ancient cities

222 Discotheque
films, clothes, and merchandise) have been marketed
and played in discotheques. The first is probably
the Twist, brought to success by Chubby
Checker. The Twist became the first dance craze to
achieve a global success. In the late 1960s, North
American disc jockeys (DJs) started experimenting
with various dance music styles such as soul,
Latino, electro, and funk, to achieve a musical
flow able to last uninterrupted for the whole partynight
in the disco. This was happening especially
within African American and Latin American
communities in New York City, in connection to
the rising hip hop culture. At the same time, gay
males began attending and organizing discos,
and these locations became central for the selfidentification
of queer communities in cities like
Chicago and New York. At the end of the 1970s,
discos were taken over by the multinational corporate
music industry. The legendary Studio 54
opened in Manhattan, New York City, in 1977. In
the same year the film Saturday Night Fever
(directed by John Badham) popularized practices
and conventions of New York City disco dancing
all over the world.
Discotheque and the Industrial City
The industrial outskirts of cities have had an
important role for the consumption of music in
discotheques. The adoption of secluded industrial
outskirts for the opening of discotheques is connected
to the noise, which increased thanks to the
technological development of more sophisticated
public address systems; to the rent, which was
cheaper than in entertainment areas of the city; and
to the need for bigger empty spaces to fit more
people. Most important, it mirrors a topography of
urban exclusion, in connection to the Latino and
African American gay scenes in the United States.
This is particularly true of the dance music
scenes, which originated at the end of the 1970s,
in contrast to the commercial normalization of
disco music. For instance, The Warehouse, a discotheque
in Chicago West Loop, recruited Frankie
Knuckles as DJ in 1977. Knuckles’s style in
mixing and re-editing was tagged “house” as in
“Warehouse,” the physical place where this kind
of music was first created and danced to.
In the 1980s, discotheques around the world,
especially in the United States and in Europe,
located in liminal and industrial areas, started
playing house. The Haçienda opened in May 1982
in Manchester, United Kingdom, in a former yacht
showroom. It started as a live music venue, but in
1986 changed its weekly program because of the
increasing demand for house music. In Berlin, in
1991, soon after the fall of the wall, Dimitri
Hegemann, previously involved in the West Berlin
techno scene, and Johnnie Stieler from East Berlin,
opened a club called Tresor. The club was located
in a building on the former death strip (the empty
area left by the disappearance of the wall) in the
Leipziger Strasse. House music changed within the
European context and was soon renamed acid
house, because of the involvement of a new synthetic
drug: ecstasy.
Discotheque and Real Estate
Discotheques play an unusual role within the shift
from industrial to postindustrial cities. On one
hand, they foresaw the chances given by abandoned
industrial architecture and usually pioneered
dilapidated downtown (in the United States)
or peripheral (in Europe) areas that would later
regain real estate value. In some cases, it could be
stated that discotheques actively collaborated in
the process, boosting the symbolic value of certain
areas within cities. This effect was created by the
sense of community and excess of sociability
linked to the bustling house scene.
On the other hand, discotheques were the first
to be excluded, within the final accomplishments
of the urban renewal process in the 1990s, because
of the increasing value of the built properties and
to the retransformation of scene-related entertainment
districts into residential ones. For instance,
the previously mentioned Haçienda closed definitely
in 1997. A private company, Crosby Homes,
bought and demolished it. Between 2002 and 2004
on the site, an apartment and office complex was
completed. The project maintained the same name
of the club. Tresor in Berlin closed in 2005,
because of its proximity to the renewed Potsdamer
Platz.
The shift from industrial to postindustrial urban
economy brought tourism and city attractiveness
in general to the forefront. Discotheques of the
past or present have sometimes achieved an important
status in city-branding campaigns.