100 Years of New York Nightlife: Of Megaclubs, Performance Art and Celebutantes During the Go-Go '80s

Bridge-and-tunnel people ran rampant at places like Limelight, and yuppies had their own playpens (like the Surf Club) at which to act all rich, drunk and proud. Picture guys in suits with their top shirt button open and gals in little black dresses, all cavorting under the great God vodka, an antecedent to the Meatpacking crowd. But the primary strain of nightlife consisted of gigantic dance clubs like the aforementioned Area and Palladium, filled with downtown socialites looking to get photographed while flouncing around in glitzily eclectic get-ups. Fortunately, there was a counter-strain -- the East Village scene, which fostered performance artists, drag queens and anyone else willing to go out on a ledge and creatively dangle there. Club 57 hosted art shows, performances, parties and theme nights where you were apt to bump shoulders with Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat or the space's vivacious manager and ringleader, Ann Magnuson. At comfortably ragtag clubs like the Pyramid, you could try out material, offend people, titillate them and do just about anything except bore them to death.
 
But AIDS started rearing its hideous head in the early '80s, and in '87 the activist group ACT UP formed to stage protests, roll around in the streets and generally call attention to the ways in which the epidemic was totally ignored by the Reagan administration. Sex became terrifying, so clubs were more valuable for networking and self-advancement than for hooking up, with some people dressing up to get media attention while scaring potential suitors away. And a certain militancy infiltrated nightlife, especially when Dean Johnson -- a 6'6" bald guy in a dress -- yelped angry but funny raps at wildly lived-in places like the World, where he threw the weekly Rock 'n' Roll Fag Bar.  Meanwhile, gays of color found their own place of worship at the Paradise Garage, the long-running dance club where DJ Larry Levan hypnotized them with "Heartbeat" and other songs that made them never want to leave.

The same year that ACT UP was created, everyone's favorite spiritual granddad, Andy Warhol, died, leaving a creative  abyss that led to everyone taking time off before the nightlife regrouped to make way for an onslaught of club kids, who picked up where the celebutantes had left off.  And then the decade was over, having left us with a head-spinning batch of press clippings.

But the '80s nightlife ethic lives on in today's use of clubs for multimedia (visual art, projections, performances), as well as in the renewed appreciation for the mixed crowd, an '80s idea that brought unlikely bedfellows together and created nocturnal magic. Nightlife is always cyclical, so I'm sure someday Manhattan will even be home to lots of big dance clubs again, and though I doubt they'll be as brilliantly carried out as the '80s ones, they'll definitely try.