Club 57
Club 57 was a nightclub located on 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 Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fleshtones, Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, Lypsinka, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Fab Five Freddy and Jacek Tylicki.
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.[1]"
She describes a "Punk Do-It-Yourself aesthetic"[2] which inspired events such as:
- A theatrical remake of "The Bad Seed"
- Erotic Day-Glo art shows
- Theme parties (or "enviroteques")
- Putt-Putt Reggae 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)
Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford ran a Monster Movie club on Tuesday nights. Hannaford has relocated to Berlin and opened the Berlin Tea Room in August 2006.
Club 57 closed in the early 1980s after the community of artists moved on to larger and more expensive venues, and many concurrently began to suffer from AIDS.
References
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