APT

Overview

Hidden Meatpacking District bar designed to feel like an apartment, remembered for Rich Medina's nine-year Lil Ricky's Rib Shack residency and its serious underground DJ bookings.

APT opened in 2000 at 419 West 13th Street, in the early years of the Meatpacking District's commercial transformation, conceived by JH and Jonathan Morr as a bar built to feel like someone's apartment rather than a nightclub. The interior was created by French-Iranian designer India Mahdavi around an invented resident named Bernard, who 'lived' and entertained at home — his actual guests, per the Jenjuice Hospitality project record, included David Bowie, big-name chefs, and an annual procession of stylists in town for Fashion Week. Despite its minuscule footprint across two levels, APT sustained some of the most serious DJ bookings of the 2000s New York underground: Rich Medina's Lil Ricky's Rib Shack anchored the venue for nine consecutive years, while Bobbito Garcia, Theo Parrish, Stacey Pullen, Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Chairman Mao (alongside Keb Darge on raw-soul Saturday nights), Modeselektor, and Tiefschwarz all played its downstairs room. A 2004 contemporaneous account noted that despite a floor too small for conventional dancing, people danced 'like it was the best club they had ever experienced.' The two levels were sharply differentiated in character. On the first floor Mahdavi's Bernard conceit held: bar and lounge seating in the mode of a high-rise dwelling, domestic in register rather than commercial. The basement was its inversion — a dark minimalist space lit by a wash of light along one wall, the DJ booth set at center and stripped of ornament. There was no sign on the exterior of 419 West 13th Street; the only way in was an unmarked buzzer. The room's capacity was small enough that regulars encountered the same faces week after week; at its peak APT brought the downtown underground DJ community and the fashion and culinary world the Meatpacking District was attracting onto the same undifferentiated floor. One source dates the opening to 2001; the Jenjuice project record and the GAYOT dining guide both give 2000, which is consistent with the Meatpacking District context, and the opening year retains approximate verification. APT closed in 2010 (previously recorded as 2009; corrected against converging accounts, no contemporaneous press source yet — the year keeps approximate verification). From 2000 through that year the Meatpacking District completed the transformation it had been entering when the bar opened — hotel anchors, scaled megaclubs with bottle-service models and explicit door hierarchies, and designer retail organized around fashion-week traffic set the dominant terms of the surrounding blocks. The hip-hop, Detroit techno, broken-beat, and deep house programming that defined APT's downstairs room — delivered at close range before a small crowd — ran for roughly a decade. The ‘Bernard’ conceit India Mahdavi invented for APT — the bar as borrowed apartment, the clientele as its resident’s guests — was an early application of a design approach she later carried into hospitality interiors such as the Gallery at Sketch in London: a domestic register applied to a commercial room, so that it reads as inhabited rather than designed. The Meatpacking District context defines what APT was not: the same block and adjacent streets produced, in roughly the same decade, some of the most expensive and hierarchically structured nightlife in New York — the Standard Hotel above the High Line by 2009 among it — and APT’s unmarked door and small floor were simultaneously inside that economy and outside its terms. Rich Medina’s Lil Ricky’s Rib Shack residency, running for nine consecutive years, gave the room a programmatic anchor in hip-hop, house, funk, Afrobeat and soul, a counterweight to the bottle-service programming that came to define the surrounding blocks.