Paradise Garage

Overview

The members-only, no-alcohol club where Larry Levan's decade-long residency on Richard Long's custom sound system fused disco, soul and proto-house into the 'garage' sound, for a primarily Black, Latino and queer dancefloor.

Paradise Garage occupied a 10,000-square-foot former parking garage at 84 King Street, leased in 1977 by proprietor Michael Brody and built (unusually) around a single resident DJ, Larry Levan, who had apprenticed under Nicky Siano at The Gallery and played the Continental Baths before following Brody downtown. Funded in part by Mel Cheren of West End Records and opened to members after a year of 1977 'construction parties,' it ran on the Loft model: membership-only, no alcohol, free juice and fruit, and an all-night floor that often went past 10 a.m. Membership was tiered—the club ran two nights, Friday (mixed) and Saturday (primarily gay men), with restricted and full-access cards priced differently—and the base skewed predominantly Black, Latino, and gay, drawn from the network Levan and Brody had built downtown. The sound system, designed by Richard Long & Associates and rebuilt continuously across the Garage's decade of operation, was the room's central physical fact. Long's custom bass enclosures—nicknamed the 'Levan Horns'—were installed throughout the building's two levels, the main dancefloor on the upper parking-garage floor with additional rooms below; Long returned regularly, sometimes mid-run, to re-calibrate individual cabinets against the specific records Levan was playing. The Saturday sets—routinely eight or more hours—moved across disco, soul, gospel, dub, and by the early 1980s the earliest Chicago house tracks, some reportedly played below their pressed speed. The catalog that ran through that system on that floor, and the specific tonal character the system imposed on it, acquired a genre name from the building: 'garage.' The word 'church' recurs in oral accounts of the Saturday floor. In April 1982 the Gay Men's Health Crisis staged its first major AIDS fundraiser, 'Showers,' at the Garage—an early instance of a large New York club organizing around the epidemic; losses to AIDS moved through the membership continuously through the mid-1980s. Sharon White held a regular booking as the first woman to headline the room; François Kevorkian and David DePino appeared alongside other figures from the downtown dance-music circuit. Brody's own health was declining through this period, and the club's operations deteriorated alongside it. The Last Party ran approximately 48 hours—September 26–28, 1987—with the floor packed continuously; some accounts give a formal closing date of October 1. Levan subsequently held reunion events under the Garage name at the Roxy (1988–1992) and died November 8, 1992, age 38. His papers and Cheren's are held at NYU's Fales Library (MSS 483); the building at 84 King Street was demolished in 2018. UK garage, the London genre that consolidated in the mid-1990s, takes its name from the same room.