Nell's

Overview

Intimate Victorian-parlor club opened in fall 1986 by Nell Campbell, Keith McNally, and Lynn Wagenknecht, a 250-capacity counter-reaction to stadium disco that became downtown Manhattan's most coveted room and, unexpectedly, an incubator for hip-hop's arrival in the mainstream.

Nell's opened in the fall of 1986 in a former electronics store on West 14th Street, co-founded by Australian actress Nell Campbell (Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show), restaurateur Keith McNally, and his then-wife Lynn Wagenknecht. Conceived as a deliberate counter-statement to the cavernous discothèques of the Studio 54 era, the 250-capacity room was fitted out to evoke a slightly shabby 19th-century English men's club: wood paneling, red leather banquettes, hand-painted café tables, beaded chandeliers, and dimly lit corners that encouraged conversation as much as dancing. The sound system was designed by Louis Feldman Jr., a protégé of Richard Long, who concealed the speakers, sub-basses, and floating tweeters inside the décor so that nothing interrupted the parlor illusion. The DJ booth sat at floor level rather than elevated above the crowd, folding the DJ into the room. Thomas Moller served as original manager and is credited with drawing in New York's art-world crowd; early regulars included Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Prince, Eddie Murphy, Mike Tyson, and Debbie Harry. Entry cost $5 with a black key-ring membership, but door curator Jessica Rosenblum made the actual bar far higher (famously refusing entry based on shoe quality) and the velvet-rope queue became its own performance. Musically, Nell's functioned in phases. In the late 1980s, resident DJs Jules (a skateboarding Brit), Basil (formerly security at the Paradise Garage), Belinda (a reported Prince favorite), Jazzy Nice, Frankie Inglese, Johnny Dynell, Stan Williams, and the Duke of Denmark programmed eclectic sets of funk, soul, synth-pop, early Chicago and Detroit house, and nascent hip-hop, a deliberately eclectic mix calibrated to the room's salon atmosphere rather than club-mode peak energy. By 1990–92, the downstairs floor shifted toward dedicated house programming, with records from Strictly Rhythm, Nervous, and Emotive. In the early 1990s, hip-hop asserted itself as the floor's dominant idiom: label executives including Lyor Cohen, Puff Daddy (Sean Combs), and Gary Harris used the room as a de facto music-industry salon, Run-DMC were known to commandeer the DJ booth on any given night, and DJs Clark Kent and Stretch Armstrong both developed their craft at Nell's. The Native Tongues collective (A Tribe Called Quest among them) clustered here. In 1993 the room's relationship to hip-hop notoriety turned serious: Tupac Shakur visited and was accused of sexual assault that evening, and metal detectors were subsequently installed. In 1995, director Hype Williams and Sean Combs chose Nell's as the location for the Notorious B.I.G.'s 'Big Poppa' video, a deliberate statement that hip-hop had arrived as mainstream culture. Nell's also registered as a site of AIDS-era solidarity. On June 4, 1987, Robert Mapplethorpe and Susan Sarandon hosted an amfAR charity dinner in the room, notable given the club's cross-genre, cross-class mixing, distinct from the more explicitly gay AIDS fundraising circuits of the same period. The club appeared as Patrick Bateman's frequent haunt in Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho. Keth McNally departed following his divorce from Wagenknecht; Nell Campbell sold her stake in 1998 to Noel Ashman and actor Chris Noth, reportedly just before the birth of her daughter. The original room continued under various stewardships (declining gradually from its late-1980s peak) and closed on May 30, 2004. Ashman and partners including Damon Dash and Samantha Ronson subsequently opened the private club NA in the redesigned space. The address later housed other ventures before becoming the nightclub Up&Down, owned by Richie Akiva, a former Nell's promoter, continuing a lineage in the same footprint.

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