When Freaks Were Chic: An Oral History of Danceteria

Getty Images, Kate Schellenbach Archives, Bob Gruen; Photo Illustration by Jessica Xie Ahmed

New York City was in the toilet when the legendary club Danceteria first opened its doors in 1980. Murder, arson, drugs, corruption, mob violence, giant rats: Pick your poison, the city had it. It also had ridiculously cheap apartments, making New York a worldwide magnet for artists, musicians, and other talented misfits.

Where Studio 54’s vibe was velvet-rope exclusivity, Danceteria exuded a much more DIY, “let’s put on a show!” attitude. It was an anarchic playground for young outsiders. And some of these clubgoers were very young. I was far from the only high school kid to frequent it: Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz once described Danceteria as his version of a “metropolitan teen rec center.” Cops were too busy to waste their time on underage patrons (like me), and doorman Haoui Montaug was happy to usher in stylish kids who would infuse the place with untamed energy.

Danceteria called itself “the supermarket of style,” encouraging cultural tribes to intermingle. Across multiple floors, you could watch an art-punk group like the Bush Tetras; dance to a DJ spinning new wave and hip-hop; gawk at a confrontational performance artist like Karen Finley; or check out a cutting-edge fashion show. Maybe you’d also flirt with someone cute in the stairwell between floors.

The club’s “anything goes” atmosphere incubated future stars like Madonna (who debuted at Danceteria), RuPaul, and Beastie Boys. Keith Haring and Debi Mazar were employees. Designers like Isabel Toledo and Andre Walker held fashion shows there. Drag performers rubbed up against breakdancers. The concept for Def Jam Records hatched at the club; Jim Jarmusch screened one of his first films there. Susan Seidelman made Danceteria the centerpiece of Desperately Seeking Susan.

Madonna performing on the rooftop of Danceteria in 1983.

Bob Gruen

Madonna’s new song “Danceteria,” from her upcoming album Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, pays joyful homage to the club, with specific namechecks: “We see the line, it’s way too long / Cut to the front, there’s Haoui Montaug.” The British band Soft Cell also has a musical tribute to the club coming out this fall with an album called Danceteria. On the rhapsodic title single of the same name, singer Marc Almond remembers the late Danceteria DJ Anita Sarko: “I said to Anita, ‘Play me what I want to hear’ / She said, ‘Dear, I’m not a DJ I’m an atmosphere engineer.’”

Danceteria cofounders Rudolf Piper and Jim Fouratt were the odd couple of New York clubland. The debonair Piper was a German émigré who, back in the late 1960s, had created a venue in a WW2 Berlin bunker. He’d also been a stockbroker, and he came to New York with money in his pocket, determined to change New York nightlife. While trying to launch a SoHo club called Pravda, he met Fouratt, an outspoken New York activist who’d been a Yippie and a cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front. By the late ’70s, Fouratt was the manager of a hip “rock disco” called Hurrah. The two men joined forces to realize their vision of the ultimate nightclub.

This is their story—and the tale of a generation of artsy misfits who lived out their fantasies at Danceteria, as told to Vanity Fair by some of its most faithful denizens.

RUDOLF PIPER, Danceteria cocreator: I was planning to do a club in SoHo called Pravda, in Bauhaus style, dedicated to art exhibitions and new wave bands. We had a super opening-night party with a fashion show by Betsey Johnson, who was at the top of her career, cosponsored by Fiorucci. Everybody was there, including Madonna, though nobody knew who she was. Then the next day the club was closed down due to zoning laws. It made my career in New York, because suddenly I am the guy that had this one-night club that was the most fabulous night of the year.

FAB 5 FREDDY, artist and hip-hop pioneer: Pravda didn’t last. But it had an edgy vibe. It was like, Wow, that was fun!

PIPER: Then Jim Fouratt and I were looking for a new place, and this unsuccessful club on [252 West] 37th Street called to see if we could do something with that space. That first Danceteria was an after-hours club that had absolutely no liquor license. It lasted about six months and was a huge success. Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz were both busboys, and Keith painted all the walls of the first Danceteria on the ground floor. This was when he was still doing subways. After a month or two, we said, “Okay, let’s paint it over and do something else to those walls.” So that building has a million dollars’ worth of Keith Harings under the paint.

Carmel Johnson, Cookie Mueller, Andy Warhol, and Dianne Brill at Brill's birthday party at Danceteria, April 5, 1984.Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

DIANNE BRILL: Danceteria It girl, fashion designer, Piper’s ex-wife: Every artist wanted to paint a room. They got paid $100. Jean-Michel [Basquiat] was hanging out and Rudolf said, “Okay, you want to do it?” So Jean-Michel leaves the walls black and just puts “SAMO,” a couple of crowns, and a little scribble of a man. Rudolf says, “You’ve got to paint it now.” Jean says, “No, no, it’s done!” So Rudolf was like, “Bullshit!” and got the next artist to just paint right over it.

DAVID ILKU, Danceteria bartender and performer: I went to the first Danceteria the night it got raided. Jayne County was opening up for the Go-Go’s. I was waiting in line to be let in, and then all of a sudden, the State Liquor Authority shows up and asks for the manager. This sweet queen goes, “I’m the manager,” and they just threw him up against the wall and busted into the place and shut everything down. Needless to say, I didn’t get to see Jayne County and the Go-Gos.

After the first Danceteria closed in October 1980, Piper and Fouratt worked at other clubs, including Studio 54 and Peppermint Lounge, before deciding to try the Danceteria concept again. They would create a spot that was less elitist than the super-artsy Mudd Club, cleaner than grungy CBGB—and totally legal. The duo met John Argento, an NYU film student who was working for New York real estate scion Alex DiLorenzo. DiLorenzo became convinced one of his tenants was going to kill him and asked Argento and a friend to serve as unofficial bodyguards.

JOHN ARGENTO, Danceteria manager and owner: DiLorenzo took us out to his house in the Hamptons and to other apartments he owned, constantly on the run from this guy. This went on for two months. We got bored, so we started going to nightclubs. I took them to this place on 37th Street called Danceteria, and Alex was saying, “We should open a nightclub!” He had all these commercial buildings downtown, so he built a club called Interferon in one of them on 21st Street. When it closed after six months, I brought Rudolf and Jim up to meet him. We eventually convinced him to turn it into Danceteria.

The second version of Danceteria on 21st Street is the fabled one. It had a concert floor where Sade and The Smiths played their American debuts; a dancefloor where DJs mixed new wave, funk, indie rock, and hip-hop; a lounge playing avant-garde videos; a performance-art space called Congo Bill; and a rooftop bar that Piper dubbed Wuthering Heights. The club launched in February 1982, kicked off by a little-known band called R.E.M. Fouratt booked the music, but a schism between the club’s creators led to Fouratt being forced out of the club, leaving Piper with creative control.

MICHAEL MUSTO, nightlife columnist and author: The second incarnation on 21st Street was where it all clicked, because it was a four-level one-stop shopping place where there was something different on every floor. You’d have these thrilling rock concerts, but also you could also see wonderful performance art from people like Dean Johnson, John Sex, and Ann Magnuson.

MARC ALMOND, Soft Cell: The new Soft Cell album Danceteria is a love letter to New York around the period of 1982–83. After the success of “Tainted Love,” we were taken to New York to work on our record Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and we were at Danceteria every night. There was this edginess and darkness, because New York at that time was like a Wild West. The third day I was there, driving home from the club, my yellow-cab driver just slumped over and the car crashed into the side of the road. I was in a wasteland with fires burning in waste bins. It was like some strange dream that you were living through.

DEBI MAZAR, Danceteria elevator operator and actor: Everybody was poor and doing art and becoming who they were. We wore vintage clothes that we picked from the Sixth Avenue flea market. I wasn’t sexy. I dressed new wave, and was doing makeup trying to look like a Fellini movie. You had designers like Isabel Toledo and Andre Walker, Stephen Sprouse and Bethann Hardison—we didn’t really realize what was happening, how we were changing a culture.

RUBEN TOLEDO, artist and collaborator with his wife, the late designer Isabel Toledo: We put on an early, precollection Isabel Toledo show there around 1982–1983. This great dude called Steve Lewis paid us cash for it—us and many other fashion designers who were just kids starting out. It gave us so much confidence. Later, we did a fashion show in the bathroom, a summer swimsuit show where the girls came out of the stalls. No one could pee for 30 minutes! André Leon Talley could not believe it. He brought the super chic Marina Schiano, who needed to go badly. She was a great sport and shared a stall with a model, even helped her change looks.

ANNA SUI, fashion designer: The first time I remember seeing Marc Jacobs was on the dance floor of Danceteria. He’d already made a big splash with his first collection. It was right when I was starting to do my own, and I was very inspired by everybody that I was seeing.

MELISSA DAVIS, Danceteria elevator operator and photographer: You were trying to be as unique and individual as possible, and that was what was so beautiful about being at Danceteria: Everyone who made that effort was like their own little unique universe of style.

PIPER: The club was open seven nights a week and I had four floors to fill. So I was open to good ideas or terrible ideas that could be interesting. A lot of the “unforgettable” parties came from stupid ideas that somehow captured the imagination of everybody else.

MUSTO: I just found Rudolf to be such an intelligent person. I felt safe with him. If he was the pilot of the room, you knew you were gonna land.

SUI: I remember that Rudolf was just so European! And very suave and handsome.

FENTON BAILEY, Danceteria DJ and performer, producer-cocreator of Drag Race: Rudolf was slightly Warhol-like with his pronouncements about popular culture. He thought there should be two mayors of New York: one for the daytime and one for the nighttime. And in a way, he was the mayor of New York at night. He had this idea that you should let things be managed chaos.

ARGENTO: We had no money, so all the furniture at Danceteria came from the Salvation Army on 47th Street. And we had this guy, Brian Damage, who used to raid dumpsters. We had one floor just full of props and stuff that the kids found on the streets.

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN, Danceteria performer: Brian Damage would say, “Okay, who wants to come with me tonight to the garment district?” We would go dumpster diving with him and pull out scraps of fabrics so he could make costumes and scenery and whatever. I was a go-go dancer and he might make me a tunic out of leather and scraps of I don’t know what, and it would be hot-glued together.

JAY MCINERNEY, author: Everybody was on something. That’s what kept you going till four in the morning! It was kind of happening everywhere. The bathrooms, the elevators…

MAZAR: I was 16 or 17 when I started working as the elevator operator. People came into my elevator to get high because they couldn’t get into the bathroom, right? People were fucking in the bathroom or doing coke. Trust me when I tell you, I had some shady motherfuckers in my elevator. But there was a code of honor where people were allowed to be messy, to let their hair down. There was no press or no phones in there to take pictures and report on their business.

KATE SCHELLENBACH, founding drummer of Beastie Boys, Luscious Jackson: I had my first kiss with a girl at Danceteria. Audrey Roman, elevator goddess, stopped the elevator between floors to confess she had a crush on me, and we kissed. Blew my not-quite-out baby-dyke mind.

Kate Schellenbach, Haoui Montaug and Audrey Roman, Danceteria rooftop "Wuthering Heights," circa 1984.Courtesy of Kate Schellenbach

ILKU: I do remember being upstairs once and someone saying, “You’ve got to go down to the dressing room. Everyone is snorting coke off of this really gorgeous guy’s dick.” Some rich sugar daddy brought a beautiful hustler who was just smiling ear to ear with a huge erect penis. There’d be little things like that all night long.

ARGENTO: One night I go into my office, and there’s Johnny Rotten sitting with his feet on my desk, with a little crew of sycophants around him. I said, “Get out of here now.” They came marching out. But he was just being obnoxious and pushed me, so I cracked him really hard in the head. The elevator doors opened, and he went tumbling in. It was like a movie scene: The door slowly closed and the elevator went down.

MUSTO: I didn’t even look for celebrities because you didn’t feel the need for them.

PIPER: One of our slogans was: “The place where everything is nothing and everybody is nobody!”

Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols (center) with friends Patty Lederer and Audrey Roman at Danceteria in New York City on August 9, 1982.Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images

SAADIA TIARE, Danceteria elevator operator: I was sitting in the third-floor restaurant one day talking to someone, and Mick Jagger walked by. And in my journal, I wrote, “Oh, I saw Mick Jagger tonight. What’s that fossil doing here?”

MAZAR: John Kennedy Jr. was definitely there. Celebrities would come in, but they weren’t treated like celebrities.

ARGENTO: Tom Cruise came to Danceteria before Risky Business. He just sat there wearing a pink button-down shirt and jeans at the third-floor bar, and nobody was talking to him. Everybody else was kitted out in black, wearing makeup—the guys and girls. He stuck out like a sore thumb. When I was leaving, he was still there.

BAILEY: At this big party for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the place was absolutely jammed. When Rudolf and Dianne walked in, flash bulbs were going off and there’s no question that they were bigger stars than Frankie—even though the song “Relax” was huge.

MCINERNEY: Dianne had a sense of humor about herself. She looked like a classic 1940s pinup, except more outrageously dressed. You couldn’t not notice Dianne.

Although 1980s New York was a cesspit of crime and crack, Danceteria felt like a safe haven. The club made an unofficial policy of not allowing groups of straight men in on their own, which helped. It was a radical move in a city where straight guys wielded so much power—though it sometimes resulted in gaggles of macho dudes standing at the end of the block, trying to coax female clubbers to escort them inside. Also key to the good vibes and eclectic mix of people were the doormen, including the late Haoui Montaug.

MUSTO: Haoui was a perfect doorman, because he was an intellectual and an activist. He wasn’t just some brute on steroids. If he rejected you, he did it with style and with wit. And the first time he said, “Oh, Michael, come in,” I was like, Oh, my God, he knows who I am!

PIPER: He knew everybody, and people say that he kept rejecting Donald Trump from coming into Danceteria…

FREDDY: There was racism on the club scene but we didn’t have that issue at Danceteria because Haoui was tapped in. He knew the people that needed to be in the room.

Danceteria often hosted theme nights and vaudeville acts. Starting in 1982, Montaug and Anita Sarko, one of the club’s iconoclastic DJs, decided to rein some of the local talent into a cabaret called No Entiendes. It hosted a bizarro blend of the talented and talentless, allowing fledgling New York performers, playwrights, designers, and employees to get their freak on—including the young Beastie Boys, Madonna, and performance artists Klaus Nomi, Karen Finley, and Ann Magnuson.

PIPER: No Entiendes had the good and bad and terrible. I remember one Danceteria manager was always bothering me to perform. I said, “Okay, fine.” He went onstage and he started to recite a poem, and in the middle he stopped and said, “I can’t remember how it goes from here,” and started to cry onstage. It was unbelievable. Everybody loved it.

ANN MAGNUSON, performer: The benefit of doing something at Danceteria was they actually had a budget. I could do happenings where I set up the situation and then asked people to participate like we were all characters at Disneyland. I remember Rudolf showing me a higher floor that was completely dilapidated. We put in smoke machines and had people with snakes and made it this apocalyptic lounge where I sang “I Will Survive” with my sardonic, apocalyptic folk band, Bleecker Street Incident. We were convinced that there was going to be nuclear war, so there was a lot of gallows humor woven into these folk songs.

ARGENTO: One night we put a one-foot stage in the corner of the elevator, and Ann Magnuson had a microphone with a little spotlight on her. In that five-by-five foot elevator, she would serenade people as it was going up and down.

MAGNUSON: Rudolf suggested, “Maybe you could do something in the back alley?” So I made up the Festivale di San DeNiro—like the San Gennaro Festival, but we had a giant thing of Robert De Niro in True Confessions. There was spaghetti. I enlisted Vincent Gallo to do a performance of a guy from Little Italy, talking about the neighborhood. We also created a Punch and Judy puppet show where we reenacted scenes from Francis Ford Coppola films. Vince was Al Pacino and I was Diane Keaton doing the Godfather abortion scene. I had to tell him, “Michael, it wasn’t a miscarriage, it was an abortion!” His puppet was just shaking as it got more and more enraged. And then he got a bat and started beating my character, like Punch beats Judy. I couldn’t keep a straight face.

BAILEY: I knew Karen Finley because she was a bartender at Congo Bill. I had no idea she was going to become a performer. One night she went on—I think she had cling peaches and some sort of, like, ketchup, and lots of other stuff poured all over her. I remember it was messy.

MAZAR: I saw every one of Karen’s shows, and it was not that shocking for me because I felt, like, I also have a vagina! She was expressing herself. To me, I was watching somebody be free.

SCHELLENBACH: The whole ethos of No Entiendes was very inspiring. Anita and Haoui were very encouraging of any idea as long as we were committed to the bit. They never made us feel less-than, even though we were a few years younger. I performed a couple of times. Once with the Beastie Boys, we all made the mistake of wearing winter coats, hats, and scarves for some reason. We were boiling. I’d always volunteer to be a prize lady, meaning we’d hand out cheap and fun prizes to audience members deemed worthy by Anita and Haoui. I remember winning a life-sized cut out of Whitney Houston one night, which lived in my loft for years.

TOLEDO: Danceteria was like Pee-wee’s Playhouse fun—silly but very cool and inventive. Joey Arias started a band called Mermaids on Heroin, which I was in. Joey let me art direct and Isabel made costumes. We covered the floor in ultra shiny red vinyl to have the band members stand out in black and white. We made over 50 black vinyl mermaid tails that looked like they were caught in an oil slick, and suspended them from the ceiling like black dripping icicles, which the crowd pulled on like a pinata.

“Mermaids on Heroin”Artwork by Ruben and Isabel Toledo Archives

BAILEY: Randy [Barbato] and I did a gig at No Entiendes. Randy was dancing up and down, and he went right through the stage. He just punched a hole in the floor and disappeared up to his waist. I remember pulling him out and on we went. The show must go on.

ALAN ROSENBERG, curator: We never knew what we were going to encounter. I once saw Pat Hearn, the late, famous art dealer, do a little singing act on the roof.

BAILEY: Michael Alig [the subject of Bailey and Barbato’s film Party Monster, who went to prison in the 1990s for the killing of his fellow Club Kid Angel Melendez] worked as a busboy at Danceteria. His first party was a “filthy-mouth contest.” Anita Sarko and Michael Musto were judges. They were all incredibly dismissive and rude about Michael, but he didn’t seem to care. He had no shame, and that was a plus. The contest itself felt like a complete disaster. But it was Congo Bill’s—so what was the difference between a glittering triumph and a disaster, right?

MADONNA (from Interview): I probably looked completely tragic waiting in line at Danceteria. That’s when Martin [Burgoyne] came up to me. He was really cute: blond curly hair, earrings up his ears, plaid golf shorts, Dr. Martens, black frames, and a white T-shirt with a sweater vest over it. He’s like, “You look lost.” And I was. He said, “Come with me. I’ll get you in.” And he just crashed to the front of the line. Everybody knew him. He said hi to everybody. The doorman opened the velvet rope. He brought me in and my whole life changed. And obviously I went there a lot because I was figuring out a way to butter up [DJ] Mark Kamins.

MAZAR: One day I went to work early. A girl came into my elevator and was like, “Can you take me up to see the DJ?” It was Madonna. She went to deliver her cassette tape to the DJ, Mark Kamins, and came back about half an hour later. No one was there yet, and Mark was starting to put some records on, so me and Madonna just danced together and sweated for 20 minutes. She said, “You know, I’m gonna be a star.” I said, “Oh yeah? I do makeup, I can maybe do your makeup and hair?” And that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

MADONNA (from Interview): Eventually I ended up in a bathroom with Mark Kamins, and I saw him snorting coke. He’s dead now. I can say that…. So anyway, we made out, we did a little blow, and then he agreed to listen to my demo.

PIPER: Mark Kamins came to me and said, “Madonna, Madonna, Madonna!” I said, “How many songs does she have?” It was just one, “Everybody.” Not enough! And then Haoui Montaug also came to me saying, “Madonna. Madonna. Madonna!” I said, “Okay.” Her first show was at No Entiendes. She did a little choreography with her friend Martin Burgoyne. She brought in an incredible crowd for that first show—cool people, a very gay crowd, and they were enthusiastic. So more shows followed.

Ivy Vale Collection

Ivy Vale Collection

MUSTO: She was so unpleasant I called her priMadonna. But it was clear that she was talented and driven and had such tunnel vision about making it. Danceteria was a really good venue for her to step up that ladder.

IVY VALE, writer and filmmaker: She was the most unfriendly person. One night it was really, really crowded, and we were going down the stairs to the first floor, and Madonna was trying to come up. My friend Daniel took his cigarette and just kind of tapped ash on her head. She didn’t even know.

MADONNA (from Interview): Girls threw drinks at me. I wasn’t popular. I was irritating to everybody because I was a dancer and I wasn’t dancing anymore. I would just go crazy on the dance floor, getting it out of my system.

FREDDY: In my memoir, I write about Mark Kamins introducing Madonna to me and [graffiti pioneers] Futura and Dondi, he played us what would be one of her first singles. I was like, okay, whatever. Then to see her blow up was like, holy shit! She was just a cool chick in the mix and then next thing you know, it was like a million girls trying to dress like her.

MCINERNEY: I heard Madonna play there for the first time, and she sang “Everybody.” I was not remotely impressed with the song, but I thought she was a really good dancer. I genuinely thought I would never hear from her again.

Madonna's iconic club scene in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan was filmed at Danceteria.Orion/Kobal/Shutterstock

Danceteria was teeming with teens, high on the music and whatever drinks or illegal substances were on offer, while older scenesters kept a fond eye on them. As high schoolers, the Beastie Boys regularly hung out at Danceteria.

BRILL: The Beastie Boys, those little shits! They were very talented. But at the time they came in, they were like naughty little boys who would come and hit me on the ass and then laugh and run. I always chased them like little brothers or something.

SCHELLENBACH: I was the founding drummer of Beastie Boys, and we had become more and more disillusioned with punk shows as that scene became more “hardcore” and violent. Danceteria was our playground for a few years. Cey Adams threw up a huge Beastie Boys graffiti piece right across from Danceteria in a parking lot.

PIPER: They were busboys. I remember I fired one of them—and to be fired at Danceteria, you needed to do something very wrong.

SCHELLENBACH: None of the Beasties worked there. I hung around the employees so much, however, that Rudolph might have wanted to “fire” me.

ADAM HOROVITZ (from The Beastie Boys Book): Danceteria was the closest thing we had in Manhattan to an amusement park. It had so many options of things to get into. You didn’t just go there to meet friends. It was total excitement, even just walking up to the door. Will you get in? You’re only sixteen, but for whatever reason, the doorman, Haoui Montaug, likes you, so you slide in.… They’d let us in (for free, no less) to see bands like The Raincoats and ESG. Let us be on the dance floor all night. And even get drinks.

RICK RUBIN, producer and cofounder of Def Jam Recordings: I remember spending lots of time there with different members of the Beasties writing rhymes that later became the License to Ill album.

LEYLA TURKKAN, founder of hip-hop PR company Set to Run: [Hip-hop] music was born in the streets but when you talk about it entering into the mainstream and crossing over, that started happening at Danceteria, because of the mix of cultures there.

RUBIN: All of us down with Def Jam spent a great deal of time at Danceteria. We had a party on the roof announcing our partnership with Columbia Records, catered by White Castle. We projected the Beasties’ first video from the roof to the wall of an adjacent building at the party. We even curated a weekly Def Jam party on the second floor for a period of time, making it one of the only places to hear hip-hop music not as an afterthought but as the music of the night.

TURKKAN: Russell [Simmons] and I were on the second floor of Danceteria and Russell was hyping up the Beastie Boys. They had “Cooky Puss” out, and he said, “the Beastie Boys are going to be so famous. We’re going to sell out Madison Square Garden.” I was like, “What? Russell, you are high.”

Adam Yauch and Adam Horowitz, 3rd floor of Danceteria, circa 1984.Courtesy of Kate Schellenbach

RUBIN: Run DMC were the first crossover hip-hop artists—not crossover to pop, but crossover to downtown tastemaker culture. There was no better place for Run DMC to first play than Danceteria.

TIARE: It was a pretty heady time to be around that scene when you’re only 17. One day [Def Jam’s] Russell Simmons and Gary Harris came into my elevator and said, “We’re gonna put you in our movie.” Being a savvy New York kid, I’m like, Yeah, right. But it did happen—I ended up in Krush Groove, which was filmed in May of 1985.

FREDDY: Some club owners were resistant to hip-hop music, but the cool DJs like Kamins wanted to play it. They knew what was going on and what was really rocking the house.

PETER HOOK, New Order bassist and co-owner of Manchester club The Haçienda (from The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club): Danceteria was the New York club between 1980 and 1986 and was…influential on The Haçienda. DJ Mark Kamins was the main draw, and it was seeing him at work that would eventually inspire Mike Pickering to shake up The Haçienda’s musical policy.

BRILL: Anita Sarko was one of the first female DJs that rose to extreme prominence. She was a total dominatrix on the turntables. People would request stuff and she would just look at them and then turn her back.

ROBIN: There were certain songs that made you stop what you were doing and just run out to the dance floor. “Blue Monday” by New Order. “New York, New York” by Nina Hagen.

BAILEY: Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” and “Hip Hop, Be Bop” by Man Parrish—those feel like the theme songs of that time.

TOLEDO: No one was there to pose or to gawk but to sweat and really have fun. My wife, Isabel, was a talented dancer, so she loved to marathon it from floor to floor for hours. Our favorite was the summer vibe on the rooftop. They had a guy selling shaved ice cones out of a tub—it was the perfect tar beach vibe on a sweltering hot Manhattan night with the moon above.

Danceteria juggled multiple events every night, and the barely controlled chaos led to some near-disasters and infamous gigs by bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Butthole Surfers.

ARGENTO: [At the Neubauten show] they didn’t so much play instruments as they played industrial tools. One band member brought a big hunk of concrete and a jackhammer. Concrete was flying all over the place and one guy [in the audience] claimed it damaged his eye. His mother came up to see me and said, “What did you do to my son?”

PAUL LEARY, Butthole Surfers guitarist: They offered us two shows at Danceteria. So we drove from LA to New York, and when we showed up, they said, “Oh, well, we canceled your second show.” We went into that show almost looking for revenge. There was a lot of belching flames and smoke and destruction on the stage. I remember taking a screwdriver and stabbing all the monitor speakers. [Our singer] Gibby was stripping down to his boxer shorts, which was something he usually did—but he forgot to put on boxer shorts that night. Once he was naked, he ended up simulating sex with Kathleen [Lynch], our dancer, who was also naked. I think it was simulated, though according to both of them, it was pretty close. Kathleen also had this [plastic] baseball bat, and she took it as a challenge to see if she could pee into the bat through the little hole on the end. So she had this bat with urine in it, which she called her piss wand, and she would wave it at the audience and pee would come flying out. I’m surprised we got paid.

ALMOND: Lydia Lunch had the idea to do a cabaret show at Danceteria called the Immaculate Consumptive. So four of us—Nick Cave, Jim Thirwell, Lydia, and myself—put together this very chaotic show. We fell to pieces, because the sound wasn’t really good, the tape broke down, there was barely any lighting. Yet it’s become legendary. Nick stole the whole show at the end with an amazing version of Elvis’s “In the Ghetto.”

ARGENTO: Ruth Polsky booked all the bands. She was very into the early English stuff, so we used to send her to England twice a year to find the bands that hadn’t become popular in America yet, and we’d bring them over, like The Smiths and Sade.

PIPER: Ruth said, “I have this great band, U2.” But they wanted something like $4,000, and our limit for bands was $2,000. I said, “$4,000 for U2? Are you crazy? These people are thieves!”

MORRISSEY (on The Smiths’ 1983 US debut, from Autobiography): I walk onstage…at the Danceteria, and as I do so, my blindness and bewilderment lead me directly off the lip of the stage, and I crash at the feet of the assembled human spillage. Unaided, I scramble back up and onto the stage, and I limp directly off—past three blank musicians who are unable to cope with such embarrassment. My right leg is bruised from top to bottom.

PIPER: RuPaul was a fixture at Danceteria.

MAZAR: Ru was raw and organic. I got to meet them there. They weren’t famous, it was just: “Wow, you look great!” I just appreciated their style.

MAGNUSON: We did these wacky musicals. Our Manson musical was called Family! Joey Arias was Manson, I was Squeaky Fromme, and Marc Shaiman [composer and lyricist, with Scott Wittman, of the musicals Hairspray and Smash] played the piano. We had dancers and lots of fake blood. It was so tasteless—we were very much influenced by John Waters in the bad-taste department. We pushed it very far.

SCOTT WITTMAN, Broadway composer: Marc and I did Peter Pan there, starring John Sex. Somebody went to a laundromat and stole costumes for us out of a stranger’s dryer and brought them to Danceteria, so all the lost boys were wearing stolen clothes. We always had a couple of cute guys in the shows who couldn’t sing or dance. I would go to the Gaiety, a male-stripper place in Times Square, collect some guys to be in the shows, and give them drink tickets.

Alison Cohn, Edwige Belmore and Walter Cessna a.k.a. ‘Walter S.’, Danceteria, No Entiendes, circa 1984Courtesy of Kate Schellenbach

Alice Temple, 3rd Floor Bar of Danceteria, circa 1985Courtesy of Kate Schellenbach

MARC SHAIMAN, Broadway composer and author of Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories From a Sore Winner: You couldn’t do anything that we did nowadays, and maybe you shouldn’t. But the pure joy of what made those musicals great always came through. It was definitely the most fun time of our lives.

WITTMAN: We went on to do Hairspray on Broadway, and someone said, “Oh, it looks just like a Club 57 or Danceteria show, except with a budget.” So I think we carried the aesthetic with us.

In September 1983, a 25-year-old Black artist, model, and downtown clubgoer named Michael Stewart, part of Basquiat’s social circle, was arrested for writing graffiti in the First Avenue L train subway station. Savage beatings by police left Stewart brain dead, and he died after 13 days in a coma. “It could have been me,” Basquiat lamented, transforming his horror into a painting titled “The Death of Michael Stewart.” Friends mounted a benefit for Stewart’s family at Danceteria, at which David Wojnarowicz’s band 3 Teens Kill 4 and Madonna both performed.

BRILL: Michael Stewart had just started doing photo shoots for me, and he looked beautiful in my clothes. The policemen must have just projected some kind of hate onto this beautiful, young, skinny guy that had nothing to do with him.

MAZAR: Michael was a very, very close friend of mine. It was the first time in my young life that I heard about police brutality in the sense of people being just singled out. He was the sweetest, most gentle soul, and it was the beginning of the loss of innocence in my life. [Soon] we were losing our friends to AIDS and going to memorials, and then there were these murders and police brutality. Shit got real.

Danceteria also hosted a benefit that year for performer Klaus Nomi, who’d contracted HIV. He died less than three months later, one of the earliest in a staggering wave of deaths that swept through the downtown world.

BRILL: When we lost Klaus, that was really shocking. You just had all these beautiful people around you that you loved and then in three months, they looked like old men. It was such a fast, crippling, horrible sickness.

PIPER: It took away not only the best performers, but it also took away the best of the audience. The audience was decimated.

DAVIS: There was a weird creep of fear slowly blanketing the whole scene, and nobody understood what was happening.

MUSTO: Eighties downtown nightlife was the best it’s ever been. And I think it’s partly because those of us surviving this horror had to get together every night and prop each other up. There was also an element of denial.

BAILEY: So much of what people were doing downtown was an act of creative defiance, in the face of prejudice and discrimination. People were not going to sit around weeping and wailing.

ALMOND: In that time of Thatcher conservatism in Britain and Reagan in the US, Danceteria was this island, a place where you could express yourself, whoever you were, whoever you wanted to be.

Danceteria’s tolerance and topsy-turviness allowed for enormous creativity—but it also allowed for some precarious situations.

BRILL: We would do dinners on the roof in the summertime. One night I wanted to get down to the dance floor and the elevators were very slow. I was always in fetish stilettos and rubber skirts that had limited maneuverability, but I saw some people climbing down the fire escape ladder. So I just climbed down [10 stories], went through the window into the club, and then climbed back up to the roof afterwards. Thank God no one was hurt that way. But we were desperate to find a place where we not only belonged but could create and express—and if it came with a little bit of danger, then that was okay.

DAVIS: There were two elevators side by side at Danceteria, and [fellow elevator operator] Audrey Roman and I used to stop in between floors and open the trap doors inside of the elevators. We would sit with our legs dangling down the shaft and share a joint, and people would be banging on the doors. But the elevators were old. One night my elevator fell from Wuthering Heights. I had too many people crammed in, and the next thing I knew, the elevator was just free falling. Somewhere between the 12th floor and the third floor it stopped, and we used that trap door to get people to safety.

Eventually, though, Danceteria’s elevators were the cause of a tragic fatal accident.

ARGENTO: This guy was on the second floor, leaning against the elevator door. It came off the bottom hinges, the door swung back and he fell down into the pit. But then the door slammed itself right back onto the rails, so it looked normal. Nobody knew that he had fallen down the elevator shaft.

PIPER: It was just terrible. The elevator had been inspected like a week before.

ARGENTO: People say, “That's why Danceteria closed.” But we only closed for that night. By 1986, real estate prices went crazy—that’s why we eventually closed. Before we took it over, DiLorenzo was going to sell that 12-floor building for, I think it was $890,000. By the time we closed, he had an offer for $5 million. And it was kind of time to go. Times were changing.

Piper left Danceteria to work at the Palladium and went on to mastermind successful clubs like the Tunnel and Mars. Argento briefly revived Danceteria in the early 1990s in the ballroom of a dilapidated old hotel. But after that, the name was put to rest—until July 2017, that is, when digging at a Flatiron construction site halted after workers unearthed a WW2-era bomb. It turned out to be Danceteria’s last blast: a time capsule planted by clubgoers and employees 32 years before.

PIPER: In those days, they sold empty bombshells on Canal Street, and I got one to do as a time capsule. Everybody at Danceteria contributed stuff, we did a big party, and we buried the time capsule in the alley.

BRILL: It had a Keith Haring drawing and one of my bras. I think Andy [Warhol] may have written something for it. We thought it would be funny if thousands of years later they’d find our treasures.

PIPER: They found it and thought it was a bomb. That was perfect, just the most fabulous thing ever.

VALE: Danceteria affected us all and opened our eyes to this wildly creative world. When you’re living it, you don’t necessarily see it that way, but in retrospect, it’s like: My God, I was a part of this magical time.

SCHELLENBACH: I figured out I spent more hours at Danceteria than I did at high school. It was a true NYC melting pot of style and glam and music. As long as you weren’t a dick, you found a community there.

DAVID RUSSELL, Danceteria doorman: Every once in a while, I’ll be walking down the street and somebody I don’t know will come up to me out of the blue, and they’ll thank me for letting them into Danceteria.

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