The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  I had to keep Limelight going while creating an entirely new club six blocks to the west. A typical day meant dealing with dozens of niggling details—to use the old phrase, it was like getting nibbled to death by ducks. In this case the quackers were contractors, building inspectors, police officials in the local Tenth Precinct, plus those aforementioned sadists of the liquor-control board, as well as any other random bureaucrats who considered it enjoyable to employ a little authority over a hapless businessman just trying to get a nightclub up and running.

  At Tunnel, I knew the effect I was aiming for. My Disney obsession had only matured over the years. When I took my girls on visits to the company’s theme parks, I was always impressed with how efficiently the places were run. The attention to detail staggered me. Disney World might do thirty thousand visitors in a single day, yet everything went along smooth as silk. All the physical details of the operation, like garbage removal and supply delivery, were kept carefully out of sight. The audience, I knew well, just wants to see the marionettes, not the strings, and definitely not the puppeteers.

  I strived for the same kind of smoothness in all my clubs. At Tunnel, it was going to have to happen on an even larger scale. I enlisted designers Eric Goode and Serge Becker to help, with artist Kenny Scharf providing some flourishes, too. I concentrated on flow, the idea that any single club-goer would be able to maneuver through the immense space without ever hitting a wall and having to turn around. I broke up the main room with a bar running directly down the center, seventy feet long and twelve wide, a double-sided battleship accessible both port and starboard. At one end of the bar I installed a raised platform for one of the club’s five DJ booths, positioned for excellent sightlines to the dance floor. Then, at the far end of the room, we created an installation that I had envisioned during that very first walk-through of the place.

  “How about a half-pipe?” I asked my staffers at our initial design meeting during the reconstruction process.

  I knew how eye-rollingly insane the idea would sound, but I’d always been mesmerized by the pendulum rhythm of boarders as they rose and fell on the curving sides of skate-park half-pipes. It was hard to keep your eyes off them, like watching one of those drinking-bird toys, where you glance over at the damned thing and wake up ten minutes later still gawking. I imagined the lazy arc of skaters as a backdrop to the dance floor. Everywhere anyone looked at Tunnel, I wanted something to attract the eye.

  “We have the room for it, don’t we?”

  Because the people who came to my clubs were mostly younger, I always felt I had to bounce ideas off staffers who fit the twenty-one-to-thirty-five club-going demographic. I needed that age-appropriate reality check. To their credit, Brian MacGuigan and the rest of the crew didn’t shout me down. In fact, they actually got psyched for the in-club half-pipe proposal.

  On the second floor, which was half the size of the main room, we installed another one of my brainstorm innovations, a coed bathroom. In the warehouse’s old washroom, the lockers of the former rail workers still lined one wall. I created an elaborate space with its own bar and its own sound system, so no one would ever have to leave the party to heed the call of nature at Tunnel.

  We put a ton of work in on the bathroom space, but we also left it as raw as we could, retaining the lockers and other industrial fixtures. Two bartenders worked back to back at the room’s circular bar, which did a surprisingly brisk business. I once saw a handmade sign posted above a urinal in a dive bar: “We don’t sell beer, we recycle it.” Substitute “champagne” and you’d approximate the fluid situation in the upstairs facilities at Tunnel.

  “That coed bathroom was beautiful and nasty at the same time,” Ramona Diaz once told me. Ramona worked security, and she was one of my favorites among the Tunnel staffers. That word nasty was actually a compliment, and the facility quickly took on a reputation of its own, infamous as a space where male-female fault lines were erased and the genders mingled freely. We were ahead of the times, and the media loved it. The phrase “unisex bathroom” was always mentioned in the press coverage of the club, as if the concept was the most titillating thing in the world.

  In reality, people adapted easily. There were both stalls and urinals, and the bathroom attendants didn’t worry too much if people mixed and matched. For such a simple, easily implemented idea, the innovation turned to PR gold, shocking the puritans to the soles of their silver-buckled shoes, while allowing our patrons to believe they were on some cutting edge of social engineering.

  While I spent so much time trying to keep a handle on operating four clubs at the same time, I was losing ground at home. My relationship with my second wife, Adrienne, suffered. We moved several times, never really settling, living in Tribeca for a year, then in a two-bedroom apartment at Sixty-Seventh Street and Columbus Avenue for two years, and finally taking a place on Central Park West.

  When our marriage went south, so did I, taking residence in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, near Central Park and within easy reach of all my clubs. Living at a hotel reminded me of my childhood days of watching Have Gun—Will Travel, a popular TV western that starred Richard Boone as a gunfighter for hire who called himself Paladin. I remember not being able to get over the fact that Paladin lived in a hotel, a lifestyle that appeared unimaginably exotic to my young eyes.

  My daughter Jen, old enough then to get around the city on her own, moved into the two-bedroom, three-bath Mayflower suite with me. I felt confident that providing Jen with a credit card and access to room service represented a perfectly fine style of parenting. She spent the day at the suite and elsewhere—mostly with Adrienne, who looked after her, but she was an adventurous, independent kid. I thought that everything was being taken care of on the Jen front. I still had not gotten it through my thick skull that a child needed a dad’s actual presence to feel whole.

  A kid loose in Manhattan grows up fast. One night at the Palladium, I spotted Jen dancing onstage with Mark Wahlberg, a.k.a. Marky Mark. She was only seventeen at the time and still in high school. The sight of my dear daughter paired off with a well-known celebrity bad boy stung me, bringing up all the contradictions inherent in being a nightclub impresario who was also a father seeking to love and protect his kids.

  Did I really want my daughter participating in the high-velocity world I knew so intimately? The situation reminded me that my life choices had consequences in the real world, but at the moment I wasn’t prepared to deal with them. I took no action to retrieve my daughter or split the young couple up, hoping against hope those consequences would not somehow work to implode the family. My twin roles of club owner and parent continued to clash, haunting me increasingly as Jen, Mandy, and Hunter grew into young adulthood.

  The club-going population of New York City—and probably every other metropolis in the world—swells on Friday and Saturday nights, then drops by half on the other nights of the week. Tunnel was so large it didn’t make much sense to keep it open beyond those golden Friday and Saturday sweet spots, and at first that’s all we did.

  Opening three more New York clubs allowed me to promote my dedicated Limelight staff to better positions, which was good for morale. Almost all promotions at all the clubs came from within the workforce. I’d make a former bar boy at Limelight an assistant manager at Tunnel, say, or boost an assistant manager at Palladium to a manager position at Club USA.

  When Jen turned eighteen, I brought her on board as a part-time employee at Tunnel. She was fresh out of high school and eager to work, so I hired her as a “list girl,” checking in complimentary entries at the door. I neglected to pay my daughter a salary, since at the time I was supporting her liberally, gold Amex card and all. Actually putting her on the payroll, I thought, would have been like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

  She worked the door Fridays and Saturdays, nights when Tunnel hosted glam, fashion-oriented crowds. The job of the club’s list girls was to sort through two groups of entries: people who got in for free and others wh
o were granted reduced admission. We compiled comps from dozens of sources, fielding suggestions from scenesters, celebrities, fashionistas, promoters, media, nightlife regulars, anyone who brought weight, had pull, or deserved to be treated with extra respect.

  “Leakage” is how the hospitality industry refers to the myriad ways profits can be skimmed off by employees. A classic example would be the bartender who rings up short sales at the till, charging ten dollars for a cocktail and then reporting an eight-dollar sale. At other times a twenty-dollar bill would take a mysterious detour on its way to the cash register, when a staffer would drop it on the floor and then pick up the skim later, unobserved.

  As with a top-level gambling casino, we had a whole hierarchy of controls in place to prevent leakage. Bar managers watched the servers, busboys, and barbacks; assistant managers watched the bar managers; managers watched the assistant managers; and I kept watch on them all. We lacked only a Vegas-style “eye in the sky.” As every club operator, tavern keeper, and hotelier knows, and as everyone in a cash business understands, an owner can never wholly eradicate the practice of skimming. I could only try to limit the damage.

  Leakage might occur at the door when a list girl accepted a twenty-dollar gratuity to let in a dozen customers. Those kinds of bribes were actually pretty rare. List girls would more often usher in a whole gaggle of their friends for free. I liked having Jen on the door because, intentionally or not, the boss’s daughter served to keep the other staffers honest.

  I also found it enjoyable to witness my oldest child at work. She was a sophisticated presence, a hip Manhattanite by way of small-town Ontario, pretty and fashion conscious and bright. But like the boxer who steers his kid away from a life in the ring, I worried about the wisdom of introducing her to the mad scramble of the city’s nightlife. The image of her dancing with Marky Mark onstage at Palladium a year before remained fresh in my mind.

  The idea that I was bringing her along too quickly tormented me. Even though I spent a lot of time at Tunnel, I could afford only occasional glimpses of her at work, mostly in passing. She usually looked happy, chatting with customers with a wide, genuine smile lighting up her face, a sight that soothed my worries somewhat.

  Those first months after opening Tunnel, I felt energized and relatively fulfilled, but soon enough those feelings started to wane. I got antsy, once again looking for fresh adventure. For a brief period in 1992–93, I was juggling four venues at once: Tunnel, Limelight, Club USA, and Palladium. Wasn’t that enough? What the hell more did I want? What kind of action could I have possibly been missing?

  CHAPTER TEN

  How Tunnel Reinvented Hip-Hop

  “What are we doing here?” I would often ask my staffers. Most of them knew the routine well enough to answer back, sometimes comically and in unison.

  “We’re trying to create culture.”

  I thought of a club as a stone dropped into a pool, the ripples spreading out to stir the water everywhere. Limelight was one of those tossed stones, with theme parties such as Rock-N-Roll Church, Disco 2000, and a gay night called Arena, each bringing together vibrant communities, each sending out waves of cultural energy.

  Tunnel might have jumped on Friday and Saturday nights, but the rest of the week it was dark or given over to private parties. I wanted more for the place. I saw it as a parent might see a kid who wasn’t living up to their potential, hadn’t discovered a true purpose. As the west-side venue underwent its yearlong shakedown cruise, an unlikely pair approached me, an energetic party promoter named Jessica Rosenblum and a Bronx-born DJ who went by Funkmaster Flex. They were looking for a place to throw a weekly party.

  There’s an old song called “White Boy Lost in the Blues,” and the promotional career of Jessica Rosenblum made me think of her fondly as a white girl lost in hip-hop. A blonde Barnard graduate who fell in love with rap music, dove in deep, and never came up for air, Jessica got her start in nightlife as a door person at Nell’s, a small, trendy club that was the exclusive celeb hangout and hipster haven on Fourteenth Street.

  In the early 1990s there was still widespread social resistance to rap music. Radio, in particular, remained deeply segregated. The reason, I believed, was racism, pure and simple. I could hear a white artist like Malcolm McLaren do his pale novelty riff, “Buffalo Gals,” on pop radio, but never any cutting-edge stuff by NWA. No one in the executive ranks seemed to understand how popular hip-hop was with the young demographic, not only African Americans but Latinos, Asians, and Jersey white boys.

  Out of pure ambition and excess enthusiasm, Jessica transformed herself into a hip-hop ambassador, hosting parties and promoting the careers of multiple young rappers. I knew Jessica was an effective party promoter because she’d done great events for me at my other clubs. She had a grip on both sides of the rap scene—the Street and the Industry, artists and music companies. There were unsigned, underground rappers in her Rolodex as well as record-label executives.

  Jessica ran a well-known party series called Mecca, using events to promote the acts she managed. But good security was hard to come by, so Meccas often lasted no more than a few weeks in any one venue. The first parties would be hip and fun, but then the events would start to feel dangerous and fall apart. Mecca moved from one small club to another: Supper Club, Grand, and Arena. Jessica even tried out stuffy, high-end venues such as Tavern on the Green.

  One of the rap acts she managed was DJ Funkmaster Flex. I took to him immediately when Jessica brought him around for a meeting at my Tunnel office. She might have been brash and ambitious, qualities absolutely necessary for the business she was in, but Flex acted as her low-key foil, laid back, measured, and a lot easier to work with. He demonstrated a clear-eyed understanding of running a business, how the devil was always in the details.

  The two of them came to me proposing that they host Mecca events at Tunnel. Of course, I was willing to listen to any experienced promoter who might attract new patrons to my clubs. I had always been drawn to rap, from back when the music was just emerging as a commercial genre with Afrika Bambaataa, the Sugarhill Gang, and Grandmaster Flash.

  “We’re looking for a fifty-fifty split of the door,” Jessica proposed at that first meeting. “Mecca is a very well-established event now, and it would be good for you, Peter, an excellent way to bring paying customers into the club on Sunday night, say, when you’re otherwise dark. It’s a win-win.”

  In negotiations, when someone suggested how much it would be to my immense benefit for me to make a deal with them, Marlon Brando’s well-known question from The Godfather always came to mind: “Why do I deserve this . . . generosity?”

  We settled on a seventy-thirty split of the door receipts, in the club’s favor. Plus I would reap all the profits from liquor and coat check. Even so, I had my doubts. I had little experience with a hip-hop crowd and thus couldn’t project what type of bar receipts I’d be getting. I had a general notion that it’d be smart to beef up security, given the recent history of hip-hop events and the difficulty Jessica had encountered securing a regular venue. Just a year before, nine people had died in a stampede of bodies during the infamous Heavy D AIDS benefit at Harlem’s City College.

  As I feared, Mecca at Tunnel didn’t succeed. I hosted the event eight times over the course of three months before realizing that the seventy-thirty split Jessica and I had settled on was causing problems. Our arrangement meant that it was in Jessica’s best interest to push through as many entries as possible, ushering in the hordes without understanding that curating a crowd was just as important as increasing quantity. To make her nut, Jessica needed patrons—the more the better.

  Because of the come-one-come-all door policy, on the Mecca nights the gender ratio skewed heavily male, an atmosphere that was at best surly, at worst explosive, and, in the end, unmanageable. More males meant more fights and less fun. So Mecca and Tunnel parted company. As far as I was concerned, it had been a failed experiment. Jessica, never one to be stymied, gat
hered up her bundle of energy and went elsewhere.

  A few weeks later, Flex showed up at my office. As I said, I’d liked the guy from the first. He was less splashy than Jessica, but more easygoing. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of hip-hop takes guts, smarts, and good instincts, and Flex remains on the scene today as one of the leading DJs on Hot 97. The man has always had an uncanny ability to spot trends and break new artists. As they say in the music game, he’s got some of the best ears in the business.

  “I thought what you did for us at Tunnel was great,” he told me when he came to me on his own. “I wonder if there’s any way that you and I could make it work.”

  “Well, we can’t move forward the way it was,” I said. “We would have to be in total control of the door.” I wanted to play the long game with any party I offered, creating safe, secure, very chill nights, in contrast to Mecca’s chaotic powder kegs.

  “Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure,” Flex agreed. “You do the club, I do the jams, and that’s it.”

  “What we need to do is find a way to keep everyone safe,” I said. “We have to be able to maintain the heat without ever boiling over.”

  The atmosphere at Mecca tended toward the mean and dangerous, which is a certain kind of draw for people who enjoy living on the edge. Violence has the power to render an underground scene legit, creating excitement and controversy. Making the atmosphere overly controlled ran the risk of turning the party bland and vanilla. But realistically, any event that smacked of disorder and violence could never be maintained over a long run.

  I ran my clubs with a built-in paradox. People dearly want to believe they’re taking a walk on the wild side, while deep down they prefer to stay on solid ground. I needed to keep the scent of risk alive, the idea that on any given night anything could happen, but underneath that, I had to have a rock-solid sense of security and well-being.