Under the Dome

Walk into the former Fillmore East on a Saturday night in 1982 and look up. A perforated aluminum dome, roughly seventy-six feet across, curves over a circular floor, and the sound is coming from the sky. Nearly five hundred speakers fire through the perforations from behind the scrim, and a planetarium projector throws constellations across the curve, ten times brighter (the club liked to say) than a real planetarium. At the peak of the night a hatch opens at the dome's apex and a mirror ball descends, foot by foot, into the artificial stars. This was The Saint, and most people who danced under that dome will tell you nothing since has come close.

The room that could not be rebuilt

The Saint opened on September 20, 1980, the creation of Bruce Mailman, who had bought the derelict 1926 theater that Bill Graham once ran as a psychedelic rock hall. With the designer Charles Terrell he gutted it and built a planetarium for dancing: the dome over a dancefloor of about 4,800 square feet, a hydraulic tree of some fifteen hundred lights rising and falling at the center, the Spitz star projector overhead. People reach for the word supernatural without being prompted.

The sound, and the money

The system was not the Richard Long rig of the rival Paradise Garage, a common confusion. It was the last and largest of the Graebar systems, built by Barry Lederer and Peter Spar, with bass cabinets set into the bottom rows of the old theater seating and tweeter arrays over the floor. The club's own publicity touted 26,000 watts, "probably the most powerful per square foot for entertainment purposes in existence," a marketing line more than a measurement. Mailman spent roughly 4.5 to 4.6 million dollars in 1980 money, against the 400,000 it had cost to open Studio 54 three years earlier. By one institutional account it was the most expensive gay business venture attempted to that point.

Members only

The Saint was a private members club for gay men. Joining took the recommendation of two existing members, and many were turned away. Mailman seeded it from the elite above it, mailing invitations to the Fire Island Pines houses of the A-list who had danced at Flamingo, its members-only predecessor; within a year Flamingo had lost its crowd. After Dark magazine called The Saint the "Vatican of disco" in 1981. The bylaws barred women on Saturday nights. And the best accounts insist, in the same breath as the wonder, on the other fact: almost everyone under the dome was white and affluent, and the room's exclusivity was inseparable from both its beauty and its blindness.

Morning music

A night at The Saint was one composed arc, not a stack of records. It opened late and slow, classical or ballads to tune the room, climbed through the early hours to a peak around six in the morning, and then, instead of ending, it turned. The crowd applauded the booth the way a theater applauds a cast, and the resident moved into "morning music" and "sleaze," a long descent of four hours or more, songs of longing and regret and joy meant to bring dancers down gently. The residents authored those mornings: Alan Dodd opened the club, then Roy Thode, Jim Burgess, Sharon White (one of the few women ever to hold the booth), Robbie Leslie, Michael Fierman, and others. White put the craft plainly.

The Saint's disease

Then the crowd that made the room began to die. The new syndrome was so concentrated among the club's members that some people called it "Saint's disease" before it had a settled name. By the later seasons the membership office is said, in a single account, to have received roughly seven hundred renewal notices returned marked "Return to Sender." The most beautiful room in gay America became, on its own floor, a vigil. The losses ran through the booth too: Sean Buchanan, the first of the Saint's DJs to die of AIDS, in 1985; Jim Burgess in 1993; Mailman himself in 1994.

The Last Party, and what survives

Mailman announced the end after a final White Party in February 1988. The Last Party then ran from Saturday, April 30 to around noon on Monday, May 2, more than forty hours of continuous music, and Robbie Leslie was given the closing. The auditorium was demolished in 1996, but the club's signature event outlived the building. The Black Party, born under the dome in March 1981, became the template for the modern circuit party and continues today as a roving Saint-at-Large event.

Why has nothing equalled it? The architecture is part of the answer. You cannot rebuild that immersion with corners and right angles, and no one has tried in earnest. But a club is finally its crowd, and the crowd that filled The Saint was decimated by the disease that briefly carried its name. The activist Brent Nicholson Earle said he could not have become who he became without "that image of transcendent glory, that iconized version of myself, bestowed to me under the dome of the Saint." The room is gone, and so are most of the people who made it the standard the rest are still measured against.