Parties & raves

Ladyfag's sweaty basement party, long associated with Open House in the East Village, the small-room counterweight to her larger Holy Mountain productions.

718 Sessions is the Sunday party Danny Krivit launched with promoter Benny Soto in October 2002, its name lifted from Brooklyn's telephone exchange, after a first room on Water Street in Dumbo. Krivit plays the deep, disco- and garage-rooted sound he also carries through Body & Soul; the crowd, loyal and intergenerational, has followed the party across rooms and boat parties for two decades.

An underground house and techno promoter that ran off-the-grid parties for eleven years as the city's nightlife went above ground. Residents Taimur Agha and Fahad Haider booked the era's heavyweights (Nina Kraviz, Ben Klock, Seth Troxler) across unmarked spaces and rooms like Cielo, Le Bain, and Output. It closed July 4, 2017 with an Apollonia party at Output.

Bubble_T is the AAPI queer party founded in May 2017 (its first night at The Rosemont in Williamsburg) by Stevie Huynh, Nicholas Andersen, Pedro Vidallon, Paul Tran, and Karlo Bueno Bello (Bichon), who wanted a community-run space for queer Asians after years of being unseen in the city's mostly white gay nightlife. Built around chosen family as much as the dancefloor, it grew into one of New York's signature queer parties (its Lunar New Year editions at Elsewhere among the most anticipated) and helped seed a wider wave of queer Asian nightlife.

A weekly Sunday party founded by Joey Sheridan, opening on New Year's Day 1993 at the third and final Danceteria (the early-1990s revival in the Martha Washington Hotel at 30 East 30th Street, not the famous 21st Street original) and known for Latin and tribal house and a famously mixed crowd of all sexual identities. At its peak at Club Expo (the former Henry Miller's Theatre in Times Square) it drew crowds into the thousands on holiday weekends. Closed July 1999 at Cheetah, the former Sound Factory Bar.

Cityfox is the Swiss-founded house and techno promoter (led by co-founder Jürgen 'Billy' Bildstein) whose immersive, heavily produced 'Cityfox Experience' parties became a centerpiece of New York's large-scale electronic scene. Its first NYC site, the original outdoor Brooklyn Mirage, opened in 2015 and was quickly shut over safety violations before the brand returned to anchor the rebuilt Mirage at Avant Gardner, pairing festival-grade production with marquee underground lineups.

Founded and financed by DJ Lil Ray, the ClubHouse Jamboree is the longest-running free outdoor house-music party in New York City, held every year since 1994 on the second Sunday in September at Prospect Park's Music Pagoda. Billed as the season's last outdoor house gathering, it draws a global house-head pilgrimage and has hosted DJ Spinna, Jellybean Benitez and Ultra Naté.

A New York collective, booking agency, and event platform founded in 2014 to represent and showcase women and non-binary artists in electronic music. Born from a two-day 2014 showcase, it formalized into a national booking force whose showcases ran from Detroit to Mexico City, reframing the gender politics of club and festival lineups. Co-founder Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson went on to launch the Black-centered Dweller festival.

A Brooklyn-born label and collective launched in 2008 by Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture) and Matt Shadetek, with Geko Jones a core early member. Emerging from the global DJ circuit and Clayton's Dub War night, it became a node of New York's worldwide-bass underground, releasing diaspora-minded electronic music until winding down after ten years in 2019.

Dweller is the New York festival celebrating Black talent in electronic music, founded in 2019 by Discwoman co-founder Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson and staged each Black History Month across Brooklyn and Queens clubs. Named for Drexciya's 'Deep Sea Dweller' and its Afrofuturist mythology, it pairs performances with talks and workshops, building a platform against an industry that has long erased techno's Black origins.

A monthly Black-diaspora day party launched in New York in 2012 by Saada Ahmed, chef Roblé Ali and DJ mOma, named for Arrested Development's 'People Everyday.' Built on '90s R&B and an Afro-diasporic crowd, it grew from an intimate brunch into a roving, multi-city phenomenon and a fixture of NYC's day-party culture.

Faggots Are Women is a queer rave launched in 2024 by Seva Granik with the poet Kay Gabriel, described in coverage as a 'transensual' party held at temporary Brooklyn warehouse locations.

GHE20G0TH1K is the roving club night Venus X started in 2009 with Hood By Air's Shayne Oliver, a deliberately genre- and scene-shattering party that pulled voguers, skaters, club kids, punks, and rappers onto the same floor and insisted goth was never a white subculture. Over roughly six years across Brooklyn and Manhattan warehouses and clubs, its dark, collaged, CDJ-driven sound ('ghetto goth') became one of the most influential exports of 2010s New York nightlife.

Ty Sunderland's late-night party, launched in 2017 at the former China Chalet restaurant in the Financial District, a pop-inflected, performance-art-laced queer rave that became emblematic of pre-pandemic downtown nightlife and drew figures including Aquaria and Kim Petras. Its China Chalet home became, in Vice's framing, 'Manhattan's greatest queer nightlife utopia.' The flagship of a brand portfolio that also includes Love Prism, Gayflower, and Ty Tea.

Ladyfag's multi-room house-and-techno fete, born at Slake in Chelsea and later scaled up to Brooklyn's Avant Gardner, maximal and costume-forward. One of the recurring nights, alongside Battle Hymn and 11:11, that the New York Times invoked in calling her 'a nightlife sorceress.'

Hot Rabbit is a roving NYC LGBTQ dance party founded in 2011 by Emily Hall Maresca, billed as one of the city's largest and longest-running queer nightlife brands, with CB Glasser as co-producer. Centering women, trans people and the full queer spectrum, it built a high-energy weekly format of DJs, performers and aerialists across rotating venues, and has been named best in LGBTQ events by outlets including the New York Times and Time Out.

A youth-led offshoot of New York ballroom, formed by a new generation of LGBTQ+ youth of color about twenty-five years after ballroom entered the mainstream. Seeded through programming at GMHC and allied service organizations, kiki houses pair competition with peer support, HIV testing, and housing referral, lower-stakes than the mainstream scene by design, an on-ramp that became its own world, documented in the 2016 film Kiki.

NYC's foundational jungle and drum & bass night, founded November 1994 at Club 205 by Cassien with E.G. 'Mac' MacFarlane, and resident DJs including Dara, Delmar, Panik and Darkstar. Forced to migrate constantly through Coney Island High, Mantra, Acme Underground and the Pyramid Club during Giuliani's 'Quality of Life' crackdown, it became the longest-running jungle/d&b night in the world and an early stage for a generation of NYC drum & bass artists.

Ladyfag's femme- and trans-forward queer music festival, debuting in 2018 at Bushwick's Brooklyn Mirage and relocating in 2023 to Under the K Bridge Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Billboard called it 'equal parts Coachella, Berlin nightclub, and queer warehouse rave.' It runs during Pride month as an alternative to corporate Pride, with lineups spanning queer pop, dance, and underground performance.

Susanne Bartsch's landmark AIDS-benefit ball, first staged in 1989, which raised some $400,000 and carried Harlem ball culture into a fashion-world mainstream years before mass recognition. Bartsch revisited the format in later decades.

Brooklyn warehouse and abandoned-space rave series run by Adam X and Heather Heart in the wake of Storm Rave, pushing a harder, rawer techno and acid sound than the larger commercial NYC raves. Part of the Storm-descended Sonic Groove underground that kept illegal warehouse culture alive through the mid-'90s.

Mister Saturday Night (and its daytime counterpart Mister Sunday) is the long-running party founded by Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin, associated with a dance-first, community-minded ethos that moved across outdoor and indoor spaces before anchoring at Nowadays.

Papi Juice is the Brooklyn QTBIPOC party and art collective founded in 2013 by Adam R, Oscar Nñ, and visual artist Mohammed Fayaz, born out of frustration with a gay nightlife that centered mostly white, cisgender men. Its first night drew seventy-five people to Bed-Stuy's since-shuttered One Last Shag. A celebration of queer and trans people of color, built as much around its commissioned artwork and door culture as its dancefloor, it grew into one of the most important parties in the city and has since toured beyond New York.

Founded in 2008 by DJs Uproot Andy and Geko Jones, Que Bajo?! was one of the original homes of what came to be called global bass, cumbia, reggaetón, kwaito and Brazilian bass folded into club edits its founders dubbed 'Barrioteca.' Roving across Manhattan and Brooklyn rooms, it reshaped the sound of immigrant New York nightlife and was named the city's top Latin underground party.

ReSolute is one of New York's longest-running underground house and techno parties, a roving night known for marathon sets in unglamorous, sound-focused rooms: rooftops, warehouses, recent editions at H0L0. It has run for well over a decade largely on word of mouth.

SHADE is frequently cited as one of the first queer underground rave series in New York, a roving, DIY warehouse party co-created by Seva Granik and Ladyfag that ran from 2013 to 2015 before giving way to UNTER.

A New York party founded by DJ and cultural curator Natasha Diggs with curator DProsper, built on soul, funk, house and hip-hop across the Black musical diaspora. Roving through Brooklyn rooms and institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, it pairs Diggs's residency with marquee guests.

Soul Summit is the free Sunday house party that has filled Fort Greene Park since 2002, founded by DJs Sadiq Bellamy, Jeff Mendoza, and Tabu, who outgrew nearby Cuyler Gore Park and made the lawn beside the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument an open-air dancefloor every summer Sunday. Conceived as a way to return house music to its communal, Black, and inclusive roots, it draws thousands across generations to dance in the park, and is among the longest-running outdoor parties in the city.

Frankie Bones's series of illegal Brooklyn warehouse and brickyard raves, widely credited with importing UK acid-house rave culture to the US East Coast. The first ran May 1991 in a Flatbush brickyard; debuts by Richie Hawtin, Sven Väth and Doc Martin followed, and the parties ended after a December 1992 blizzard. The origin point of the 'PLUR' (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) ethos, traced to Bones breaking up a fight from the decks.

A monthly house and techno party billed as one of the city's last proper undergrounds, quality bookings in unmarked Brooklyn rooms, boats, and rooftops, address given only on RSVP. Founder Benjamin Gleitzman, also behind the Ruse Laboratories collective, hosted the deep end of the spectrum: Soichi Terada, Chez Damier, Move D, Fred P, Marcellus Pittman.

Brooklyn 'music and ice cream social' collective founded by Travis George around 2016, running daytime and rooftop disco-house, R&B and hip-hop parties across rooms like Elsewhere, Baby's All Right and Jolene. Built around connecting up-and-coming artists to crowds ('breaking bread' between artist and audience) with a recurring seasonal rooftop day-party series.

Teksupport is the warehouse-party promoter founded in 2010 by Rob Toma, known for staging large-scale electronic-music events in never-before-used industrial spaces around the city (submarine factories, navy yards, subterranean ballrooms, even Grand Central) and bringing the biggest names in house and techno to New York. It did more than any other promoter to define the modern NYC warehouse spectacle, and has since expanded into permanent venues.

The Bunker is a long-running techno and experimental-electronic party often cited within New York's deeper club lineage. It has been hosted across changing rooms rather than tied to one address, including extended runs at dedicated clubs.

The Carry Nation is the DJ-and-production duo of Will Automagic and Nita Aviance, and the long-running queer house party they share. Their first party landed in early 2012 at The Spectrum; it grew into a beloved monthly at Brooklyn's Good Room, with the pair also touring to Berghain/Panorama Bar and Glastonbury's Block 9. The name nods to the Prohibition-era hatchet-wielding temperance crusader Carry Nation. Their Pride and New Year's mega-editions are co-produced with Wrecked as 'Get Wrecked & Carry.'

GMHC's annual ball, launched in 1990 as HIV-prevention outreach woven into competition. The oldest annual function of the international house-and-ball community, it draws thousands each Pride season and stands as both celebration and memorial to those lost to AIDS. Held at venues including Roseland and Terminal 5, it remains the scene's biggest mainstage night, with GMHC as steward, not originator, of a culture built by Black and Latino LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.

Tiki Disco is a New York outdoor day party founded in 2010, when Andy Pry (then working at Roberta's in Bushwick) invited Eli Escobar and Lloyd (Lloydski) to DJ the pizzeria's backyard, before Bushwick had much of a party scene at all. Its bi-weekly Sunday-afternoon format, disco-and-house policy, and cookout looseness helped seed the Brooklyn day-party circuit; the crowd multiplied across its first summers until the party outgrew Roberta's patio and came to pack the Knockdown Center's courtyard, The Ruins. It now runs year-round, with a recurring Good Room home and pop-ups beyond New York, including Pride collaborations with Glitterbox and House of Yes.

Unter is often cited as one of the defining New York raves of the 2010s, Seva Granik's queer-leaning, techno-forward party (2015–2023) known for rotating, often-secret warehouse locations rather than a fixed home, and for an explicit emphasis on safer-space and consent culture on the floor.

A weekly Monday-night function founded in 2010 by Jack Mizrahi (House of Mizrahi) and Luna Khan (House of Khan), held in the basement of the Latin gay club Escuelita in Hell's Kitchen. With DJ MikeQ on the decks, it gave young voguers a low-stakes space between major balls to hone their categories before crowds of a hundred or more. After Escuelita's 2016 closure it migrated to XL and other rooms.

Wigstock is the drag festival often cited as an outgrowth of East Village queer nightlife, associated with Lady Bunny and performers from rooms like the Pyramid Club. It has been staged outdoors and across venues rather than fixed to one address.

Wrecked is one of the defining queer techno parties of New York's underground, founded around 2010 by DJs Ryan Smith and Ron Like Hell. It built a long-running home for musically serious queer clubbing, anchored in recent years at Basement and Knockdown Center. Its New Year's and Pride mega-editions, billed as 'Get Wrecked,' are produced with The Carry Nation and run all night.

Zero Chill is a warehouse rave series Seva Granik launched in spring 2024, associated with Brownsville and East Brooklyn warehouse locations, including Pride-weekend editions.