Located in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, Studio 54 is a Broadway theater and former disco club that is the brainchild of Brooklyn-born Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager.
The club was first opened on April 26, 1977, as disco was gaining popularity in the United States, and was best known for its celebrity guest list, restrictive entry policies, extravagant events, open sexual activity and rampant drug use.
Rubell was known to stand just behind the velvet ropes and decide who was and wasn’t allowed entry, Felipe Rose, a member of the original Village People, recalled in a PBS article.
“He would say, ‘yes, no, you can stay, you can go, maybe so,’” Rose said. “His own nursery rhyme because he was having a ball doing that.”
“You start out playing rock’n’roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock’n’roll and have sex.” -Mick Jagger
The club was regularly frequented by celebrities including Cher, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Farrah Fawcett and “Disco Sally,” a then-77-year-old retired lawyer who, according to the article, became best known for her “cocaine-fueled antics.”
“You start out playing rock’n’roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock’n’roll and have sex,” said The Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger and that is what Studio 54 is all about.
In a GQ article, Schrager said the club’s dynamic scene, which wasn’t limited to only upper-class citizens and celebrities, was one of the reasons the club was so special.
“New York wasn’t dominated by only rich people, which it is now. It was a little bit more bohemian, maybe because of the demographics or maybe because people didn’t have anything to lose. So everyone was willing to give it a shot,” Schrager said. “It was the emergence of drugs at, again, a full state. And it was the golden era of music. So all those things were happening and Studio happened to be the right time at the right place to ride that cultural wind.”
In an article for The New York Times, Schrager recalled the club’s opening night as being a mob scene.
“We were actually scared,” Schrager said. “We had to bring all the security inside out onto the street.”
Schrager recalled some of his favorite nights at Studio 54 were its annual Halloween parties when it was easier for people to get into the club due to their extravagant costumes.
“They were the zenith, anything goes, do anything you wanted, the one night that almost anyone in a good costume could get in. They were so amazing, so creative,” Schrager said. “There were six doors when you walked down the corridor and when you opened up one door you might have four dwarfs sitting at a table with silverware that came out of a doll’s house, eating a Cornish hen. In another, you might find a guy sitting under a table with a tablecloth with a hole in the table and his head on a plate eating noodles coming out of his mouth.”
Rubell and Schrager sold the business in February of 1980 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and serving 20 months in jail. The club reopened shortly after, operating until 1986, but the club was never the same with its two original owners.
In the years since the closure of the club, Schrager has reflected on his life, saying he only remembers there being two seminal cultural events in his life, Woodstock and Studio 54.
In the ‘60s, before the club first opened, Schrager spent a lot of time studying Woodstock at St. John’s University School of Law in New York, according to GQ, and what he discovered was a place in which people were free to express themselves with almost no rules and regulations.
“Here’s a society of 400,000 people where there’s no laws, no police force,” Schrager said in regard to the original Woodstock in 1969. “How did they get along? Maybe you don’t need laws?”
It is that idea of freedom, Schrager said, that planted the seed for Studio 54.
