Xenon

Overview

The $2 million Studio 54 challenger (named after element 54) built in the former Henry Miller's Theatre by concert promoter Howard Stein and European club operator Peppo Vanini, with a Douglas Trumbull-designed spacecraft as its centerpiece and a fashion-world dancefloor that Tony Smith held seven nights a week until it closed in 1984.

Xenon opened in June 1978 at 124 West 43rd Street in the former Henry Miller's Theatre, a 1918 Broadway house that had cycled through a prestige run in the Noel Coward era, a stint as the Avon-at-the-Hudson pornographic cinema, and a brief stint screening Federico Fellini before its disco incarnation. Its founders were Howard Stein, a New York concert promoter who had routed the Who, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and Rod Stewart into American venues, and Peppo Vanini, who operated Régine's and other major European clubs; the two had met at Studio 54 and spent $2 million converting the theater. The name was chosen precisely: xenon is the 54th element of the periodic table, the reference to their Midtown competition unmissable. The centerpiece of the redesigned room was a spacecraft built to order by Douglas Trumbull, the visual-effects designer responsible for '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' The room's moving sets and backdrops were designed to shift the environment every thirty to forty-five minutes, a borrowed logic of theatrical transformation applied to the disco format. Opening night drew approximately 2,500 guests including Peter Frampton, Tony Curtis, Paul Simon, and Mariel Hemingway. Where Studio 54's identity ran on the spectacle of celebrity, Xenon positioned itself as the fashion world's room — models, photographers, editors, and designers rather than film stars — with a door policy observers considered more inclusive than 54's. The DJ booth at Xenon's opening season featured multiple residents: Richie Rivera appears alongside Tony Smith in a surviving 1978 archival tape, one of the earliest direct audio documents of the room. By 1979 Smith had settled into a seven-nights-a-week residency, extending sets to 4 a.m.; part-time residents included Louis Martinez (professionally Louis Orlando). In Xenon's later years, John 'Jellybean' Benitez split his schedule between Xenon and his concurrent Fun House residency (April 1981–June 1984) — a dual allegiance that placed him simultaneously at opposite ends of the disco spectrum: Xenon's fashion-world dancefloor and the Fun House's predominantly Puerto Rican and Italian American outer-borough crowd. Studio 54's owners were convicted of tax evasion in 1980 and sold the club; Xenon continued through the post-disco contraction without a comparable public crisis, closing in 1984 as the era's economics unwound across the board. The Henry Miller's Theatre building was subsequently restored and eventually renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in 2010. Howard Stein died in October 2007, age 62. Xenon's clientele — the fashion industry's working tier rather than its celebrity tier — gave the room a social character distinct from Studio 54's, drawn more from Seventh Avenue and the magazine world than from Hollywood. The Avenue Magazine profile of Stein is headlined 'The Man Who Taught JFK Jr. About Disco,' placing Xenon in the social orbit of New York's 1970s–1980s cultural establishment. Tim Lawrence's 'Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983' (Duke University Press, 2016) maps the commercial contraction that surrounded Xenon's later years as the mainstream disco market narrowed after 1979; the room outlasted that contraction until its 1984 closing. The Henry Miller's Theatre at 124 West 43rd was renovated by Roundabout Theatre Company and reopened as a Broadway house in 2007; Roundabout renamed it the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on April 22, 2010, the composer's 80th birthday. The Douglas Trumbull spacecraft installation — designed to shift the room's visual environment every thirty to forty-five minutes — has left no documented trace in the building's post-club history; no record of the installation's removal or disposition has been located in sources reviewed. Howard Stein continued as a concert promoter after Xenon's closing, his primary professional identity through the end of his life; he died in October 2007, at 62. Xenon's six-year window (1978–1984) coincided with the disco era's peak capitalization and then its collapse: the club opened during Studio 54's year of maximum national saturation, outlasted the Rubell-and-Schrager era by four years after their 1980 tax-evasion convictions, and closed as the industry economics that had briefly made a $2 million theater conversion viable unwound.