Manhattan nightlife has slumped, thanks to COVID and the internet. Anthony Haden-Guest remembers Studio 54 in the city’s heyday
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NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE
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ho or what killed New York’s night world? A number of perps come instantly to mind. ‘The camera phone basically killed off the VIP room as an arena where anything interesting might happen,’ I once told the writer Christopher Tennant, who referred to me as the ‘three-time winner of Spy magazine’s infamous Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon’. I went on to say, ‘There’s not nearly as much drunkenness as there was back then, and certainly not as much fun. I can hardly remember the last time I saw a queue of giggling girls waiting to use a restroom.’ I moved to New York in the late 1970s, from a still somewhat swinging London. I had long been happily living in a studio in the Pheasantry on the King’s Road when a traditional horror occurred: Developer Swoop. So I was kicked out, and looking for a place when I bumped into Clay Felker, the great creator/editor of New York magazine, at a party. I’d done some pieces for him – Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on-stage in Oxford etc – and he said he’d been looking for me. I explained that I had been somewhat sleeping around. ‘Come to New York,’ Felker proposed. Yes. A ticket materialised. A lifechanger. The New York in which I arrived was hardly a fun capital. It was just after the famous Daily News ‘Drop Dead’ cover (pictured) about President Ford’s refusal 28 The Oldie January 2022
to to save the city. New York was so close to bankruptcy that Abe Beame, Mayor of New York from 1974 to 1977, planned to lay off thousands of cops and firemen. Several unions then set up a joint Council for Public Safety which printed a million copies of a pamphlet, Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors. It had a hooded skull on the cover and opened with the tip ‘Stay off the streets after 6pm.’ Bankruptcy was staved off. And then along came disco. Yes, Studio 54 – the 54th Street club that boomed from 1977 to 1980. Such has subsequent coverage of Studio been that one could easily imagine that it was back then the only game in town. Not so. Xenon, Howard Stein’s club on 43rd Street, was as big a draw for another element in New York’s ballooning as an international city – the Eurotrash. That was the semi-affectionate nickname for the incoming rich folk, some distancing themselves from the terrorist groups then bombing and kidnapping in Europe and Latin America. There was also Area, the very artoriented Hudson Street club. There Andy Warhol created an ‘imaginary sculpture’ and the Mudd Club, which was Downtown and punkish – heroin chic, not coke. It was also where an artist friend, Ronnie Cutrone, installed metal cages. ‘They were like rooms. David Bowie had a room,’ he told me. He built a room for Grace Jones while working on an album cover for her. ‘We put her in nude. And we threw in raw meat,’ he said.
Disco days: broke New York was ripe for revival, 1975
There were dozens of such clubs, but Studio was the most effective player in the celebrity culture. This was growing fast but hadn’t gone ballistic. Warhol, the designer Halston and Bianca Jagger all broadened their brands at Studio. The paparazzi would freely shoot the celebs at the door. Inside, the famous would usually be snapped by consent only. It was full Mondo Celebrity. Big clubs bulk big in Lost City lore. But such clubs have always come and gone – as arenas for performance and display, rather than for people to connect. The real clubs of New York, in the timeless sense of places where a specific group would regularly cluster,
