Paradise Garage

Written by
Greg Ferguson for Place Matters and Professor Gwynneth Malins Fall 2019 NYU Local and Public History Course

The Paradise Garage (also known simply as “the Garage”) was a nightclub founded in 1977, when proprietor Michael Brody took out a lease on a disused parking garage in downtown Manhattan with the intention of turning it into a disco on a scale not yet seen. When completed, its main room held two thousand dancers and housed a massive sound system, but the club’s enduring reputation is not based primarily on its size. Instead, the Paradise Garage’s legacies remain both its radically pluralistic ethos and the musical and emotional connection that the resident DJ Larry Levan established with the club’s primarily gay, black and Hispanic audience.

The Paradise Garage’s roots lie in The Loft and The Sanctuary, the racially and sexually mixed underground venues where Manhattan DJs and party goers created a new form of nightlife in the early 70’s: dancing all night to a seamless flow of recorded music in an inclusive and uninhibited environment. Many of the early participants were gay men, who found that the social setting and music formed a perfect backdrop for affirming their sexuality and group
identity after decades of limited visibility. By 1977 this new activity, its venues and its music

had all come to be known as “Disco” and had reached zeitgeist proportions across the country. While New York’s celebrity-focused, publicity-driven Studio 54 came to define the phenomenon in the public imagination, an under-the-radar network of clubs and private parties including the original Loft, The Gallery, Better Days, SoHo Place and Reade Street all strove to keep the open, pluralistic spirit alive. Reade Street was Michael Brody’s first attempt to recreate the atmosphere of The Loft and the first venue where he employed Larry Levan. Reade Street and Levan drew a devoted crowd but problems with the space and the landlord led to its closure, so Brody asked Levan not to play anywhere else while he looked for a larger venue.

He found his location at 84 King Street, a former parking garage located on an industrial block at the far end of the West Village. Brody funded its buildout with loans from his family and his ex-partner Mel Cheren (owner of West End Records, the record label most closely associated with the Garage) as well as through a series of “construction parties” during 1977 and 1978. Each party revealed a new phase in the development of the space, with the proceeds going
straight back into further construction.2 Improvements included a spectacular sound system

designed by Levan and the sound engineer Richard Long that could fill the massive space with high-powered, high-fidelity sound. The club’s official opening in 1978 was as a disaster, as a blizzard held up delivery of important sound equipment while the A-list guests Brody had invited waited outside in the cold. Most of them never came back, according to Brody’s friend and

ex-partner Mel Cheren (also owner of West End Records, the record label most closely

associated with the Paradise Garage).3 Brody regretted the rejection at the time, but in hindsight

it appears to have been a blessing in disguise, as the club was able to grow organically without the pressure of competing for the more affluent, image-oriented, and largely white clientele of clubs like Studio 54, Flamingo or The Saint.

Instead, the Paradise Garage gradually built up an audience of people who wanted first and foremost to dance. At a time when crime was high, jobs were scarce, AIDS was spreading, and racism and homophobia remained facts of life, the club offered a sanctuary and a community where people from any background could forget their troubles on the dance floor. The catharsis was provided by Levan, who developed a powerful, highly personal style of DJing that
emphasized dramatic tension and euphoric collective release through his eclectic choice of records and his use of the thunderous sound system. Dressed-down celebrities like Diana Ross, Mick Jagger, Keith Haring and Grace Jones circulated largely unnoticed among the crowd, which was focused instead on Levan’s music and the dancers’ fluid, expressive movement:

“You’d walk in through a garage door and up a ramp with light bulbs on either side that looked like a runway or an old-fashioned marquee, and as you heard Larry’s music on top, you’d feel like you were about… about to take off … ’Cause Larry had that gift to take the crowd to a place where you’d feel the aura of these bodies in rhythm… inventing all kinda moves, freestylin’, dancing by yourself and with everyone else. ” — Paradise Garage regular Juan Rivera

In order to maintain the feeling of an enormous extended family, the Paradise Garage operated as a private membership club to which only card-carrying members and their guests were admitted. (This policy also allowed the venue to exploit a legal loophole that permitted private clubs to function outside the usual laws regulating nightlife, allowing parties to go on long past daybreak.) Friday nights were mixed, while Saturday nights were reserved primarily for gay
men. These rules allowed the nightclub to keep out sightseers and avoid unwanted media

attention, which was a priority for both Levan and Brody8 As a result, the venue maintained a

warmth and intimacy that belied it size: members knew each other, the staff were famously friendly, and no alcohol was served while food and beverages were offered free — sometimes including punch spiked with LSD.

The dancer-focused, low-key strategy paid off as membership grew and both Friday and
Saturday nights took off.10 Despite disco’s commercial collapse in 1980, it remained a strong

underground force in New York City and reached new peaks creatively as musicians and producers began to incorporate diverse elements of new wave, hip-hop and reggae into their new records. Levan established himself as a remixer and producer on records like Instant Funk’s “I Got My Mind Made Up”, Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face” and Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait” (the latter two on Mel Cheren’s West End Records), all of which he turned into classics at the Paradise Garage. His reputation as a tastemaker was further cemented by his friendship with Frankie Crocker, the star DJ on WBLS in New York. Crocker and Levan would turn each other on to records, with many Paradise Garage mainstays becoming regional hits

through Crocker’s plays.11 Record labels and managers clamored to get their releases into

Levan’s hands and the performers booked on the Garage’s stage as a result. While the club itself remained under-the-radar, its members could sense like they were at the center of a distinctive New York phenomenon. According to regular and occasional fill-in DJ François Kevorkian: “It felt like the whole city was listening.”

The party lasted for eleven years, but eventually tensions with the neighborhood and the AIDS crisis took their toll. Trouble developed with the local neighborhood association and the developer of a nearby luxury condo development, who were both unhappy about the noise and the partygoers exiting the club every weekend. Despite Brody’s efforts to smooth things over, the association and developer succeeded in persuading the building’s landlord not to renew the
club’s lease.13 By the time it expired in 1987, Brody himself was suffering from AIDS and chose

not to pursue a new location. 14,000 people passed through the club during its three-day closing party, and to the membership it felt like the end of an era:

“By 8pm on Sunday, the punch bowl room started thinning out and you could get into the dance floor room, though there were still a lot of people in there. Larry’s mom, Minnie Levan, was in the punch bowl room and she was speaking to whoever was left and thanking them, saying, ‘The Garage is dead and now we can all go home and be in misery.’ It was very emotional. People were crying and not wanting to leave.”– Paradise Garage regular Tina Paul

Two months later, Michael Brody passed away. Larry Levan continued to DJ, but he struggled with addiction and never found another venue or audience that compared to the Garage. He died in 1992 of a heart condition exacerbated by his drug use.

The memory of the Paradise Garage endures today both musically and socially. Since his death, Larry Levan’s reputation has only continued to grow, and he is now remembered as one of
the defining figures of disco and still cited as one of the greatest DJs ever. Equally importantly,

the club’s mixed, pluralistic ethos provided its members with an almost countercultural community that still exists today in the form of annual reunion parties. With its crowd made up of everyone from “freestyling homeboys to vogueing drag queens, straight-identified banjee boys to recently “out” gays, up-and-coming media celebrities to East Village underground experimental artists, and music industry insiders to homeless and thrown-away kids,” the

Paradise Garage was an emblem of 70’s and 80’s New York and a lasting symbol of the power of music to form communities.