Electric Circus (nightclub)

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This article is about a Manhattan nightclub. For other uses, please see Electric Circus (disambiguation)

The Electric Circus was a famous American nightclub open between 1967 and September 1971 in downtown Manhattan's East Village at 19-25 St. Marks Place between Second and Third Avenues. With its invitation (from one of its press releases) to "play games, dress as you like, dance, sit, think, tune in and turn on," and its mix of light shows, music, circus performers and experimental theater, the Electric Circus embodied the wild and creative side of 1960s club culture. It was also very influential to the later rise of disco culture.

The bands that played at the Electric Circus were mostly the more adventurous and experimental of the time, including the very influential rock band The Velvet Underground, the early composers of electronic music Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick, and the seminal San Franciso band The Grateful Dead. Many groups that played there became famous, such as "Soft White Underbelly" shortly before it became "Blue Öyster Cult." Flame throwers and trapeze artists performed between musical sets (which explains the "circus" part of the club's name); and during musical sets strobe lights flashed over a huge dance floor, while multiple projectors flashed images and played home movies.

In his book Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), Joel Lobenthal wrote the Electric Circus became "New York's ultimate mixed-media pleasure dome. Its hallucinogenic light baths enthralled every sector of New York society." But by 1970 the "tune in, turn on" culture that the club represented was already in decline. When in March 1970 a small bomb exploded on the dance floor injuring seventeen people, bad publicity accelerated the decline of the club. It closed a year and a half later.

[edit] History

The cavernous ballroom space with a balcony that became the Electric Circus originally consisted of four distinct buildings built in 1833. Three of them (19, 21, and 23 St. Marks Place) were bought between 1887-1888 and merged into a ballroom and community hall called Arlington Hall. During the 1920s the buildings were bought by the Polish National Home, which combined them with 25 St. Marks Place for use by Polish organizations and a Polish restaurant.

By the 1960's, the bohemianism and nightlife previously associated with New York's Greenwich Village (an area roughly on the same latitude, but on the west side of Manhattan) was growing in the East Village. Before the Electric Circus was established, Stanley Tolkin ran "Stanley's Bar" downstairs (slightly below street level) at the building at 19-25 St. Marks Place. Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern began leasing the ballroom on the floor above Stanley's Bar for their "Theater of Light" show.

Then in 1966 artist Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey (who directed many of Warhol's films, and who became a sometime manager of the Velvet Underground) sublet the ballroom from Jackie and Rudi, and created a club called the "Dom" (derived from "Polski Dom Narodowy," or in English, "Polish National Home"). The Velvet Underground was the house band, and their performances under Andy Warhol's influence were accompanied by many light effects (presumably using equipment left from the "Theater of Light" show) with the added touches of projected movies and many changing projected photographs, all going on at the same time. The experience was called the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable."

Later in 1966 the club under different management was briefly called the Balloon Farm, and in 1967 the lease was transferred to Jerry Brandt who created the Electric Circus. Brandt was a William Morris agent turned impresario. While he clearly took some multimedia cues from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, his Electric circus was a far more commercialized and formally designed place, and used even more technology for sensory overload.

After the Electric Circus closed the building no longer functioned as a club or space for regular public performances, but the building was not significantly physically altered until 2003 when a drastic renovation eliminated the ballroom and converted the building into upscale apartments and multiple retail spaces.