Studio 54: The Wild Rise and Fall of New York's Most Famous Club
Updated: Oct 16
For less than three years in the late 1970s, the hardest door in the world to get through wasn't at the White House or Buckingham Palace. It was on West 54th Street in Manhattan, and it was guarded by a 19-year-old from Brooklyn. Studio 54 opened in a city that was broke, filthy and frightened, and within weeks it was the most talked-about room on the planet. Then the taxman turned up with a search warrant and the whole glittering thing came down almost as fast as it went up.
Quick Answers
• When did Studio 54 open? On 26 April 1977, at 254 West 54th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
• Who ran it? Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, two college friends with no real nightclub experience.
• Why did it close? A December 1978 raid uncovered a huge tax skim. Both owners went to prison and threw their final party on 2 February 1980.
• Is it still there? The building is. It's now a Broadway theatre run by the Roundabout Theatre Company, and it still goes by Studio 54.
Before the Disco: An Opera House, a Casino and Captain Kangaroo
The building had already lived several lives before anyone dropped a needle on a disco record there. It opened in 1927 as the Gallo Opera House, a 1,400-seat theatre built for the impresario Fortune Gallo. The 1929 crash killed that off fast, and over the next few years it became the New Yorker Theater, then a nightclub called the Casino de Paree, then a venue for the government's Depression-era Federal Music Project, as NYS Music's history of the site lays out.
In 1949 CBS turned it into Studio 52, a television soundstage. Some of the biggest shows of early American TV were made there, including What's My Line?, The $64,000 Question and the children's favourite Captain Kangaroo. When CBS moved out in 1976, it left behind a cavernous room with a stage and a theatre lighting rig. That's exactly what a pair of ambitious young men from Brooklyn were looking for.
A Lawyer, a Restaurateur and a Very Risky Bet
Ian Schrager was a lawyer and Steve Rubell ran a chain of steakhouses. Neither of them had run a big club, but they'd had a taste of nightlife and wanted more. With backing from businessman Jack Dushey, they took over the old CBS studio and spent the spring of 1977 turning it into a theatrical dance hall where the sets, lights and even the ceiling could move.
The timing looked mad. New York had come within hours of bankruptcy in 1975, crime was soaring and Midtown's West Side wasn't somewhere you'd wander about at 3am. You can see that city in Camilo José Vergara's photographs of 1970s New York, and it's not exactly party central. Schrager's bet was that people wanted somewhere to escape all that, and that the most interesting crowd would be a mixed one. Rich and broke, gay and straight, famous and nobody, all on the same floor. Writing in the Guardian decades later, he summed it up neatly: "When you have that alchemy, magic happens."
Studio 54 opened its doors on 26 April 1977. Within a year, Rubell would be boasting that the place had made $7 million.
The Door: Polyester, Bribes and a 19-Year-Old Gatekeeper
Studio 54's real product wasn't drinks or music. It was the velvet rope. Every night a huge crowd gathered on the pavement hoping to be picked, and the man doing most of the picking was Marc Benecke, a 19-year-old from Brooklyn with no hospitality experience whatsoever.
Rubell trained him personally, with rules that were blunt to say the least. One of his favourites was that polyester causes cancer, which tells you everything about what the wrong outfit could do to your chances. Benecke worked the door from 10pm to 4am, five nights a week, and turned away far more people than he let in. Speaking to AARP years later, he was refreshingly honest about it: "We ruined a lot of people's nights. There's no way around that."
People tried everything. Benecke says he was once offered $5,000 plus drugs to wave someone through, and turned it down. The same piece reveals that publicist Joanne Horowitz was effectively paid by the famous face, earning $250 when she got Michael Jackson through the door, and a young Alec Baldwin briefly worked there as a shirtless waiter.
The Night Chic Got Turned Away (and Wrote a Hit About It)
Being somebody didn't guarantee anything. On New Year's Eve 1977, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the band Chic turned up because Grace Jones had invited them to talk about working on her next record. They weren't on the list, so they didn't get in.
Fuming, they went back to Rodgers' flat and wrote a song telling the doorman exactly where to go, with a very rude word in the hook. Edwards decided that probably wouldn't get much airplay, so they kept tweaking it until the swear word became "freak". The result was "Le Freak", which American Songwriter notes went on to become Atlantic Records' biggest-selling single. Not a bad result for a night out that never happened.
The Horse That Wasn't Quite What You Think
If there's one image everyone knows from Studio 54, it's Bianca Jagger on a white horse at her 30th birthday party in May 1977. The legend says she rode it in off the street. She's spent decades insisting she didn't.
Rubell had seen a magazine photo of her riding a white horse in Nicaragua and arranged one for the club as a surprise. Bianca says she and Mick simply walked in, and the horse was already inside. In a letter to the Financial Times, reported by Ultimate Classic Rock, she called the story a fable, admitting only that "I made the foolish decision to get on it for a few minutes." As a long-time animal rights campaigner, she's not a fan of the myth.
Glitter, Gasoline and a Spoon Up the Moon's Nose
The old TV studio gave Rubell and Schrager something no other club had, which was the ability to change the whole room overnight. Sets flew in from above and lighting rigs rose and fell on cue. The most famous fixture was a giant man in the moon that hung over the dance floor, with a spoon that rose up to his nose and lit up. Schrager has always insisted it was cheeky rather than an advert for cocaine, though plenty of guests took it as both.
On one New Year's Eve, four tons of glitter were dumped on the dance floor. For a Grease-themed party, real 1950s cars were wheeled inside. Former manager Michael Overington told the Guardian that the fire brigade insisted the petrol came out first, and that it ended up being poured into the sewers, leaving the street reeking for blocks. Another winter, the club built a wall of ice inside, and when staff dumped it on the pavement the next morning, a confused passer-by reckoned they must serve enormous drinks in there.
Cher with pal Diana Ross Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger Diana Ross in the DJ booth Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields Cher Michael Jackson, Steve Tyler Jackie O Shirley Bassey Woody Allen and MJ Bruce Jenner (left) Curtis Mayfield Sly Stone Donny trump Travolta Michael Caine & Shakira
Who Actually Went to Studio 54?
Pretty much everyone famous in the late 1970s. Andy Warhol was there so often he was practically furniture, usually standing at the edge of things, watching. (He was a man of strange side projects, including sneaking a rude drawing onto the Moon.) Liza Minnelli and the designer Halston were regulars, as were Mick and Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross, Cher, Elton John, Grace Jones, Elizabeth Taylor and a teenage Michael Jackson. Jackie Kennedy Onassis dropped in. So did Truman Capote, Calvin Klein and a very young Brooke Shields.
The house rule was that nobody pestered anyone, so stars could actually relax. Not everyone did, though. A young property developer called Donald Trump was spotted there from time to time, but Schrager told Mixmag he never saw him on the dance floor: "I never saw Donald Trump dance, though. He was a serious guy."
"Only the Mafia Makes More Money"
Studio 54's downfall started with Rubell's mouth. He couldn't resist telling New York magazine that "only the Mafia makes more money", which is a strange thing to say out loud when you're not paying your taxes. It was like waving a flag at the IRS.
In December 1978, dozens of federal agents raided the club. CBS News reported that the records they seized included a column marked "skim", which added up to about $2.5 million that had never been declared. Cash had reportedly been stashed all over the building, in bin bags and in the ceiling. The same records listed so-called payouts that appeared to cover drugs. It was the sort of underworld bookkeeping New York's real Mafia bosses would've recognised.
Rubell and Schrager pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and on 18 January 1980 a judge sentenced them to three and a half years each, as Taxgirl's write-up of the case records. They also paid fines and ended up serving around 13 months. Schrager later told CBS, "It was an embarrassment to me. It still is."
The Last Party
Before they went inside, the pair threw one final blowout on 2 February 1980. Liza Minnelli and Diana Ross sang from the club's moving bridge, Frank Sinatra's "My Way" boomed over the sound system and Ross reportedly lost a shoe at some point. One supporter turned up in a "Free Steve Rubell" shirt, Grazia recalls. It was the end of the original Studio 54, and arguably the end of the disco decade too. A few months earlier, Disco Demolition Night in Chicago had shown just how ugly the backlash against disco was getting.
Life After Rubell and Schrager
While its founders were in prison, the club was sold for $4.75 million. Hotelier Mark Fleischman reopened it in September 1981, but without Rubell on the door the magic never really came back, and it shut for good in April 1986.
Rubell and Schrager walked out of prison together and did surprisingly well. They opened the Palladium nightclub and then more or less invented the boutique hotel, starting with Morgans in Manhattan. Rubell died in 1989 of complications from AIDS, aged just 45. Schrager went on to build a hotel empire, and in January 2017 he was one of the last people Barack Obama pardoned before leaving office, as GBH News reported. He'd told reporters he'd made mistakes and paid for them.
As for the building, the Roundabout Theatre Company moved its production of Cabaret there in 1998 and bought it outright in 2003. It's been a Broadway theatre ever since, still with the old name over the door.
What Studio 54 Left Behind
Studio 54 lasted less than three years in its prime, yet it's still the yardstick every exclusive club gets measured against. It invented the modern velvet rope, blurred the line between celebrities and ordinary punters and made the people inside as much a part of the show as the music. It inspired the 1998 film 54 and Matt Tyrnauer's 2018 documentary, and it gave the world one of disco's greatest records, written out of pure spite.
It also showed how quickly hedonism can curdle. The money, the drugs and the arrogance that made it legendary were the same things that brought it down. For a few nights a week in a frightened, broke city that also gave us The Warriors, though, it really was the centre of the universe.
Further Reading
If you want to see what it really looked like inside, Ian Schrager's own book Studio 54 Rizzoli is packed with hundreds of photos from the club's heyday, many never published before.
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