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Tunnel (New York nightclub)


Coordinates: 40°45′9″N 74°0′27″W / 40.75250°N 74.00750°W / 40.75250; -74.00750

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.

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. Eli 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, with 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.


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