Peter Gatien, owner of Limelight and the Tunnel, was the king of New York City nightlife. After his Canadian exile, he's back in his city — and ready to tell his story
-style flourish, Gatien built an enclosure beneath the glass dance floor and stocked it with a live panther. Today he cringes at the idea, but the big cat roaming under dancers’ feet presaged his preternatural ability to drum up press and controversy — an ability that would make him, but later destroy him.
The place drew a hell of a mass from the jump. Every boldface name of the roaring Eighties partied there, from Madonna to Donald Trump. In Florida and Atlanta he’d learned how the lifeblood of a swinging disco depended on the gay quotient. “My whole thing was always that to try to get an eclectic crowd in the place, you need a gay presence,” he says.
“It used to be a lot more egalitarian back then,” says Gatien. “I valued customers more for what they could contribute to a party than whether they bought six bottles or whatever.” Reconnoitering today’s dreadful scene, he says: “God, you go to a place like 1Oak” — the Meatpacking District club favored by Instathots and their investment-banker boyfriends — “and you get a table, it’s costing you a thousand dollars. There’s no legacy to those places and there never will be.
on the ballot that year. . As part of his new “Quality of Life” initiative, Giuliani went after hot dog vendors, buskers, jaywalkers, street artists and squeegee men. Even J.J. Hunsecker did not relish shooting mosquitoes with an elephant gun the way Giuliani did.,” says Gatien, “and I was the face of nightlife back then.” In that brooding, eye-patch clad visage Giuliani found the perfect, tabloid-ready target for his moral crusades.
The world in which Gatien operated was crawling with characters of ill repute. One such character was promoter Michael Alig. In 1996 Alig, doped out on a mix of heroin, cocaine, rophynol, and ketamine, murdered fellow club kid Angel Melendez. The brutal nature of the killing — Drano was used in some capacity and body parts washed up on Staten Island months later — made it one of the decade’s most notorious crimes.
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