ISSUE-22

feature feature
On the dancefloor at the
Haçienda, Manchester 1990.
Photo by kevin Cummins/
Premium Archive/Getty Images
14
fROM
DISCO
TO
DISCO
Paradise Garage.
Studio 54. The Loft.
The heady influence
NYC’s clubs exerted on
global dance culture.
WORDS TIM lAWRENcE
the case is harder to make today, but once upon a time
New York hosted the most numerous and adventurous DJ-led
party spaces in the world. Visitors testify they had never experienced
anything like it prior to their trip to the city. Some
even returned home with the dream of re-creating something
of their own.
New York’s influence can be traced back to the moment at
the beginning of 1970 when David Mancuso hosted the first in a
series of shimmering house parties that came to be known as the
Loft. Around the same time, two entrepreneurs known as Seymour
and Shelley took over a struggling discotheque called the
Sanctuary and became the first nightclub proprietors to welcome
gay dancers into a public venue. Selecting records in relation to
the energy of their multicultural and polysexual crowds, Mancuso
and Sanctuary DJ Francis Grasso established the sonic and social
potential of a contagious culture. Better Days, the Tenth Floor, the
Gallery, Le Jardin, Flamingo, 12 West, SoHo Place, Galaxy 21, and
Reade Street bolstered the word-of-mouth network. With the media
barely aware of its existence, the city’s dance scene remained
resolutely subterranean—to most locals as well as tourists.
That began to change in the spring of 1977 when one-time
restaurateurs Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54
in Midtown Manhattan as a celebrity hangout. From the moment
Bianca Jagger rode through the venue on the back of a
white stallion, New York discotheque culture circulated as a
global media story. It did so again in November when the release
of the Brooklyn disco movie Saturday Night Fever carried
the culture into its juggernaut phase. With Laker Airways
having recently launched Skytrain as the first long-haul, lowcost
transatlantic airline, it became much more likely that disco
would travel via the firsthand experience of dancefloor immersion
as well as vinyl, tape, and print-media distribution. The
industry-oriented Disco Forum, first staged in New York in 1976
and held annually, helped potential nightclub operators meet
lighting and sound operators. The hermetic culture of disco was
all set to spread.
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