Danceteria’s tolerance and topsy-turviness allowed for enormous creativity—but it also allowed for some precarious situations.
BRILL: We would do dinners on the roof in the summertime. One night I wanted to get down to the dance floor and the elevators were very slow. I was always in fetish stilettos and rubber skirts that had limited maneuverability, but I saw some people climbing down the fire escape ladder. So I just climbed down [10 stories], went through the window into the club, and then climbed back up to the roof afterwards. Thank God no one was hurt that way. But we were desperate to find a place where we not only belonged but could create and express—and if it came with a little bit of danger, then that was okay.
DAVIS: There were two elevators side by side at Danceteria, and [fellow elevator operator] Audrey Roman and I used to stop in between floors and open the trap doors inside of the elevators. We would sit with our legs dangling down the shaft and share a joint, and people would be banging on the doors. But the elevators were old. One night my elevator fell from Wuthering Heights. I had too many people crammed in, and the next thing I knew, the elevator was just free falling. Somewhere between the 12th floor and the third floor it stopped, and we used that trap door to get people to safety.
Eventually, though, Danceteria’s elevators were the cause of a tragic fatal accident.
ARGENTO: This guy was on the second floor, leaning against the elevator door. It came off the bottom hinges, the door swung back and he fell down into the pit. But then the door slammed itself right back onto the rails, so it looked normal. Nobody knew that he had fallen down the elevator shaft.
PIPER: It was just terrible. The elevator had been inspected like a week before.
ARGENTO: People say, “That’s why Danceteria closed.” But we only closed for that night. By 1986, real estate prices went crazy—that’s why we eventually closed. Before we took it over, DiLorenzo was going to sell that 12-floor building for, I think it was $890,000. By the time we closed, he had an offer for $5 million. And it was kind of time to go. Times were changing.
Piper left Danceteria to work at the Palladium and went on to mastermind successful clubs like the Tunnel and Mars. Argento briefly revived Danceteria in the early 1990s in the ballroom of a dilapidated old hotel. But after that, the name was put to rest—until July 2017, that is, when digging at a Flatiron construction site halted after workers unearthed a WW2-era bomb. It turned out to be Danceteria’s last blast: a time capsule planted by clubgoers and employees 32 years before.
PIPER: In those days, they sold empty bombshells on Canal Street, and I got one to do as a time capsule. Everybody at Danceteria contributed stuff, we did a big party, and we buried the time capsule in the alley.