Infinity

Overview

The first disco to make extensive use of neon lighting, opened November 5, 1975 by Maurice Brahms in a former envelope factory at 653 Broadway, NoHo, where Jim Burgess held a residency from 1978 until the night of February 14, 1979, when a fire that began in the pillow factory upstairs destroyed the club; arson was alleged but never established.

Infinity opened on November 5, 1975 at 653 Broadway in NoHo, in a former envelope factory that Maurice Brahms had leased and renovated for roughly $150,000. Before the conversion, Hare Krishna members had occupied part of the building. Brahms commissioned neon lighting from Let There Be Neon—the neon-art studio that Rudi Stern had founded in 1972 at 451 West Broadway in SoHo, pioneering neon as a gallery medium before turning it to nightclub design—making Infinity the first disco anywhere to deploy architectural neon at scale. Memberships launched with demand that outran supply on opening night; the room placed itself at the NoHo intersection of Broadway, between the Bleecker and Houston Street blocks, inside the downtown gay and mixed disco ecosystem alongside Le Jardin uptown and 12 West to the west. Jim Burgess, who had come to New York to play 12 West in 1977, took a residency at Infinity in 1978 and became the room's defining voice. He built long, arced narrative sets that moved through classical and film-score interludes before resolving into the floor's peak—a structural approach that contemporaries regarded as among the most sophisticated of the disco era. After Infinity burned, Burgess carried the same arc to the Fun House, the Paradise Garage, the Underground and, from its September 1980 opening, the Saint, where he was one of the three original resident DJs; he also played Studio 54. He retired from DJing in January 1981 at 27, an unusually early exit, returned to the Saint's booth in 1986, and died in January 1993, at 39, of a brain tumor that Disco-Disco.com describes as AIDS-related. His career, truncated by both the fire and his own early retirement, remains a reference point in the literature of the era's DJ culture. Infinity did not survive to the end of disco: on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1979, a fire that started in a pillow factory on the floors above 653 Broadway destroyed the club after three and a half years. Brahms has said he believed it was set (he has pointed to a dispute with a prospective buyer of the building, and an earlier basement fire had been blamed on a disgruntled customer), but no cause was officially established and no one was charged. Maurice Brahms subsequently co-founded Bond's International Casino at 1530 Broadway in Times Square, which opened in July 1980 in a converted clothing store and ran as an 1,800-capacity dance venue and concert hall until 1983. Infinity's destruction in February 1979 removed what had been one of the architectural novelties of the disco era. Rudi Stern's Let There Be Neon studio continued operating in SoHo for decades after the fire, executing neon commissions across art and commercial contexts; Stern remained active until his death in 2006. Jim Burgess's reputation as a DJ of rare structural sophistication survived the club's loss and extended through subsequent residencies at the Paradise Garage, the Underground and the Saint—but his early retirement in 1981 and his death in 1993 left his career largely undocumented relative to its acknowledged stature. The primary written reconstruction of his method appears in Tim Lawrence's 'Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979' (Duke University Press, 2003), which drew on interviews with contemporaries; Burgess left no published account of his own method, though recordings of some of his sets circulate among collectors. The downtown gay ecosystem that Infinity inhabited—alongside 12 West, the Flamingo, and eventually the Saint—was also among the communities most catastrophically affected by AIDS from 1981 forward. Burgess's 1993 death, which Disco-Disco.com attributes to an AIDS-related brain tumor, placed him among the downtown creative figures the crisis took.