Vinyl

Overview

Alcohol-free Tribeca warehouse club, home to Body & Soul's Sunday sessions (1996–2002) and Danny Tenaglia's 'Be Yourself' residency (c. 1999–2004), drawing a deeply mixed crowd in deliberate succession to the Paradise Garage.

Vinyl occupied the same ground-floor warehouse at 6 Hubert Street that had already housed Area (1983–1987), the themed art club addressed at 157 Hudson Street in the same building, and The Shelter (which opened there in 1991 following Paradise Garage's closure and held its Saturday night in the room into 2001). By the mid-1990s the space re-opened under the name Vinyl, a black-walled single-room warehouse with capacity for roughly 1,200 people, no alcohol license, and a sound system that traced back to the 37,000-watt rig assembled by sound engineer David Soto originally for The Shelter. The no-alcohol policy was deliberate, drawn from the Garage/Loft ethos: Vinyl was built as a dancefloor, not a bar. In July 1996 promoter John Davis and DJ François Kevorkian (François K.) launched Body & Soul as a weekly Sunday afternoon party at Vinyl, running from 3 p.m. through midnight. The three resident DJs (François K., Danny Krivit, and Joaquin 'Joe' Claussell) rotated in and out without fixed set times, creating a fluid arc of soulful house, New York disco classics, and garage. Claussell had run the early house imprint Jungle Sounds; Krivit had been DJing the city since the 1970s; Kevorkian bridged the post-disco and house eras. Body & Soul was explicitly conceived in the lineage of David Mancuso's Loft, Nicky Siano's Gallery, and Larry Levan's Paradise Garage, and the crowd matched that lineage — Black and Puerto Rican club veterans, queer regulars, ravers, and dancers across generations, held together by the music and the no-alcohol rule. Kenny Carpenter described it as the most racially mixed crowd he'd seen in the city. The party ran weekly at Vinyl until the club closed under that name in 2002, ending a six-year run. In 1999, while Body & Soul still held Sundays, Danny Tenaglia launched his own weekly Friday-night residency at Vinyl under the name 'Be Yourself', drawn from a self-affirming vocal track he had produced with Chicago singer Celeda, released in 1999. Where Body & Soul had been Sunday afternoon and communal, 'Be Yourself' was night-into-morning and intensely singular in its focus on Tenaglia's arc-driven, prog-house sets. Tenaglia explicitly invoked the Paradise Garage as a model: 'Be Yourself' ran in deliberate contrast to the cavernous superclubs (Twilo, Tunnel) where he had previously held residencies. The space, in Tenaglia's phrase, was 'about one-quarter the size of Tunnel', intimate enough to feel like a house party. By 2002–2003, operating as Arc, the space had been sold to residential developers. Tenaglia presided over a marathon closing party beginning Sunday, April 25, 2004, extending well into Monday afternoon, closing the final set with his remix of Kings of Tomorrow's 'Finally.' Body & Soul did not close with the room: after Vinyl's 2002 reconfiguration as Arc, François K., Krivit, and Claussell carried the format to other New York venues and international stages, sustaining the rotating-resident, daytime-party format the Hubert Street years had established. The 6 Hubert Street address had traced a single lineage across four names — Area (1983–1987), The Shelter (from 1991, overlapping the Vinyl years as a Saturday party), Vinyl (c. 1995–2002), and Arc (2002–2004) — the last three citing the Loft and Garage as their model. Following the 2004 closure, the building was converted to residential use.