How Mayor Giuliani Decimated New

York City Nightlife

Michael Musto

Ty Bassett, Susanne Bartsch, and Kenny Kenny in a NYC taxi. (Photo via Getty
Images/Patrick McMullan)

In our Dancing vs. The State series, THUMP explores nightlife's complicated
relationship to law enforcement, past and present.

At one point in the 1990s, I nearly plotzed with shock as I was carded at the door
of a bar. This hadn't happened for quite a while; most night spots didn't card at all,
and besides, I was rapidly approaching middle age. But it was the Giuliani era,
and some venue owners were starting to realize how strict they were going to have
be to stay in business. No chances could be taken when it came to the law, even if
my ID was practically an AARP card!

I'm all for making New York City nightlife safer and more livable. But I'm not in
favor of sucking all the life of it, so it becomes a terrified place full of people
minding their Ps and Qs while looking behind them to see if they're going to get
busted for having fun.

As mayor of NYC from 1994 through 2001, Rudy Giuliani demonized nightlife as
our city's bastard child, trying to smooth it over in order to make things safe for
tourists and co-op owners. Ignoring the fact that nightlife pumped money and
creative excitement into the city (which many tourists and co-op owners would
have loved), he steamrolled over the industry, at the same time taking the porn out
of Times Square and making it ready for people in Mickey Mouse costumes.

Squashing nightlife was part of the mayor's broader initiative to reduce crime and
improve the city's so-called "quality of life." To that end, he used both new and
existing regulations to monitor nightclubs, including taking the cabaret lawa bit
of archaic legislation that decreed there couldn't be more than three people
dancing in a boite without a cabaret licenseout of mothballs and using it to
punish places full of happy feet.

Penny Arcade, the longtime performance artist whose 2002 show New York Values
railed against Giuliani for robbing NYC of its identity, remembers how the
authorities targeted venues that didn't have cabaret licenses. "One Avenue A bar
that was a cafe during the day and a gay bar at night was fined thousands of
dollars for people swaying to the music!" she told me. "And if the cops returned
after they fined them and found someone dancing, the bar was fined $1,000 per
night for every night since the original violation. Who wanted to go to nightclubs
with police raids?"

Arcade still fumes at the mayor's impact on nightlife. She recalls Giuliani-ordered
quality of life club raids, conducted by police officers who formed what she calls
"task forces of morality agents." These task forces went around from club to club
looking for infringements. "They handed out violations for dancing, smoking pot,
exit lightswhatever they could find, financially crippling the club owners,"
Arcade explained.

Around the same time, local community boards across the city were becoming
more powerful and denying licenses to wannabe hotspots. The hoity toity board
members didn't want noise or "bad people" in their neighborhoods. Welcome to
the new New York. Party!

Ethyl Eichelberger, Keith Haring, John Sex, and Cookie Mueller at Danceteria
in1984. (Photo by Joseph Modica)

True, the city's violent crime rate did go down by 56 percent during Rudy's two
terms, according to the FBI Crime Index, and we no longer lived in as much fear
of constant muggings. But at what price? Giuliani clearly wanted to take the fun
out of what was once known as "Fun City." When he arrived in the mid-90s, the
80s scene of booming dance clubs was already on the decline. The arty Tribeca
dance club Area ended in 1987, by which point it had run out of steam (Quick!,
the club that replaced it, was nowhere near as enticing). Raunchy gay disco the
Saint closed in 1988, its clientele ravaged by AIDS, and the third location of
rock/dance club Danceteria shuttered in 1993.

On the ascent were loungesvirtually dance-free venues where you sat and got
rigor mortis as you tried to scream over Top 40 songs, hip-hop, and dance-pop.
This partly came about due to Rudy's obsessive scrutiny of clubs, as he frantically
searched for reasons to fine them or shut them down. Lounges like Spy Bar, which
opened in SoHo in 1995, kept popping up as a counter-balance to the crazy club
kid scene, which by that year had already started showing signs of losing energy,
as Michael Alig got messier and more desperate for attention. There was
occasionally some awkward dancing between tables at Spy Bar, but it was
nervously done, the customers aware that they were engaging in something wildly
taboo. I started likening NYC to the town in Footloose, where dancing was illegal!

Who wanted to go to nightclubs with police raids?

Penny Arcade, longtime NYC performance artist

Through much of the mid-90s, I would get calls from thuggish-sounding people I
suspected were either Feds or on Giuliani's team, trying to get dish on any illegal
activity allegedly committed by Peter Gatien. Gatiena favorite target of Giuliani
was owner of the racy church-turned-nightclub the Limelight, which hosted
many of Michael Alig's club kid parties. Gatien was cleared of charges that he was
involved in drug sales at his club in 1996, but he did eventually get busted on tax
evasion in 1999, and was later deported back to Canada. It was almost as if
authorities were trying to catch him on any charge they could find.

The Comeback Kid: Michael Alig's Return to New York Nightlife

But it was in 1996 that Giuliani got his "Told you so" moment. That year, the
tragic killing of clubbie Angel Melendez by Michael Alig and his roommate
Robert Riggs helped fuel the fire beneath the mayor's campaign. The grisly killing
and dismembering of Melendez gave credence to Giuliani's agenda of pushing the
idea that terrible things can happen because of nightclubs, and that therefore, we
needed way tighter strictures on nocturnal behavior. While I agree that Alig had
too few boundaries surrounding what he could get away with, bad things happen
on the police force toodoes that mean you eradicate the entire squad?
An invitation to a Disco 2000 party at Limelight in April 1993 (Photo courtesy of
Michael Alig)

And things got worse. After the killing, there was a sense of doom in the air as
many club people started chilling out and self-policing. A wave of conservatism
kept creeping in from within the scene itself. Even those who hated Giuliani began
realizing that it was no longer cool to be a club kid, so many of them quickly
retired their lunch boxes and rethought their personas. In their place, the credit-
carded gang dominated the new lounges, and were springing for bottle service
wildly overpriced bottles of vodka and trimmings, served by busty blonds. Spy
Bar is credited withI mean blamed forhaving initiated this trend, which
certainly hauled in tons of cash to clubs that dared to go there.

The shift in emphasis from large, riotous nightclubs to staid, sit-down lounges felt
traumatic and a little too permanent. In the late 90s, the Meatpacking District
started burgeoning as boutiques, restaurants, and wan hangouts like Tenjune and
PM Lounge emerged in an area that was previously home mostly to
slaughterhouses, packing plants, prostitutes, and a bagel shop (and before that, gay
sex clubs). The neighborhood became the backdrop for the kind of yuppie lifestyle
reflected on Sex and the City. Even the long running 24-hour French restaurant
Florent started attracting a more conservative looking crowd than before. And just
a few blocks away was Moomba, a sceney restaurant/lounge in the West Village
where, starting in 1997, celebs would come to schmooze, pose, and imbibe.

Get to Know Suzanne Bartsch, the Snazziest Dresser in New York Club History

If anyone hadn't heard the death knell for creative nightlife yet, the ascent of bottle
service rang it loud and clear. Eighties clubs like Area had been focused on art,
performance, and dance, but now, sitting down and paying way too much for a
drink was considered the height of expression. At the same time, technology was
changing the way people connected and throwing a wrench into the fun of going
out. With the rising popularity of HBO in the late 90s, it was suddenly considered
acceptable to say you were staying home to watch TV instead of going out. The
internet was also coming around as a means of communication, and people I knew
who had gone to clubs all the time were starting to find themselves on the
computer all night.

But nightlife, which is generally tailor-made for outcasts and oddities, has a way
of fighting back against oppression. In revolt, I kept dressing up even wilder and
continued going to the fetishy club Jackie 60a beacon of bohemia in the
changing Meatpacking Districtthrough the end of the decade. Party promoter
Susanne Bartsch also kept beating her drum, attracting a conga line of wonderful
wackos who defied everything that was going on under Giuliani's dicta.
Susanne Bartsch in New York City (Photo via "Fashion Underground: The World
of Susanne Bartsch")

Other flamboyant corners of the club scene flourished, such as drag, thanks in part
to RuPaul and movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Early
in Giuliani's run, I rouged myself up, donned heels, and appeared in a 1994 video
Cyndi Lauper directed for her remake of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." Drag kept
evolving after that, and the queens got even zanier and performed in campy Jackie
60 stage pageants, indulging in colorfully outrageous antics as if Giuliani had
never happened. In 1998, I co-wrote "Daddy's Little Prostitute: The JonBenet
Ramsey Story," a sardonic but pointed romp with scenesters Flloyyd, Sweetie, and
David Ilku in the leading roles. Those who survived it are still scandalized.

Nightlife people were more connected than ever because we were the only ones
left carrying on like that. In this new era of tightening regulations, being
outrageous took on a different air. We felt extra edgya feeling that had started to
drain out of the culture, thanks to Giuliani's creepy colander. In the mid 90s,
SqueezeBox!a weekly party at Don Hill'serupted as a haven for drag queens,
rockers, and poseurs, the only rule being that lipsynching was not allowed. The
diverse crowd was distinctly against Giuliani's relentless whitewashing of the city,
and the result recaptured rock's rebellious spirit, until the party ended in 2001.

Today's nightlife still faces all kinds of challenges, like stringent security checks
that make you feel like you're getting on an international flight, plus steep prices
and the fact that people generally hook up via apps and sites, not at clubs. The
long-running weekly gay party Beige went kaput in 2011 when a condo rose up
next to it and filed noise complaints. But the party scene carries on, a compromise
between the flamboyance of the 80s scene and the repression that chilled the 90s
one. There's a new batch of club kids, but because of rising costs of living in the
city, a lot of them go home to their apartments in Brooklynthe borough where a
lot of the clubbing has moved, for financial and zoning reasonsat a reasonable
hour, so they can wake up and earn a paycheck the next day.

Still, without Giulianior his successor, Michael Bloomberg, who was also strict
there's a slightly more playful ambience today. It's not all peaches and cream,
though. Just last year, I was booted off a banquette at the club Stage 48 because it
was reserved in case someone came in and wanted to order bottle service!

Giuliani's impact on nightlife is still strongly felt every time you see a roped off
bottle service table, are patted down and told to be quiet outside a bar, or have to
pay for a $15 Uber to get to a far-flung dance club. "Fundamentally," says Penny
Arcade to me. "Giuliani set out to deliver the broken spirit of NYC to America,
which resented the freedoms, sexual and otherwise, that NYC had long
symbolized." It's comforting to know that this spirit will never truly die, whereas
Giuliani's political career seems to have done exactly that.