Tunnel

Overview

A cavernous 80,000-square-foot club built inside the 1891 Chelsea Terminal Warehouse (whose 670-foot railroad tunnel gave both the room and the venue their character) that ran from 1986 to 2001 as a multi-room pleasure palace hosting gay house and disco crowds, Club Kids, and, under promoter Jessica Rosenblum, the definitive Sunday-night hip-hop party of the East Coast 1990s.

Tunnel occupied the Terminal Warehouse Company Central Stores Building at 220 Twelfth Avenue, a full-block brick freight facility designed by George Mallory and erected in 1891 as a transfer hub for the New York Central Railroad's Eleventh Avenue freight line. Trains entered through a curved eastern arch, ran through a 670-foot barrel-vaulted tunnel, and exited onto car floats for Hoboken, the surviving tracks remained visible, embedded in the sunken dance floor, when the space opened as a nightclub in December 1986. The founders were real-estate developer Boaz Aharoni and Elli Dayan, chairman of Bonjour International, who reportedly spent $5 million converting the industrial shell into a multi-level room with multiple sound systems. Dayan sold to Marco Riccota in January 1990; Peter Gatien (who already held Limelight and would soon take Club USA and the Palladium) acquired the lease in 1992 and enlarged the club's scope, commissioning artist Kenny Scharf to decorate one lounge (the 'Lava Lounge'), installing themed rooms that cycled between Victorian library, S/M dungeon, and various lounges, and preserving the unisex bathrooms with their original freight-terminal worker lockers and shower-room remnants. In its early years, Tunnel was a gathering point for a gay and downtown crowd and for the emerging Club Kids scene. Michael Alig held court in the basement VIP room; Amanda Lepore and RuPaul were regulars; DJs Johnny Dynell and Roman Ricardo anchored the early dance floor. When the original Sound Factory closed in February 1995, Junior Vasquez held a Tunnel residency through roughly 1996 before moving to the Palladium's ArenA nights and then to Twilo. Danny Tenaglia, coming from Twilo, brought his residency to Tunnel around 1998. Jonathan Peters, Little Louie Vega, Hex Hector, and DJ Amadeus (named resident DJ in 1998) also helmed the room. The Saturday 'Kurfew' party, promoted by Jeff Brenner and featuring resident Johnny Vicious alongside performers Lady Bunny, Peppermint, and Amanda Lepore, drove the gay trance-techno contingent through the mid-to-late 1990s. The defining programming shift came in 1993 when promoter Jessica Rosenblum (then managing Funkmaster Flex) moved her Sunday-night hip-hop party Mecca to Tunnel after stints at the Supper Club, Grand, and Arena. Mecca drew crowds above 3,000 weekly, with Flex assisted by Cipha Sounds and Big Kap; it became the principal broadcast venue for East Coast hip-hop's commercial ascent, breaking early records by Nas, Jay-Z, Biggie, Puff Daddy, and DMX and serving as the last public venue Eazy-E visited before his death in 1995. The room's sheer scale (five or more DJs could play simultaneously in different spaces) let the house, trance, and hip-hop contingents coexist in the same building on the same night, something few rooms of the era could manage. Gatien was indicted on federal drug-trafficking charges in May 1996 after DEA undercover operations at Limelight and Tunnel; a five-week trial ended in acquittal in February 1998 when jurors found the government's flipped informants unreliable. Gatien nonetheless pleaded guilty to state tax-evasion charges in 1999 (reportedly $1.6–1.88 million owed), served approximately two months at Rikers, and paid heavy legal fees. The club closed in 2001, cited variously as non-payment of rent and the sustained attrition of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life enforcement campaign against large nightclubs. Gatien and his wife were deported to Canada in 2003 after his tax-evasion conviction made him deportable as a non-citizen felon. The Terminal Warehouse building itself was landmarked as part of the West Chelsea Historic District and underwent a roughly $1 billion office conversion completed in the early 2020s.

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