For members of New York City’s downtown art scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s, hitting the club didn’t mean navigating through a velvet rope, negotiating with a brutish bouncer and ordering hundreds of dollars worth of bottle service.
At Club 57 — the East Village communal space celebrated in the new MoMA exhibit “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983” — a night out could mean watching obscure monster movies, seeing a hot punk band, viewing eye-wateringly explicit art exhibits or even participating in a ladies’ wresting match. And it all took place inside an unremarkable church basement populated by artists, oddballs and weirdos.
“There were a lot of dead ends confronting young people at the time,” actress and former manager Ann Magnuson tells The Post. “There was a sense that we could be at nuclear war with Russia at any minute, the city was broke, there was a lot of crime. But Club 57 gave young artists a place to be optimistic.”
Studio 54 was where you went if you had money and cocaine, the Mudd Club and Danceteria if you were stylish and cutting-edge. Club 57 was for everyone else, and almost 40 years after its inception, MoMA is shedding light on how this runt of New York City nightlife spawned a new pedigree of artists.
“It was populated by an odd collection of drag queens, junkies, runaways and, worst of all, art students! At Club 57, it was the crème de la crumbs.”
- Kai Eric
The underground haunt offered an early platform for the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, as well as composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.
Today, Haring’s and Basquiat’s work sell for millions, while Shaiman and Wittman have numerous Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award nominations among them.
The exhibit, opening on Tuesday, also explores how that initial optimism began to fade once harder drugs like heroin became a factor, and the onset of AIDS replaced the sexual openness of Club 57 with rampant paranoia.
“I always think of Club 57 as version of Andy Warhol’s Factory or like a giant TV set, where the channels were always changing,” adds Magnuson.
“It was a place where anything could happen, and it often did.”
Club 57 began when bishops at the Holy Cross National Polish Church at 57 St. Marks Place drafted Stanley Strychacki (a Polish immigrant known throughout the community for organizing social and cultural events) to help utilize the basement and raise funds for the church. The space was bare but had a bar, and Strychacki quickly realized there was a growing local artistic crowd that needed a no-frills spot to host events. For a fee of $5, members got a customized membership card, calendar mailouts and access to almost everything hosted at Club 57. The vast majority lived in Alphabet City.
“The city was destitute at the time,” says Kai Eric, who was an active member and manager for a short time. “It was populated by an odd collection of drag queens, junkies, runaways and, worst of all, art students! At Club 57, it was the crème de la crumbs.”
Early bookings were met with mixed results. On one occasion recounted in Strychacki’s book, “Life as Art: The Club 57 Story,” the club’s first manager, Chris Gremski, unwittingly rented the space to hold a news conference for New York’s first prostitutes union, to the consternation of the church.
Punk-rock bands, such as the Fleshtones and the Misfits, immediately sought out the venue for its open-minded booking policy. (Sonic Youth would also play one of its earliest shows there, in 1981.) Strychacki’s mother fed the musicians cheese sandwiches, but the hassle and noise involved in putting on rock shows led him to look for other events for the St. Marks location. (Acts such as Cyndi Lauper and the Cramps continued to get booked to play at a Club 57-branded night at Irving Plaza, which ran concurrently.)
Magnuson became manager in 1979, and one of her innovations was a regular new-wave vaudeville night. Singers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias appeared regularly and, by the end of the year, both appeared alongside David Bowie on “Saturday Night Live” performing “The Man Who Sold the World.”
Even though Arias and Nomi met Bowie at the rival Mudd Club, it was still a thrill for Club 57 members to see two of their own with artistic royalty.
“We were all teenagers when Ziggy Stardust happened,” recalls Magnuson. “People were liberated by Bowie’s bisexuality and the promiscuity of that time — for better or for worse.”
The burgeoning downtown visual-art crowd also began to use Club 57 as a base. Haring became a regular by 1979, reading poetry, exhibiting video art and debuting the bright dancing figures and the famous “radiant baby” motif that would come to define his career.
One of Haring’s most famous shows was the Erotic Art Show held in February 1981 — a particularly graphic exhibit with contributions from dozens of artists whose flier featured a naked man with a plane between his legs.
“There was a giant photograph of an erect phallus, painted entirely in silver, right as you came in,” Magnuson says. “I saw the bishop from the church upstairs come in and headed him off. I said, ‘I have to talk to you about something very important right now,’ so I walked him down to a coffee shop and made up something to talk about to distract him.”
Also making Club 57 his home was Basquiat. Although revered now, the Brooklyn-born artist was struggling to make enough money for his meals and rent during the 1980s.
“He came in one night while I was working the bar,” recalls Kai Eric, who also lived with Basquiat for a while. “He laid out about 15 drawings and was trying to sell them. There was one of a skeletal Marlboro man. He wanted $10, but I said I was going to give him $25. He smiled and said, ‘OK, choose three more.’ So I bought four Basquiats for $25!
“There was one canvas piece I had that I also bought for $25 that was hung behind the bar at Club 57 for a while, but I had to sell for rent money in the late ’80s. It went for around $10,000.”
Basquiat later claimed he “hated” Club 57 and found it “silly,” according to Steven Hager’s 1986 book, “Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene.”
It was at these art shows that downtown got its first taste of hip-hop. Graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy was another patron of Club 57 and, in 1981, he invited the Bronx-based hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa to deejay at one of the club’s shows.
“After introducing Keith Haring to the different aspects of hip-hop culture and playing him live hip-hop party tapes, he asked if I thought Bambaataa would play for them [the Club 57 crowd],” Freddy tells The Post. “I reached out to Bam and made it happen. These experiences playing for a mostly white crowd of young, new-wave artists inspired Bam to make his groundbreaking dance music classic, ‘Planet Rock’ [1982].”
Performance art was also a key facet of Club 57’s programming. On one occasion, Magnuson performed with her band Pulsallama — an all-girl 13-piece percussive orchestra.
“That’s another term for a lot of noise,” she says.
Performance artist John Sex also came to prominence by melding drag act, stripper, singer and dancer into one larger-than-life persona.
But the event that lives in infamy was Lady Wrestling Night, held in 1980. Club members devised their own characters and storylines, and the ample supply of trash found on New York’s streets provided the props.
“We had a ring built in the middle of the club,” says Magnuson. “When I got fake-punched, I spit out a mouth of teeth, which were actually Chicklets.”
The event, like many at Club 57, was intended to subvert traditional gender roles.
“I thought the uptown art scene was the land of ‘no’ for a lot of women,” Magnuson says. “It was downtown where I saw a lot of women controlling their own destiny and thriving — people like [no-wave artist] Lydia Lunch, or Patti Smith a few years earlier.”
That anything-goes approach to gender also extended to sexuality. In the book, “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” artist Kenny Scharf recalled, “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!’ ”
But as AIDS spread, Club 57 — and New York’s wider artist community — was decimated. Nomi was one of the first to die, in 1983. Sex and Haring both succumbed in 1990. (Basquiat also passed away, of a heroin overdose, in 1988.) For much of the 1980s, information about AIDS was scarce and few knew how it could be contracted. The conjecture only made things worse.
“Imagine watching a third of your friends die, one-by-one, within five or 10 years,” says Magnuson, who sobs as she recalls the era of fear that AIDS ushered in.
“It took a huge emotional toll. Some people’s parents disowned them. I heard a couple of Keith’s celebrity friends stopped talking to him when they found out he had HIV. I’ve talked to many people from Club 57, and many admit to suffering from some kind of PTSD from seeing all this,” she said.
Distressed over the growing AIDS epidemic, as well as the wider spread of heroin use downtown, Strychacki called time on Club 57 in 1983.
The location is now a clinic for mental-health patients, but Club 57’s creative legacy is huge. Haring, Scharf and Basquiat are all famed modern artists, Magnuson went on to be a noted performer and actor, appearing alongside Bowie in “The Hunger” (1983) and Madonna and Rosanna Arquette in “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), and hip-hop has gone from making an early impression downtown to becoming a dominant genre in pop music around the world.
It seems inconceivable that a comparable scene could happen again, not for a lack of artists, but because modern-day New York is completely different from the city in which Club 57 was born.
“The stakes were low and people with money weren’t really paying any attention,” says Magnuson. “Club 57 was an example of the creative freedom that I believe is only possible when a city, and its inhabitants, are down on their luck.”