Club 57

Overview

The basement incubator beneath a Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church where a no-budget, membership-only DIY ethos launched Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, Ann Magnuson, and a generation of queer and avant-garde downtown artists — a nightly laboratory of punk vaudeville, erotic art shows, monster movies, and drag, running from 1978 to February 1, 1983.

Club 57 was born in 1978 when the Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church at 57 St. Marks Place tasked Stanley Zbigniew Strychacki (a Polish émigré who managed Irving Plaza and organized community events) with finding a revenue use for its empty basement. Strychacki initially booked punk and garage acts (The Fleshtones, the Misfits), but by November 1978 he invited film programmers Susan Hannaford and Tom Scully, fresh from organizing 'New Wave Vaudeville' revues at Irving Plaza, to take over programming. They launched a Tuesday-night Monster Movie Club and brought in Ann Magnuson as manager, who transformed the room into what she called a 'low-rent answer to Andy Warhol's Factory', a center for 'personal exorcism' built on themed 'enviroteques': Putt-Putt Reggae Night (miniature golf on a refrigerator-box Jamaican shantytown), Model World of Glue Night, Elvis Night, Radio Free Europe, and burlesque-cabaret mashups that refused any line between artist and audience. A $5 annual membership card (introduced October 1978) gave legal cover to a space that never held a liquor license; admission to individual events ran $1–$5, rented to organizers for roughly $25 a night. The club operated without a liquor license under the church's social-club umbrella, meaning it ran on pure creative energy and cheap door takes. Keith Haring arrived in the summer of 1979 alongside Kenny Scharf and became its de facto visual impresario: he curated the 'First Annual Club 57 Annual Group Erotic and Pornographic Art Exhibition' (February 27, 1980, including David Wojnarowicz's work), staged a 'Black Light Show' of his own Day-Glo paintings (1981), performed poetry from inside a fake television set, and organized a 'Club 57 Invitational' open to anyone who wanted to make art. By late 1980 Andy Rees had taken over programming, bringing in Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (later the Hairspray team) who staged original musicals, Livin' Dolls, The Sound of Muzak, and a gender-bent Bad Seed with Scott Covert as Becky Rockefeller. The resident DJ was Dany Johnson (founding member of the all-female no-wave percussion collective Pulsallama); Johnny Dynell and, on occasion, Afrika Bambaataa also spun, planting the hip-hop/new-wave crossover seed that Fab 5 Freddy was brokering across the downtown circuit simultaneously. Club 57 had no single dedicated gay night; its queerness ran through the whole program. Klaus Nomi (who had migrated from Hannaford and Scully's original New Wave Vaudeville revues) performed gender-bending opera-cabaret sets that crystallized his persona here; Joey Arias, John Sex (with his 'Burlesk Show'), Holly Woodlawn, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Lypsinka (John Epperson) all worked the basement stage. The Women's Night Surgical Drag Ball, co-produced with WOW Café Theatre, was among the more formally LGBTQ events, but drag, androgyny, and fluid sexuality saturated the weekly program throughout. Photographer Ande Whyland documented the scene from the inside; April Palmieri attended from the first Monster Movie Club in 1978. The crowd was drawn largely from the School of Visual Arts, financially enabled by the East Village's still-cheap rents and (by the early 1980s) animated by the Reagan-era pressure that made the basement's defiant irreverence feel necessary. The Mudd Club's Steve Maas began recruiting Club 57 talent around 1981; Haring took his practice uptown to the Mudd Club and (eventually) to the street and the galleries. Club 57's own community dispersed organically as artists found larger platforms. The space closed on February 1, 1983. The church sold the building in 1988; it has since housed a behavioral health and primary care clinic. In 2017–18 MoMA devoted a full retrospective to the club, 'Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983,' curated by Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos, the most thorough archival accounting to date, accompanied by a 176-page catalog. Strychacki installed a commemorative plaque at the site in 2020, honoring thirteen contributors. Pyramid Club's Bobby Bradley explicitly cited Club 57 as half the template for what he wanted Pyramid to become.

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