The World

Overview

Arthur and Colleen Weinstein's cavernous former wedding hall in Alphabet City (raw, multi-level, gilded and falling apart) became the downtown crossroads where Frankie Knuckles and David Morales brought Chicago house to New York, Dean Johnson invented the queercore Fag Bar, and banjee boys danced beside club kids, drag queens, and hip-hop royalty, until co-owner Steven Venizelos was shot dead in the balcony in 1991.

The World occupied a century-old multi-level former Jewish wedding hall and catering facility at 254 East 2nd Street, in the then-raw Alphabet City corridor between Avenues B and C, a neighborhood of burnt-out buildings and open drug markets that few uptown promoters would have considered for a nightclub. Arthur Weinstein, a Bronx-born photographer and seasoned club operator who had previously opened Hurrah (36 West 62nd Street, New York's first large punk/new-wave dance club, 1976) and the after-hours Continental, discovered the space around 1982 with his wife and co-designer Colleen Weinstein. The building (once called Lennox Chalet) retained its chandelier, balcony, maple dance floor, and peeling gilded walls. Rather than redecorate conventionally, the Weinsteins salvaged and projected: slides by photographers including Christopher Makos and a young David LaChapelle filled a 40-by-20-foot screen above the dancefloor. The venue operated in informal and unlicensed form through the mid-1980s before obtaining a license; an on-site 1988 interview places its licensed opening on September 17, 1987. The programming was intentionally plural and changed by the night. Frankie Knuckles, freshly returned from Chicago, held the Friday residency, importing the nascent house-music vocabulary to a New York room that was not yet the Garage or Sound Factory. David Morales joined on Thursdays from around 1988, playing for roughly eighteen months before moving to Red Zone in 1989, years he later cited as pivotal to his development. The downstairs room ran separately, with Larry Tee and Michael Connolly behind the decks. On Tuesdays from 1987, Dean Johnson (1961–2007) (cross-dressing singer, promoter, queercore agitator) staged Rock 'n' Roll Fag Bar with his band Dean & The Weenies, a deliberately dirty-punk counterweight to the velvet-rope city uptown; the night is widely credited with catalyzing New York's gay rock underground and, in summer 1988, Johnson opened an unmonitored back room called the Testosteroom, provoking community debate in the AIDS era. Larry Tee ran Celebrity Club, a weekly celebration of a downtown figure (Dianne Brill, Deee-Lite, Michael Musto) that helped incubate the club-kid scene and gave a platform to a very young Michael Alig. AIDS benefits, organized by theater producer Chip Duckett at least once monthly, channeled door proceeds to organizations including the Bailey House. The crowd was genuinely cross-class, cross-racial, and cross-genre in a way that most Manhattan rooms were not: local Black and Puerto Rican residents from the neighborhood, banjee boys and members of voguing houses (the club hosted one of the first downtown voguing balls in 1987, organized by the House of Field), art-world figures, hip-hop acts (Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy performed or appeared), downtown socialites, and a long roster of international rock musicians who found the Alphabet City address bracingly unglamorous. The building itself (a precarious two-ton chandelier, a balcony that had seen better decades) contributed to a lawlessness the Weinsteins neither suppressed nor manufactured. Devo filmed their 1988 video 'Disco Dancer' on the premises. The World closed violently. Shortly after midnight on June 28, 1991, co-owner Steven Venizelos was found on the balcony, shot three times at close range; the murder was never solved. The city subsequently revoked the club's operating licenses. The building was later demolished and replaced by an apartment complex. A 1988 photobook by Stephan Lupino (*The World: 254 E. 2nd Street, N.Y. City* (Graphics-Photos-Art, Munich)) and Nelson Sullivan's video footage (now at NYU's Fales Library) constitute the primary visual record of the room. The club-kid scene it incubated moved uptown to the Limelight; the Weinsteins had come to it from Hurrah. The World sat between downtown punk/new-wave and the house, ballroom, and queercore undergrounds that followed.

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