Le Jardin

Overview

The basement discotheque of the Hotel Diplomat where owner John Addison and DJ Bobby Guttadaro opened New York's first openly commercial gay disco on June 13, 1973, the room Studio 54's founders studied.

Le Jardin opened June 13, 1973, in the basement of the Hotel Diplomat at 108 West 43rd Street (the hotel's footprint ran 108–116 West 43rd; '110 West 43rd' appears in some sources as the entry address). Created by owner John Addison and marketed as 'Discotheque Pour Monsieurs,' the room was unambiguously gay-oriented from its first night—operating as an openly commercial discotheque at a moment when New York's gay dance culture had been housed almost entirely in private, invitation-only loft parties. Diana Ross attended the opening night on June 13, 1973; press coverage of the event is credited with pushing 'discotheque' into mainstream usage. Bob Casey, a New York sound engineer who characterized Le Jardin's opening as the moment disco 'came above ground,' was central to the room's early operation. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager later cited Le Jardin as one of the rooms that led them to conceive Studio 54. The resident DJ was Bobby Guttadaro ('Bobby DJ,' a nickname Casey gave him because patrons could not pronounce 'Guttadaro'), who arrived at Le Jardin from the Fire Island Ice Palace, where he had started DJing in 1971 after working as a pharmacist (Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, 1970). Guttadaro received a gold record from 20th Century Records for his role in breaking Love Unlimited Orchestra's 'Love's Theme,' won Billboard's National Disco DJ of the Year in both 1976 and 1977—after leaving Le Jardin—and co-founded Disconet in 1977 with Tom Savarese and Kevin Guilmet, an early subscription service distributing remixed and extended 12-inch tracks to DJs. Patti Smith performed a 'Rock and Rimbaud' set at Le Jardin with Lenny Kaye — dated by most accounts to November 1973, though some accounts give November 10, 1974 — to an audience reported to include Susan Sontag. The Hotel Diplomat was acquired by the Durst Organization in 1974; the club's run ended around 1976 as the disco era entered its mass-market phase. Accounts of a closing party at which Diana Ross and Liza Minnelli sang have circulated in oral history but have not been independently confirmed from a primary source and are flagged here as needs-review. Within months of Le Jardin's closure, Studio 54 opened on West 54th Street in April 1977; Rubell and Schrager have been cited in multiple accounts as having studied Le Jardin when conceiving it. The underground gay dancefloor audience Le Jardin had demonstrated commercially viable moved not into Studio 54's celebrity-spectacle format but toward smaller, more controlled rooms — 12 West on the Hudson piers (1975), Flamingo at 599 Broadway (1974), and eventually the Saint on Second Avenue (1980) — where the dancefloor remained the organizing principle. The Hotel Diplomat at 108 West 43rd Street, acquired by the Durst Organization in 1974 while Le Jardin was still operating, continued as a hotel under changing management through subsequent decades, the Le Jardin basement eventually absorbed into the building's later reconstruction.