Studio 54

The Library Essay

Thirty-Three Months of New York

Studio 54 opened in a former theatre on West 54th Street in April 1977 and the first act ended in February 1980 with its founders convicted of tax evasion, a run of under three years that remains the most mythologised stretch in the history of nightlife. Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell staged it as theatre, lighting rigs and nightly transformations, a door policy that treated the crowd as casting, and a floor where celebrity, disco and license met without photographic consequences, mostly.

Schrager, who went on to invent the boutique hotel, assembled this Rizzoli volume in 2017 as the inside record, photographs, floor plans, memos and his own unsentimental commentary. It documents a piece of social history whose afterlife has lasted a dozen times longer than the club did.