Club 57
Encyclopedia
Club 57 was a nightclub located at 57 St. Mark's Place in the East Village
, New York City
during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a hangout and venue for performance- and visual-artists and musicians, including Madonna
, Keith Haring
, Cyndi Lauper
, Charles Busch
, Klaus Nomi
, The B-52s, Futura 2000
, Kenny Scharf
, Frank Holliday, Staceyjoy Elkin, John Sex
, Wendy Wild
, The Fleshtones
, Joey Arias
, Lypsinka, Marc Shaiman
, Scott Wittman
, Fab Five Freddy
, Jacek Tylicki
, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Michel Basquiat
.
It was started in the basement of the Holy Cross Polish National Church on St. Mark's. Ann Magnuson
, who managed the club and hosted events, described it as home to "pointy-toed hipsters, girls in rockabilly
petticoats, spandex pants, and thrift-store stiletto heels...suburban refugees who had run away from home to find a new family...who liked the things we liked - Devo
, Duchamp, and William S. Burroughs
- and (more important) hated the things we hated - disco
, Diane von Fürstenberg
, and The Waltons
."
She describes a "Punk Do-It-Yourself
aesthetic" which inspired events such as:
Johnny Dynell
DJed at Club 57 for a time.
Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford ran a Monster Movie club on Tuesday nights. Drew Staub remembers at 9:00 Tuesdays “they’d show the really worst monster movie that they could find. And everybody would scream and drink and carry on. I was the house critic of the movie… I was known for that, and it used to gain me free admission.” Hannaford has relocated to Berlin and opened the Berlin Tea Room in August 2006.
Keith Haring used to perform from inside a fake television set, and read his "neo-dada poems" at the Club 57 Wednesday night poetry readings, and later put on evenings and exhibitions there. He curated the Black Light Show there, an early show of his own works (1981), and an exhibition of Kenny Scharf's hand customized appliances.
Besides Magnuson's input, the main contribution to the Club 57 style was from (mostly gay) School of Visual Arts undergraduate students (including Haring,Holliday, Scharf and Sex), who used it as a playground. “At Club 57 there were drugs and promiscuity—it was one big orgy family. Sometimes I’d look around and say, “Oh, my God! I’ve had sex with everybody in this room!” It was just the spirit of the times—and it was before AIDS" remembers Scharf, "Everybody there was either living together or sleeping together" Drew Staub agreed.
Scharf recalls that "Ann Magnuson may have been twenty-four, but she was like our mom." Jean-Michel Basquiat fell out with Kenny Scharf, in part over Club 57: "esthetically I really hated Club 57. I thought it was silly. All this old and bad shit. I’d rather see something old and good.”
Ann Magnuson left her position as manager of Club 57 soon after forming the band Pulsallama, and just before being cast in The Hunger with David Bowie
." Andy Rees took over bring Marc Shaiman andScott Whitman.
In 1981 Steve Mass of Mudd Club
began showing up at Club 57, and began hiring Club 57 crowd to help acquire part of that scene. Keith was later hired to currate shows at the Mudd Club.
Club 57 closed in the early 1980s ("around 1983" said Magnuson) after the community of artists moved on to larger and more expensive venues, and many concurrently began to suffer from AIDS
.
East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a hangout and venue for performance- and visual-artists and musicians, including Madonna
Madonna (entertainer)
Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983...
, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper
Cynthia Ann Stephanie "Cyndi" Lauper is an American singer, songwriter, actress and LGBT rights activist. She achieved success in the mid-1980s with the release of the album She's So Unusual and became the first female singer to have four top-five singles released from one album...
, Charles Busch
Charles Busch
Charles Louis Busch is an American actor, screenwriter, playwright and female impersonator, known for his appearances on stage in his own camp style plays and in film and television. He wrote The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, which was a success on Broadway.-Early life:Busch was born in 1954 and...
, Klaus Nomi
Klaus Nomi
Klaus Sperber , better known as Klaus Nomi, was a German countertenor noted for his wide vocal range and an unusual, otherworldly stage persona....
, The B-52s, Futura 2000
Futura 2000
Futura 2000 is a graffiti artist. He started to paint illegally on New York's subway in the early seventies, working with other artists such as ALI. In the early eighties he showed with Patti Astor at the Fun Gallery, along with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton and Kenny Scharf...
, Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. The artist received his B.F.A in 1980 at the School of Visual Arts located in New York City. Scharf's works consist of popular culture based shows with made up science-related backgrounds...
, Frank Holliday, Staceyjoy Elkin, John Sex
John Sex
John McLaughlin , better known as "John Sex" was a cabaret singer and performance artist in New York City from the late 1970s until his death.-Early life:...
, Wendy Wild
Wendy Wild
Wendy Wild, born Wendy Andreiev was an American singer, musician, and artist who in the 1980s was a well known presence in New York's downtown music and performance scenes.-Career:...
, The Fleshtones
The Fleshtones
The Fleshtones are an American garage rock band from Queens, New York formed in 1976.- 1976-1979 :The Fleshtones were formed in 1976 in Whitestone, New York by Keith Streng and Marek Pakulski The Fleshtones are an American garage rock band from Queens, New York formed in 1976.- 1976-1979 :The...
, Joey Arias
Joey Arias
Joey Arias is a New York City based performance artist, cabaret singer, and drag artist.Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he was six when he moved with his family to Los Angeles. After singing with the rock band "Purlie" on Capitol Records and a stint with famed improvisational group the...
, Lypsinka, Marc Shaiman
Marc Shaiman
Marc Shaiman is an American composer, lyricist, arranger, and performer for films, television, and theatre. He is perhaps best known for writing the music and co-writing the lyrics for the Broadway musical version of the cult John Waters film Hairspray, for which Shaiman won Tony and Grammy...
, Scott Wittman
Scott Wittman
Scott Wittman is an American director, lyricist, and writer for Broadway, concerts, and television.Wittman was raised in Nanuet, New York graduated high Nanuet Senior High School in 1972 and attended Emerson College in Boston for two years before leaving to pursue a career in musical theatre in...
, Fab Five Freddy
Fab Five Freddy
Fred Brathwaite , more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American Hip hop historian, Hip hop pioneer and former graffiti artist...
, Jacek Tylicki
Jacek Tylicki
Jacek Tylicki is an artist who settled in New York City in 1982.-Works:Tylicki's work is closely related to Land art, Installation, video and Photography...
, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...
.
It was started in the basement of the Holy Cross Polish National Church on St. Mark's. Ann Magnuson
Ann Magnuson
Ann Magnuson is an American actress, performance artist, and nightclub performer who first gained prominence in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan...
, who managed the club and hosted events, described it as home to "pointy-toed hipsters, girls in rockabilly
Rockabilly
Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, dating to the early 1950s.The term rockabilly is a portmanteau of rock and hillbilly, the latter a reference to the country music that contributed strongly to the style's development...
petticoats, spandex pants, and thrift-store stiletto heels...suburban refugees who had run away from home to find a new family...who liked the things we liked - Devo
Devo
Devo is an American band formed in 1973 consisting of members from Kent and Akron, Ohio. The classic line-up of the band includes two sets of brothers, the Mothersbaughs and the Casales . The band had a #14 Billboard chart hit in 1980 with the single "Whip It", and has maintained a cult...
, Duchamp, and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
- and (more important) hated the things we hated - disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
, Diane von Fürstenberg
Diane von Fürstenberg
Diane von Fürstenberg, formerly Princess Diane of Fürstenberg , is a Belgian-American fashion designer best known for her iconic wrap dress. She initially rose to prominence when she married into the German princely House of Fürstenberg, as the wife of Prince Egon of Fürstenberg...
, and The Waltons
The Waltons
The Waltons is an American television series created by Earl Hamner, Jr., based on his book Spencer's Mountain, and a 1963 film of the same name. The show centered on a family growing up in a rural Virginia community during the Great Depression and World War II. The series pilot was a television...
."
She describes a "Punk Do-It-Yourself
Punk ideology
Punk ideologies are a group of varied social and political beliefs associated with the punk subculture. In its original incarnation, the punk subculture was primarily concerned with concepts such as rebellion, anti-authoritarianism, individualism, free thought and discontent...
aesthetic" which inspired events such as:
- A theatrical remake of "The Bad SeedThe Bad Seed (film)The Bad Seed is a 1956 American horror-thrillerfilm directed by Mervyn LeRoy. It is based upon a play by Maxwell Anderson, which in turn is based upon William March's 1954 novel The Bad Seed. The play was adapted by John Lee Mahin for the screenplay of the film...
" by andy rees - Erotic Day-Glo art shows
- Theme parties (or "enviroteques")
- Putt-Putt ReggaeReggaeReggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
Night (miniature golf played on a course made of refrigerator boxes designed to resemble a Jamaican shantytown) - Model World of Glue Night (New York's hippest built airplane and monster models, burned them, and sniffed the epoxy)
Johnny Dynell
Johnny Dynell
Johnny Dynell is a New York City DJ and recording artist. A favorite of New York's downtown art and fashion crowds, Dynell started his DJ career at the seminal Mudd Club in 1980 and has worked at many New York nightclub since including Danceteria, The Pyramid Club, Club 57, Area, Boybar, The...
DJed at Club 57 for a time.
Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford ran a Monster Movie club on Tuesday nights. Drew Staub remembers at 9:00 Tuesdays “they’d show the really worst monster movie that they could find. And everybody would scream and drink and carry on. I was the house critic of the movie… I was known for that, and it used to gain me free admission.” Hannaford has relocated to Berlin and opened the Berlin Tea Room in August 2006.
Keith Haring used to perform from inside a fake television set, and read his "neo-dada poems" at the Club 57 Wednesday night poetry readings, and later put on evenings and exhibitions there. He curated the Black Light Show there, an early show of his own works (1981), and an exhibition of Kenny Scharf's hand customized appliances.
Besides Magnuson's input, the main contribution to the Club 57 style was from (mostly gay) School of Visual Arts undergraduate students (including Haring,Holliday, Scharf and Sex), who used it as a playground. “At Club 57 there were drugs and promiscuity—it was one big orgy family. Sometimes I’d look around and say, “Oh, my God! I’ve had sex with everybody in this room!” It was just the spirit of the times—and it was before AIDS" remembers Scharf, "Everybody there was either living together or sleeping together" Drew Staub agreed.
Scharf recalls that "Ann Magnuson may have been twenty-four, but she was like our mom." Jean-Michel Basquiat fell out with Kenny Scharf, in part over Club 57: "esthetically I really hated Club 57. I thought it was silly. All this old and bad shit. I’d rather see something old and good.”
Ann Magnuson left her position as manager of Club 57 soon after forming the band Pulsallama, and just before being cast in The Hunger with David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
." Andy Rees took over bring Marc Shaiman andScott Whitman.
In 1981 Steve Mass of Mudd Club
Mudd Club
The Mudd Club was a TriBeCa nightclub that was opened in October 1978 by Steve Mass, art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips, a figure in the downtown punk scene...
began showing up at Club 57, and began hiring Club 57 crowd to help acquire part of that scene. Keith was later hired to currate shows at the Mudd Club.
Club 57 closed in the early 1980s ("around 1983" said Magnuson) after the community of artists moved on to larger and more expensive venues, and many concurrently began to suffer from AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
.