The King of Clubland

Put yourself behind Peter Gatien’s black eye patch for a moment and imagine you’re the most powerful nightclub owner in the city, the stony-faced ruler of a domain that extends from the Tunnel on the West Side Highway to Limelight in Chelsea over to the Palladium on the edge of the East Village.

It’s a summer Saturday night, and you’re crisscrossing the town via cab, paying lightning visits to the venues you operate, attempting to track the rhythm of the night as it builds into the wee hours.

As you arrive, lounging bouncers spring to attention, promoters rush over to pay their respects, and the velvet rope is whipped open in double-quick time. You linger outside for a few minutes, trying to gauge if the doormen are being too generous with the comp tickets, before pressing forward into the club, where you’re delayed by a commotion at the box office. The short pudgy man with a tan directly in front of you is trying to talk his way in without paying. “I’m Mark from Miami. I’m a friend of Peter Gatien’s,” the indignant tourist keeps insisting. This happens all the time. You’ve never seen the guy before in your life. Outside of your family and employees, you could count your real friends on the fingers of both hands. Miami Mark pays if he wants to stay.

You walk through the club unrecognized. Your profile is lower than a limbo dancer’s. And that’s how you like it. This way there’re fewer pretentious air-kissing phonies to deal with. You conduct yourself with a reserve that’s almost English, yet, in reality, you’re from a small blue-collar town in Canada. But even after more than two decades in the same business, you still get a buzz when you enter a room that’s pumping. Tonight the fashionable crowd dances feverishly to the latest sound from Europe called gabba-house, a propulsive fusion of house and techno that your staff tells you is the next big dance craze.

Standing motionless at the side of the dance floor, your body language in stark contrast with the undulating forms you’re surrounded by, you know people think you’re a bit of a cold fish, not exactly the life of the party. But you also know what happens to club owners who partake too much of the nocturnal pleasures they make money off. Steve Rubell, if he hadn’t succumbed to hepatitis first, would have drugged and drank himself into an early grave. The high-living Rudolph, after a string of short-lived nightclubs collapsed, exiled himself to the West Coast. And Frank Roccio, who used to entertain visiting pop stars and big-time gangsters alike in his private office at former East Village hot spot the World, was last seen begging for change on Christopher Street.

You, on the other hand, have prospered. Fun City still wants to party hearty.

The sober ’90s have turned out to be anything but, news that even City Hall and the police have recently cottoned on to.

Your racy pleasure domes, where, on certain nights, cruel and erotic entertainments are staged that would have made Nero blush, have struck gold by cleverly predicting many of the major themes of ’90s pop culture—s/m, voyeurism, the cult of the super-model, cyberpunk, kiddy-chic, retro-mania, body modification, antifashion fashion—a full 18 months before they appear in the pages of the style mags and on Geraldo.

No one has more successfully ridden the changes that have dramatically transformed New York nightlife since the late ’80s.

Back then, you had only one club in New York, the Limelight. It was regarded as irredeemably passé by the hip elite, a tacky meeting place for the bridge-and-tunnel set. At the same time, there was a recession going on. AIDS also seemed to signal an cnd to the festivities. And a lot of the people who made clubs like Area and Danceteria happen in the ’80s grew older and stopped going out.

But, paradoxically, all these negatives worked in your favor. The fear of AIDS meant that voyeurism, pornography, and fetishism suddenly took on a new appeal, a trend evident in all your clubs but exploited most famously at the _____ people who couldn’t afford big-ticket items anymore, such as holidays abroad, spcnt their disposable cash closer to home. The retirement of the ’80s generation from active duty in the nightclubs cleared the way for a new generation, who didn’t expect to be comped and paid for their own drinks. And your catering to clubbers from the outer boroughs allowed you to capitalize on the increased hipness of mainstream youth culture in the area; these days at your dance halls, downtown trendies and the boys from Bensonhurst dress so much alike as to be nearly indistinguishable. You also courted out-of-towners, recognizing what a major tourist attraction local nocturnal wild life is.

Your remarkable longevity has led to resentment among some of the gossipy denizens of New York’s clubland, who have filled the vacuum left by your elusive personality with rumor and hearsay.

Strangers claim to have the most intimate details of your financial dealings and personal life. Every time a club shuts down in Manhattan, people say you’re responsible. Your rivals accuse you of having the police and City Hall in your pocket, a common perception that’s about to be dramatically dispelled.

Looking out over the whirling mix of models and wodels, rockers and ravers, drag queens and muscle boys, you’re still a little irritated by the New York Times article earlier this year that proclaimed large-scale New York nightlife is dead, that the type of mega-clubs you specialize in are no longer fashionable, replaced by an age of intimacy, whatever that is. Do the people who write these articles ever go out?

Your clubs are packed nearly every night. Twenty-five thousand people a week pass through your doors. You employ over 900 persons.

You expect to gross about $15 million to $20 million in combined revenues this year. Against the odds, you revitalized two ailing clubs, Palladium and the Tunnel. And you’ve kept the Limelight going for 12 years, an uncommon length of time in the fickle world of New York nightlife. No wonder somebody has called the notorious boîte nuit place “the most consistent product since toilet paper.”