Club 371

Overview

South Bronx multi-floor disco at 371 East 166th Street in Morrisania (owned by the transit-worker cooperative 'the Ten Good Guys') where DJ Hollywood and Eddie Cheba built the proto-rap MC style performing on separate floors, and where Sal Abbatiello first heard DJ Junebug and was inspired to open Disco Fever; the building has since burned down.

Club 371 occupied 371 East 166th Street in Morrisania, South Bronx, taking its name directly from the address. The club was owned by a group of transit workers calling themselves the Ten Good Guys, who had been running a two-floor disco on the premises. The Ten Good Guys brought in DJ Hollywood after witnessing his drawing power elsewhere in the Bronx (Hollywood had been performing since around 1975, starting at a club called A Bunch of Grapes), and the resulting arrangement was a two-floor operation: DJ Hollywood with his deejay Junebug occupied one floor while Eddie Cheba, MC and DJ, with his deejay EZ Gee and rapper Reggie Wells worked the other. Hollywood and Cheba were among the earliest practitioners of what would become the MC style in hip-hop: their patter and call-and-response over disco records predated and influenced the Bronx DJ culture that would codify rap as a distinct form. The success of Club 371 was such that the Ten Good Guys eventually expanded the space, adding a second section called 'the House of Glass.' It was at Club 371 that Sal Abbatiello (who would later open Disco Fever in the Highbridge neighborhood) first heard DJ Junebug and was introduced to the rappers and DJs populating the Bronx circuit; Abbatiello later described the visit as a formative encounter on his path to opening Disco Fever. The building at 371 East 166th Street subsequently burned down and no longer stands; the site has been cited as part of the inspiration for 'Les Inferno' in the Netflix series The Get Down. The address is sometimes misreported as 371 East 138th Street; multiple independent sources confirm East 166th Street. The cast of Club 371's core years migrated almost directly into Disco Fever's weekly structure once Abbatiello made his formative visit: DJ Hollywood held Wednesdays at Disco Fever, Eddie Cheba Thursdays, Junebug Fridays and Saturdays, and Reggie Wells Sundays — a near-complete transfer of Club 371's roster into the Highbridge room that would run nightly hip-hop bookings through the mid-1980s. The two-floor format at 371 East 166th Street — simultaneous competing floors of MC performance in a licensed room, with a paying admission — is among the earliest reliably documented indoor commercial frameworks for proto-rap in New York, operating from at least the mid-1970s within the same Bronx landscape where the park-jam tradition was simultaneously developing. Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop and a Vital City NYC survey of lost hip-hop landmarks both document the address among the South Bronx indoor venues that moved the form from street events into the club economy. The burning of 371 East 166th Street places the venue in the geography of the South Bronx arson wave of the 1970s, when thousands of buildings in Morrisania and surrounding neighborhoods were destroyed — in many cases by landlords seeking insurance payouts on properties they could no longer profitably rent, in others by tenants driven to desperation in abandoned or unmaintained stock. The fiscal crisis of 1975 had already withdrawn city services from these neighborhoods; 60,000 housing units were lost in the South Bronx in the decade after 1970, according to subsequent housing surveys. The transit workers who ran Club 371 — city employees holding working-class income from a major union — were among the few stabilizing actors in Morrisania’s informal economy during this period. The two-floor format they operated was also structurally distinct from the contemporaneous Bronx park-jam tradition: where Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa organized outdoor jams and school gymnasiums around the DJ as the central figure, Club 371 built its commercial draw around the MCs — DJ Hollywood and Eddie Cheba — with the DJs (Junebug, EZ Gee) serving as accompanists. That inversion — MC as headliner, DJ as support — anticipated the professional format hip-hop would assume, and Club 371 was running it in a licensed, ticketed indoor venue while the park-jam tradition was simultaneously at its height, in the same borough.