Mr Rubell would pass away later that year. The duo would return from prison and play a seminal role in the boutique hotel movement with the opening of Morgan’s in 1981. At the event Ms Diana Ross serenaded Messrs Rubell and Schrager.
(It probably didn’t help that Mr Rubell told New York newspapers that Studio 54 had made $7 million in its first year of operation and “only the Mafia made more money”.) Here, Mr Ryan O’Neal and Ms Farrah Fawcett arrive for the co-founders’ farewell party. Like all good things, Studio 54’s first incarnation came to an end in 1980 when Mr Rubell and Mr Schrager were convicted of tax evasion. “ The very notion of a New York that rich people were fleeing instead of flocking to seems exotic.” “The attraction of the 1970s lies in how much this decade is the polar opposite of today’s brittle, money-driven city of hedge funds and $100 million apartments, and the nostalgia for the sheer grunginess of New York then seems only to keep mounting,” writes the cultural critic Mr Paul Goldberger in the introduction to Mr Ian Schrager’s new book on the nightclub, Studio 54.
Why does Studio 54 generate so much nostalgia particularly when by all other measures (crime, cleanliness, prosperity) New York City was dangerous, filthy and nearly bankrupt. The scene was a melting plot – straight and gay black, white, Latino and Mr Chow libido (not love) was in the air: The club’s heyday from 1977 to 1980 coincided with a moment when the pill was standard operating procedure and Aids hadn’t happened yet.įorty years after Messrs Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell opened Studio 54 on an initial capitalisation of $400,000, people are still wondering why a short-lived nightclub from one of the dirtiest and most dangerous moments in New York City’s recent past continues to inspire mood boards from the hot, overt sexiness of Mr Tom Ford’s era at Gucci in the 1990s to the cool, clandestine sexiness of Mr Alessandro Michele’s current one. Over the dance floor was a pendulum-like sculpture of a crescent moon that would swing down and collide with another sculpture of a coke spoon as a maenad-like frenzy undulated beneath them. The theatre’s balcony, which still had its rows of flip-up seats, was a pansexual passion pit the bathrooms, pharmaceutical-ingestion stations. Shirtless go-go boys wearing track shorts and tube socks tended the bar. The main floor of the former theatre and its backstage were now a dance floor with couches ringing the perimeter. Something glamorous, intimidating and throbbing to a Ms Donna Summer beat lay on the other side. A bouncer in a puffer jacket clicked the rope open for the women, and we held on like drowning men. The crowd outside was 20 people deep on all three sides of the velvet rope as we spilled out of the cab and onto 54th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. My best friend and I were at a black-tie dance uptown when three striking blondes of good pedigree and even better décolletage announced that we were all “going to Studio”. At 14, I had only been to a nightclub once before (if you count going with your mum to hear cabaret singer Mr Bobby Short perform at Café Carlyle). The first time I ever went to Studio 54 was also the first time I ever went to a discothèque. Forty years since the club first opened, a new book by its founder celebrates the patrons who kept the party going.