ABSTRACT
By the late 1980s, the city’s clubland had altered considerably. The municipality continued to trumpet the city’s celebrated nighttime entertainment as an important selling point of the city. Nightclubs that were the engines of cultural innovation and creativity, however, were gradually disappearing or decamping to other boroughs, while glitzy versions had increasingly settled in as the dominant players in Manhattan. Nightlife was under disciplinary offensive from the market, the state and residential communities. In this chapter, I examine how these offensives and other factors, such as AIDS and changes in demographics in Manhattan that took place with the increasing post-industrialization of the city had gradually changed the nature of nightlife landscapes and cultures, ushering in the “gentrification of nightlife.” I illustrate this process with the example of Paradise Garage, a legendary underground club that closed in 1987, the same year that a club critic declared the “death of downtown.”
