Save the Robots

Overview

Alphabet City's defining after-hours room, an illegal basement cave at 25 Avenue B where drag queens, club kids, punks and musicians landed after 4 a.m., drinking vodka until 8 in the morning beneath a DJ spinning from a cage; the crossroads of East Village subcultural life from 1983 to 1993.

Save the Robots opened in 1983 in an undistinguished storefront and basement at 25 Avenue B, between East 2nd and 3rd Streets, in Alphabet City, then a neighborhood defined by burned-out buildings, open-air drug markets and cheap rents that made it hospitable to artists, punks and the underemployed. The club's founders were Denis Pruvot (who held the registered trademark) and his wife Alexandria; the name is said to derive from Alexandria's father, who worked in robotics. From the start it operated illegally as an after-hours venue (no liquor license, only vodka, soda, and juice) opening around 4 a.m. when the city's licensed clubs shuttered and closing around 8 a.m. The layout was two-tiered: a ground-floor lounge featuring a sandbox area with salvaged furniture, and a basement dance floor described by regulars as frighteningly dark, with a single strobe and the DJ spinning from a caged booth to protect his records. Authorities shut the club down in mid-1984 for fire safety violations; after renovations and the acquisition of a social club license, it reopened in early January 1986. A 1996 New York Times article noted the club's late legalization. First-person accounts describe hip-hop, reggae, house and 'techno-cum-punk' played back-to-back without apology, the programming logic of an unlicensed room that owed nothing to any commercial format. DJ John Hall is reported in a first-person account to have worked the room on Fridays across 1984 to 1991, a span that includes the club's 1984–86 shutdown; DJ Keoki's March 1993 Thursday-night set is documented in a circulating recording; The Los Angeles DJ Doc Martin was reportedly observed playing there around 1992. The after-4 a.m. crowd included drag performers, punk musicians, club kids from Limelight's Disco 2000, skinheads, bar workers finally off shift, and a contingent of Alphabet City regulars. Dean Johnson, the towering, shaved-head Queercore figure who fronted Dean and the Weenies and later the Velvet Mafia, worked the door in a mini-dress behind an iron gate; his band appeared in the club in footage captured for Harvey Keith's 1988 documentary Mondo New York. Lady Bunny, the future Wigstock founder, was a regular. Craig Ferguson, then a Scottish immigrant and future television host, worked as a bouncer, later recounting the experience in his 2009 memoir American on Purpose. By the early 1990s, figures including Björk and the broader Club Kids circuit were part of the after-hours crowd that filtered in from larger venues. The original Save the Robots closed in 1993, drained by legal fees accumulated through a series of door altercations. Subsequent operators leased the space and attempted to capitalize on the name, without consent from Pruvot, who held the trademark, and without sustaining the original atmosphere or clientele. The space was eventually renamed Guernica. On April 13, 2003, Guernica's bouncer Dana Blake was stabbed to death in an altercation with smokers outside the venue. The block at 25 Avenue B subsequently housed other establishments. Harvey Keith's 1988 documentary Mondo New York, distributed by Island Pictures, includes footage of Dean Johnson and Dean and the Weenies performing; the footage is associated with the club's basement, and no other contemporaneous film or television coverage of the room has been located for this record. The social-club license Pruvot acquired after the 1984 closure—allowing alcohol service to dues-paying members without a full liquor license—was a regulatory category that other Alphabet City venues used during this period to operate in a legally gray zone; the category was progressively eliminated by city reform in the early 1990s. The stabbing death of bouncer Dana Blake outside the Guernica iteration on April 13, 2003 occurred in a neighborhood transformed beyond the conditions of Save the Robots' original operation: rents on Avenue B had risen sharply across the two decades between Pruvot's founding and Blake's death, and the open-air drug markets that had defined the block in 1983 were gone.