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Address 220 12th Ave, New York, NY 10001, USA | ||
Tunnel was a nightclub in New York City, located at 220 Twelfth Avenue, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, in the Terminal Warehouse Company Central Stores Building, which is now part of the West Chelsea Historic District. It operated from 1986 to 2001.
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History and description
Tunnel, frequently misnamed as "The Tunnel", was opened in December 1986 at the cost of $5 million by Eli Dayan – the founder of Bonjour Jeans – in a space which was formerly a railroad freight terminal. Dayan sold the property to Marco Riccota in January 1990. Peter Gatien acquired the 80,000-square-foot nightclub in 1992.
The club was named for the tunnel-like shape of the main room, in which train tracks from the early 1900s ran through a sunken area of the dance floor. These were a relic of an era in which railroad sidings from the Eleventh Avenue freight line of the New York Central Railroad ran directly into warehouse buildings in that area, so that goods could be transferred to and from freight cars which were floated across the Hudson on barges from Hoboken.
The club was architecturally distinctive: a long, narrow space with multiple rooms on several levels. The dance floor featured several dance cages. The decor of the club changed frequently. One room, decorated by artist Kenny Scharf, was called the Kenny Scharf Lava Lounge. Others were decorated as Victorian libraries, S/M dungeons, and lounges. The club featured unisex bathrooms, which were the converted locker rooms formerly used by the freight terminal's workers. They had modern stalls with partitions and doors for privacy, extant rows of old lockers attached to the wall, as well as marks where the former shower stalls had been removed. In the late 1980s, Club Kids, including Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore, and RuPaul, often gathered in the V.I.P. room in the basement.
During its lifespan, Tunnel frequently hosted Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, Jonathan Peters, Little Louie Vega, DJ Renegade, Eddie Baez, DJ Justin Time, DJ Corbett, Bobby Rios and Hex Hector after the close of the original Sound Factory in the mid-1990s. It later presented Kurfew, a trance-techno oriented Saturday night party started by promoter Jeff Brenner and hosted by talent such as Lady Bunny, DJ Urbanox, Peppermint, DJ Vito Fun, DJ Michael T, Amanda Lepore and DJ Steve Sidewalk and introducing young clubbers to talent including Danny Tenaglia, Jonny McGovern, and Cazwell (as Morplay). While the club attracted primarily gay audiences, it also attracted members of the hip hop community. One advantage of the multiple rooms of the club was the ability to host different types of parties, with as many as five or more DJs spinning different styles of music to varying crowds. In 1998, DJ Amadeus was named the resident DJ at Tunnel.
Tunnel closed its doors late in 2001 due to non-payment of rent and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign. Gatien had been accused of drug trafficking, charges he was acquitted of, although he and his wife pleaded guilty to tax evasion and were deported to Canada in 2003.