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), a disco-era predecessor, and The Shelter (which opened there in 1991 following Paradise Garage's closure). 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, six-hour 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 continuously at Vinyl until the club closed in 2002, ending a six-year weekly run. In approximately 1999–2000, after Body & Soul's tenure, 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.'

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