife market. On any given weekend, a half million people spilled out onto the bricks in Manhattan, pleasure-seekers looking for a place to set their hair on fire.
Tunnel featured a much rawer physical environment than my other clubs, industrial and steampunk where Limelight was Gothic and ornate. Good bones or not, the Tunnel property basically needed a top-to-bottom redo. When the joint had closed four years previously, the premises had been left vulnerable to scavengers. Everything and anything that could be pried up and ripped off had vanished—furnishings, appliances, even the knobs on some of the doors. There was no sound system, no lighting array, no serviceable AC.
The original liquor license for the premises was long gone, too, so I couldn’t make a simple transfer from the past owner. We’d have to jump through the multiple bureaucratic hoops dreamed up by some sadist in the state liquor authority. But I had been to that rodeo more than once, and I already had a support structure of lawyers, fixers, and blade runners in place. For any move I wanted to make in New York City, from securing building permits and certificates of occupancy, to obtaining an array of licenses and collecting sales taxes, I needed to hire a person called an “expediter” to untangle the almost-surreal amounts of red tape. Franz Kafka would have understood.
