Funhouse

Overview

Chelsea warehouse where a grinning-clown DJ booth and Jellybean Benitez's April 1981–June 1984 residency made a predominantly Puerto Rican and Italian American dancefloor one of the birthplaces of New York freestyle, the room where 'Let the Music Play' was first broken.

The Fun House opened March 30, 1979 at 526 West 26th Street, founded by Joe Monk and three neighborhood partners identified in accounts only as Ronnie, Jerry, and Vinnie. The booth was built as the open mouth of a giant grinning clown, flanked by speaker stacks topped by a large bass-drum cabinet, a design as theatrical as the music it would host. Early residents Bobby 'DJ' Guttadaro, Jim Burgess (also a Saint alumnus), and Jonathan Fearing cycled through without establishing a coherent identity for the room. That changed in April 1981 when John 'Jellybean' Benitez took the residency, bringing with him a crowd of predominantly straight Puerto Rican and Italian American youth from the outer boroughs, kids schooled equally on Kraftwerk and Tito Puente, straight in orientation in contrast to the Loft and Paradise Garage lineage. Jellybean forged what would be named freestyle: hard-edged, 808-driven electronic funk with R&B melodic lines, and the room became the place where those records were broken first. When he brought the demo of Shannon's 'Let the Music Play' (Emergency Records, 1983) to the Fun House, the floor's response on that first night became one of the genre's foundational creation myths. Latin Rascals producers Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran, and producer Omar Santana, developed the genre's vocabulary in close orbit around the club. Jellybean left in June 1984 to pursue a production career (his credits would include Madonna's 'Sidewalk Talk' and early remix work that made him a central figure in the pop-dance crossover). His protégé Lil' Louie Vega (a Bronx Puerto Rican who would later co-found Masters at Work) took the residency for the room's final year before it closed in 1985. The Fun House is cited as one of three birthplaces of New York freestyle, alongside the Paradise Garage and The Devil's Nest. Beyond the clown booth and the dancefloor, the Fun House's aesthetic radiated outward through the careers of its principal figures. Jellybean Benitez, after leaving the residency in June 1984, produced Madonna's 'Sidewalk Talk' (1985)—a direct translation of Fun House-era freestyle energy into a pop production—and became one of the decade's most sought-after dance remixers; the club's sonic vocabulary, mediated through his productions, reached a mainstream commercial audience that had never set foot in Chelsea. Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran (the Latin Rascals) took the megamix editing and production approaches they had developed in the Fun House orbit to nationally broadcast radio shows and a studio catalog that carried freestyle to CHR radio: their edits of Exposé, Shannon, and the Cover Girls were among the most-heard freestyle productions of the mid-1980s. Louie Vega moved from the Fun House residency to the Roxy and subsequent rooms before co-founding Masters at Work with Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez in the early 1990s; he later cited the Fun House as one of the foundational floors that shaped his understanding of how to build a set across a night.