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						Remembering Area Nightclub
	New York in the early 1980’s was ground zero for art and would-be artists. It was also economically depressed, which meant that kids could live in the city and work miracles with duct tape. Area’s founders, Eric and Christopher Goode, Shawn Hausman and Darius Azari, four young friends from California, came here like the rest: to have fun while getting famous. They had thrown theme parties back home, but they wanted to make history. Eric Goode, who now builds hotels and restaurants , says the clubs back then were driven solely by music — disco, punk or rock. “Area,” he recalls, “was purely visual. It was based on ‘happenings,’ on what Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg did.” Hausman, a designer, adds: “We were going to open this place for two years, and that was going to be it. We didn’t want to be club owners.” Area’s premiere, in September 1983, was announced by a pharmaceutical-looking capsule that arrived in a jeweler’s box with the instructions: “Place capsule in glass of hot water and allow to dissolve.” The club’s “Disco” night was announced by a phonograph record; “Suburbia,” by a slice of Velveeta; “Confinement,” by a Chinese finger trap. “Gnarly” beckoned with a corrugated box that, when opened, set off a mousetrap smashing open an ammonium capsule. In turn, the capsule might have revived anyone who fainted at the mousetrap snap, but it did not amuse the United States Postal Service. “I’ve never been in a rock band, but I would imagine our way of working was a little like a band,” Hausman says. The themes, which changed roughly every six weeks, were generated by marathon brainstorming sessions and then put into play by a frenzied art department of rotating eccentrics that included brilliant and sometimes slightly mad talents like Kenny Baird, Michael Staats, Mark Garbarino , Serge Becker  and Reno Dakota . "Eric would be doing windows inside a display, doing the whole thing himself,” Hausman says. “I’d be managing a crew of 20 people. Maybe Chris would be taking care of the business end, which we weren’t prepared for at all. Darius was the mechanical one; he did effects. He was also the cheerleader. If you came by on Wednesday at 3 p.m., we’d be in despair saying, ‘There’s no way this one is going to get done,’ and he’d be insisting, ‘We can do this!”’ The art department had wild imaginations and the obsessive ability to work three days straight. “I eventually found out half of them were junkies,” Goode says. “But I always liked reckless abandon.” A quality shared by each and every one of them. “It didn’t look fake because it wasn’t,” Goode says of each theme’s castings. “For ‘Gnarly,’ we got real bikers; for ‘Sex,’ we got real perverts.” Other key players included Joe Dolce, now the editor in chief of Star magazine, who wrote crazy press releases and did guerrilla P.R. Eric and Christopher’s sister Jennifer was the team researcher and designated shopper. Her list for “Suburbia” included 100 boxes of cereal, Fluffernutter, Goobers, a washer and dryer, plastic pink flamingos, an oak-veneer bedroom set, a toilet, Astroturf, Spic and Span, and Tide. And then there were the regular performers: Bernard Zette, a man who appeared variously as Marie Antoinette, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy; Jeffrey Strouth, whose repertory included characters from John Travolta to Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar; the ultravixen costume artist Christina Downing; Michael Anderson, later the midget on “Twin Peaks”; and the almost equally diminutive David Yarritu, who went on to play with the band ABC. The artist Jeff Vaughn created ingenious, otherworldly slide projections. Johnny Dynell, Anita Sarko and DJ Red Alert frequently spun records, but sometimes Jean-Michel Basquiat worked the turntables for fun, playing Miles, Duke and Bird. A few of Area’s themes were more curated than constructed. Ironically, Eric Goode recalls, art didn’t hold up that well as a theme, but artists had a field day. David Hockney flew in to do the pool. Michael Heizer put his meteorites on the dance floor. Warhol did T-shirts and an invisible sculpture. Keith Haring painted something on the dance floor. Barbara Kruger painted something on a wall. Basquiat, Alex Katz, Jenny Holzer and Tom Wesselmann all did windows. Larry Rivers did a great sculpture of two guys having sex.One of the more spectacular themes was (and happened to come) “Ready-Made.” Hausman’s father had produced the film “Silkwood,” and when production shut down, the nuclear-reactor set was going to be tossed out. So Shawn and Eric flew to Texas and drove it back to New York in a 24-foot Ryder truck. Sex, of course, was an ongoing theme at Area. There was talk of something called “gay cancer,” but AIDS wasn’t yet feared. At either end of the women’s bathroom, projectors were set up so that films could be seen in the lounge or on the dance floor. People would sneak in and have sex in the space between the projector and the screen, giving hundreds of people a wild shadow show.So, after 25 buildups and tear-downs, Area closed in early 1987 with “Childhood,” a nice symbolic touch suggesting a life lived backward. For years after, I felt a twinge of nostalgia whenever I passed the site, at 157 Hudson Street in TriBeCa. When something like Area comes along, you think, This is a first! But when you think, This is a first, it’s often really a last. Area suggested a brilliant future, where night life and art would merge. And they did, for a moment, with reckless abandon. by Glenn O'Brien  -  New York Times NICKY LONDON COLUMN MENU                               /                               AREA NIGHTCLUB MENU