NY Times article on new clubs

[wallflour]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/f...52eb5bcc4a0abd1

Big, Loud Clubs Seek New Glitter

November 9, 2003

By JULIA CHAPLIN

I DIDN'T invite her," said Eve Salvail, a model with a

dragon tattoo on the side of her head, who gets $500 to

linger a few hours and look cool at Avalon, the latest

incarnation of the Episcopal church in Chelsea once known

as Limelight.

It was 3 a.m. on a recent Sunday, and Ms. Salvail, a

part-time employee known as a tastemaker - a k a eye candy

- watched helplessly from her free V.I.P. table in the

hip-hop room while the uninvited woman, who looked like the

Colombian pop star Shakira with streaked hair and a

mini-kilt, wrapped herself around a stripper pole. When the

woman began a deafening tap dance in her knee-high boots,

two male models in Ms. Salvail's entourage gathered their

free glasses of vodka and cranberry juice, slid out of the

banquette and left.

"She's scaring people away," Ms. Salvail said. "I wish

she'd just sit down."

So it goes on the front lines of New York's latest attempt

to revive the glittery era of huge dance clubs - that

halcyon 80's moment of celebrities, downtown artists and

well-dressed nobodies mixing under strobe lights at

Danceteria and the Palladium.

A new batch of entrepreneurs is betting that chic New

Yorkers, after years of holing up in low-key lounges, are

ready to hit the dance floor with the masses again. Over

the next four months, no fewer than five clubs - each with

room for hundreds or even thousands of dancers and

featuring new-generation diversions like bungee-jumping

cocktail waiters and raw-food kitchens - will open in two

square blocks of West Chelsea. The area - bounded by 10th

and 11th Avenues and 26th and 28th Streets - is already

thick with art galleries. Now it bids to become the center

of New York clubland.

"Tenth Avenue is great, because it's wide enough for limos

and Escalades to pull up outside," said Noah Tepperberg,

who is opening one of the clubs, so far unnamed, on 10th

Avenue near 27th next month.

Among the others to come are Spirit, which is to open this

month in the old Twilo space on 27th Street; Crobar, a

branch of a club with sites in Miami and Chicago, which

plans to open next month; and Quo, due in February, whose

name, in a very loose translation from the Latin, means

"where it's at," its owners say.

Applications to add more clubs are pouring in, according to

Community Board 4, which oversees West Chelsea. They would

include an Indian-theme nightclub and a dance club on 16th

Street. Add the Avalon and Club Deep, both of which opened

between Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue in

September, along with lounges that were already in the

neighborhood (Lot 61, Glass, Bungalow 8, the Coral Room),

and the Studio 54 question is, Who is going to fill all

these places?

David Rabin, president of the New York Nightlife

Association and an owner of Lotus, a lounge on West 14th

Street, said: "I can't figure out how all these places are

going to make money. New York has been hit so hard by

unemployment, particularly in the finance and dot-com

industries that drive trendy night life. If one or two were

opening I'd think, `Well, yeah, maybe.' But this many at

once is really puzzling."

A bigger question, perhaps, is how the new discos will

escape the kinds of drugged-out club kids who, in legions,

contributed to the demise of New York's last dance-club

wave. That boom, in the 1990's, was a dark chapter riddled

with drugs, violence and elephant pants. After a crackdown

on clubs by the Giuliani administration, which made it

nearly impossible to get the cabaret licenses required for

dancing, night crawlers retreated to small lounges catering

to a privileged few. Dancing became a naughty and

spontaneous act for the drunken and daring, performed atop

cocktail tables and on banquettes. (Places like Lotus and

Bungalow 8 regularly replaced the stiletto-punctured

upholstery.)

The empire built by the club owner Peter Gatien crumbled

when federal agents labeled his Limelight "a drug

supermarket" and shut it in 1996. In a separate case, the

club's star promoter, Michael Alig, pleaded guilty to

manslaughter for killing a clubgoer who was a reputed drug

dealer (the subject of the recent film "Party Monster").

And in 2001, Twilo, a big black room with all-night D.J.

parties, was also closed by the authorities. A favorite of

glow-stick-twirling ravers, it kept an ambulance to run

victims of drug overdoses to emergency rooms.

Some old club hands say it is going to be hard to change a

business that has habitually thrived on hard drugs and bad

behavior. "Where are they going to get a club crowd that

isn't young and on drugs?" asked Steven Lewis, who was a

director of Danceteria, the Palladium and Club USA, and who

went to prison himself for nine months on drug charges.

"I'm sure the 22-year-olds that do go out and are creative

and cool would rather be at a divey rock club in the Lower

East Side or Williamsburg."

Residents of the club district are essentially powerless to

block them, community board members say, because the area

is zoned for manufacturing. "Many residents oppose the

opening of all these nightclubs," said Kevin Kossi, a

co-chairman of Community Board 4. But instead of trying to

block the issuance of liquor licenses and risk being

overruled by state authorities, Mr. Kossi said the board

has persuaded the clubs to help control the likely throngs

of pedestrians, the heavy late-night street traffic and the

thumping music.

But some say the clubs will bolster the area. "It's better

to have clubs, which are a controlled grittiness, than what

used to be there, which was a derelict area with

prostitutes and people having sex in cars," said Danny

Emerman, an owner of Glass, a lounge, and Bottino, a

restaurant, both on 10th Avenue.

Almost all the owners interviewed for this article said

they were trying to attract "an older, more sophisticated

crowd," a code phrase that some of them acknowledged means

"no 21-year-old `bridge and tunnelers' on Ecstasy."

Callin Fortis, an owner of Crobar, said the club's

entertainment would influence the behavior of its crowd.

"We're not going to book one trance D.J. for 14 hours in a

big dark room," he said. "It's going to be like a creative

playground." Crobar, which will hold 2,750 people, will

feature live performances, an art gallery, acrobats on

trampolines and what he described as bungee jumpers

delivering cocktails. (Next door to Crobar, a branch of the

"upscale" topless club Scores plans to open early next

month.)

Like many of the other new clubs, Crobar is being designed

to feel less like a giant disco and more like a series of

lounges. It will have a V.I.P. lounge, an ultra-V.I.P.

lounge and several small rooms catering to different

subsets and designed by fashion companies including

Heatherette (the flamboyant fashion-techno crowd), As Four

(a downtown rock crowd) and Supreme (alternative hip-hop

and street wear).

Richie Rich, a designer for Heatherette who was once

Michael Alig's assistant at Limelight, said the new clubs

would have it easier because indiscriminate drug

consumption is no longer so acceptable. "Now it's become

cool to get up earlier and be professional," he said,

although he acknowledged that he may just be growing older.

Robert Wootton, an owner of Spirit, the 35,000-square-foot

club in the former Twilo space, is betting that the

neo-clubgoer enjoys tarot readings, astrology and organic

foods. Testing the outer limits of a concept, Spirit will

combine nightclubbing and New Age. It will be divided into

zones: Body, a dance area with "uplifting" house music;

Mind, a spa with aromatherapy and massage; and Soul, an

organic and raw-food restaurant. It will have no V.I.P.

areas. "The concept doesn't really make sense on paper,"

Mr. Wootton said. He said he had "no idea" if it would make

money, but it was something he felt called upon to do.

The competition is heating up among club owners to enlist

the city's top promoters, models and night-life regulars to

draw in the many thousands of paying customers they will

need to stay in business. On the weekends, Avalon pays more

than 100 people, including promoters and eye candy, to pull

not just a crowd, but the right crowd.

"It's like 50 dogs fighting over a bone, and the bone is

the A-list," said Ronnie Madra, who promotes parties at

Lotus and Avalon and is considering offers from several of

the new clubs. One of his tactics is to hire what he calls

"extroverted beautiful people" like Ms. Salvail, whose sole

purpose is to hang out and look good, a job description at

other clubs, too, like Plaid and Lotus.

"I say here's $200, all you can drink and a table to fill

with a few of your good-looking friends," Mr. Madra said.

"When the average person walks past and sees them there

having fun, it makes the place seem a lot more `happening.'

"

On a recent Saturday night at Avalon, such social

engineering seemed to be paying off. The club, which has a

$25 cover charge, was mobbed at the entrance, with a line

down the block. Inside, the Habitrail-like hallways were

jammed with Japanese and German tourists and other

curiosity seekers. But a few glitches were apparent: the

lounge crowd and the techno dancers were not getting along.

Up in one of the three V.I.P. skyboxes, to which entry

could be gained only with the password "Brazil," Morgan

Handbury, 21, a model from Canada who moved to New York

City last month, was clutching her cocktail. "You can get

this big club thing anywhere in the world - Miami, South

Africa," said Ms. Handbury, who was wearing Levi's and a

lingerie top. "I'd much rather be in a small lounge without

all these random people. I hate the lighting in here, and

the music is awful."

She craved a smoke. "but there's no way I'm walking through

that crowd to get outside," she said.

In a bar off the main dance area where the D.J. Josh Wink

was spinning, Tyson Gorrie, 28, a lawyer who recently moved

to Manhattan, was wigging out. "There's too much of a money

vibe here, man," he said. "I'm not into it. It's like a

Euro place where you've got to buy a bottle just to get a

girl to talk to you."

A couple of blocks away, Club Deep, which caters mostly to

a clientele from outside Manhattan, was gelling better. The

two-level space with five V.I.P. areas was packed at 1 a.m.

Young men in Von Dutch trucker hats and leather pants and

young women in tight spandex tops inhaled cocktails and

bobbed their blow-dried hair to Chingy's "Right Thurr."

The club, decorated with amber-tinted mirrors, candles and

several giant photographs of half-naked women, looked like

a trendy lounge, only much bigger. A large dance floor with

spinning colored lights was deserted. Lauren Greenfield, a

24-year-old stripper from Queens, stood by the bar with her

friend Jennifer Fernandez, 28, a high school teacher from

Edgewater, N.J., who was celebrating her birthday.

"At most places you go out to, 80 percent of the guys are

going to be duds, which leaves 20 percent who are eligible,

right?" said Ms. Greenfield, who said she had no intention

of putting a toe on the dance floor. "Now at a big club,

that 20 percent is going to be a much higher number. I want

to go up to the V.I.P. area where the rich guys are."

In the V.I.P. area directly in her line of vision, Nick

Arsenis, 23, an accountant from Queens, and a 24-year-old

friend, Scott, who would not give his last name, were

sizing up the crowd from behind a velvet rope as they mixed

cocktails from carafes of orange and cranberry juice and a

$300 bottle of vodka. "We don't like to dance," said Mr.

Arsenis, who wore a button-up shirt and jeans and had

gelled hair.

Scott, who looked roughly the same, nodded. "We just like

to sit up here with bottles and meet cute girls," he said.

[karisma]

way too much to read, but I think the last sentence says it all!!

[dbolboy]

Interesting article, i dont know if the whole mind body and soul thing is going to pan out, but i like the idea of something new.

[montebrogan]

wallflour, good post. The next 6-12 months in NYC nightlife are going to be VERY interesting to say the least.

[djmikedr]

Very intelligent!