Pacha NYC

Overview

The first North American outpost of the Ibiza-based Pacha brand, a 30,000-square-foot, four-floor superclub in Hell's Kitchen, co-owned by Eddie Dean and Erick Morillo, that ran from December 2005 to January 23, 2016, anchoring NYC's 2000s big-room EDM era while making room for underground house on the same bill.

Pacha NYC occupied the same 618 West 46th Street warehouse that had housed the relocated Sound Factory. Eddie Dean, a New Jersey-born club operator who had run Faces in Bay Ridge and later Manhattan venues including Hush and Discotheque, met Erick Morillo at Discotheque in 2001 and the two became partners. Morillo, nine-year Pacha Ibiza headliner and founder of Subliminal Records, introduced Dean to Ricardo Urgell, whose family had opened the original Pacha outside Barcelona in 1967 and the Ibiza flagship in 1973; Dean and Morillo licensed the North American rights. The club opened in December 2005, the gutted Sound Factory shell rebuilt as a four-and-a-half-story, 2,665-capacity complex, with the main dance floor and mezzanine on the lower levels, a 'Funky Room' lounge on the third floor, and 'Pachita' (little Pacha, capacity ~400, independent sound system) under the roof. The DJ booth was placed at the center of the dance floor, restoring a direct spatial connection between the deck and the crowd that the preceding superclub model had often sacrificed to VIP tables. The installed sound system, New York's first Dynacord Alpha Concept rig, imported from Germany and also deployed at Space Miami, won the Club World Award for Best Sound System in 2007, the same year the room took Best Superclub and Best New Club; it would repeat the Best Superclub honor five more times and rank in DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs through its final year. The booking architecture was set by Rob Fernandez, who came up as a doorman at Sound Factory Bar where Frankie Knuckles and Little Louie Vega held Friday residencies, and who had later run the Subliminal Sessions party at Centro-Fly with Morillo and Danny Tenaglia. As Pacha's director of promotions and bookings, Fernandez threaded the genuine tension at the heart of the room: an internationally branded superclub that could sell Sebastian Ingrosso to three thousand people on a Saturday night while also offering Victor Calderone's monthly Evolve residency (twelve-to-sixteen-hour sets traversing tribal to techy minimal) and 'Pacha Late Night' showcases for Nicole Moudaber and Oscar G. 'Lose It Fridays' programming brought the rising EDM festival circuit (3LAU, Oliver Heldens, the Chainsmokers) through the same rooms that hosted Danny Tenaglia open-to-close. The club also mounted 'Music Fights AIDS' benefit events and a post-Hurricane Sandy 'Help Heal NY' Red Cross night, positioning itself as a civic institution rather than a purely commercial operation. Morillo's sudden death by accidental ketamine toxicity in Miami Beach on September 1, 2020, four years after the club closed and three days before a scheduled court appearance on sexual battery charges, has permanently complicated his legacy as the room's co-founder and resident anchor. Rob Fernandez, the club's director of promotions and bookings, died July 10, 2015 at 47; contemporaneous obituaries in Billboard and Vice describe him as central to the club's programming. The formal closure announcement came November 24, 2015. A month-long December farewell featured Morillo, Puff Daddy, Jonathan Peters (closing a marathon 'Classics' set), Markus Schulz, and others; the final night, January 23, 2016, brought Sebastian Ingrosso and Danny Tenaglia together to close the room. Eddie Dean's summation: 'The average nightclub lasts 18 months, we lasted 120.' The building passed through abortive plans (a FREQ nightclub proposal from Space Ibiza New York co-owner Antonio Piacquadio) and as of 2025 houses an escape game venue. The Pacha name returned to New York in 2026, when FIVE Holdings (which acquired the Pacha Group in 2023) rebranded the Brooklyn Mirage as Pacha New York. The two deaths that shaped the closing arc of the club have continued to echo in the New York dance-music press. Rob Fernandez's July 2015 loss was memorialized across Billboard, Vice/Thump, and Resident Advisor, with Danny Tenaglia among many contemporaries crediting him with the curatorial intelligence that had connected the underground and commercial ends of the ten-year program. The Miami-Dade sexual battery case against Morillo ended without judicial resolution when he died. Subliminal Records, the label he founded in 1997 and used to build the Pacha NYC residency circuit, has continued releasing under new artist direction. No one from the Hell's Kitchen operation has been reported as involved in the 2026 FIVE Holdings arrangement.