Michael Alig Released From Prison

Infamous New York City "club kid killer" Michael Alig was released from prison today after serving 17 years for the gruesome murder of his roommate.

Alig, now 47, who masterminded some of the most extravagant parties of the early Nineties, pleaded guilty to bludgeoning the winged drug dealer Andre “Angel” Menendez to death in 1996, before pouring bleach into his mouth, dismembering his body with knives and disposing of his corpse in the Hudson River. His accomplice, roommate Robert Riggs (otherwise known as ‘Freeze’, was also sentenced to 10-to-20 years in prison after he confessed to manslaughter. The former promoter was famously played by Macaulay Culkin in the 2003 film Party Monster, which was based on the novel Disco Bloodbath by original Club Kid James St James (who was played by Seth Green).

Evening View - Limelight Mall

The is the view from the Sixth Avenue entrance of the former Limelight nightclub. The bones of the old space have mostly been obliterated, although one can still peg the former location of the DJ booth. The main floor consists of about a dozen retailers whose boundaries are defined by aisles instead of walls. When I stuck my head inside tonight, they were pumping out dance music at the same infamous Limelight volume. (So it seemed to my now much older ears.) Missing, however, were the dealers, the club kids, the drag queens, the go-go boys, the slumming celebs, etc etc.

Limelight To Become IHOP

Chelsea's iconic Limelight nightclub, which became a mini-mall a few years ago, is getting a new tenant: IHOP. The pancake house will occupy the bottom two floors of the former Episcopalian church. IHOP expects the site to become one of their top-grossing locations.

TRAILER: Limelight

It may be a boring-ass mini-mall today, but once upon a time the Limelight was the nightclub. I didn't live in NYC during its heyday, but I always made at least one visit any time I was in town. It's the only nightclub I've ever been thrown out of! True story. I also own the starburst light fixture that used to hang over the DJ booth.

As the owner of legendary hotspots like Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium and Club USA, Peter Gatien was the king of the New York club scene until years of legal battles led to his eventual deportation to Canada. This exuberant documentary charts Gatien's rise and fall against the transformation of New York City, offering a wild ride through a now-closed chapter in the history of NYC nightlife. From the director of "Cocaine Cowboys."

Limelight opens today in NYC.

NYC Event Promoter And Gay Magazine Publisher Marc Berkley Dies at 56

Famed NYC club promoter and one-time magazine kingpin Marc Berkley died unexpectedly in his sleep last night on Fire Island. Berkley reportedly had a heart attack. He was 56. Berkley was the co-founder of HX Media, the now-defunct gay publishing company that owned the popular nightlife guide HX Magazine and the LGBT news title The New York Blade.

Berkley became a dominant force in Manhattan nightlife twenty years ago, when as the longtime promoter of Chelsea's famed Limelight disco, he and business partner Matthew Bank founded Homo Xtra, a folded newsletter guide to parties and nightclubs. (And an essential list of must-dos that I was never without when visiting NYC.) Later Homo Xtra morphed into HX Magazine, a glossy weekly whose high production values and titillating cover photos influenced similar gay bar guides around the world. Avalon Media, which owned a stake in HX Media, was forced into receivership by its creditors in February 2009. Several months later, HX Magazine was sold to competing NYC nightlife guide Next Magazine, who shortly afterwards ceased its publication. Two days after the sale of HX, the New York Blade shut down as well.

In 2001, when he was probably at the height of his influence on Manhattan's gay nightlife, New York Magazine wrote a frank, but fascinating profile on Berkley. An excerpt:

Scratch a gay party promoter and more often than not you'll find a fledgling political activist; Berkley's no exception. Especially when it comes to Mayor Giuliani's relentless war on the city's nightclubs: "We're living in Nazi Germany done by Disney right now." He's told Gatien that he'd be willing to do events at the Limelight free, because "if that club stays open one day longer than Giuliani's term, we've won." Over the years, Berkley's served on his community board, coordinated Heritage of Pride's nineteenth and twentieth anniversaries, and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to gay charities. Even HX was conceived as a political statement: "I used to sit in on act-up's fund-raising meetings every weekend; that's where I met Matthew Bank. It was 1990, and at the time, Outweek was more or less the only gay publication -- Matthew and I used to call it The New York Native Medical Journal, because every week, it was all about dying. There was nothing about what else was going on in the city. That's how we came up with the idea for HX, as an alternative to that."

Nightlife figures, DJs, fellow promoters, and longtime customers are leaving messages of tribute on Berkley's Facebook page.

UPDATE: Berkley's former business partner, Matthew Bank, sends the following message: "I am truly saddened by the passing of my dear friend and former business partner Marc Berkley. His creative spirit and boundless energy helped make New York gay nightlife a shamefully good time for what seems like forever. Working with him to create HX was a grand adventure that I will relish for the rest of my life. I'll miss him terribly."

Limelight Mini-Mall Almost Ready

As I mentioned here many months ago, NYC's notorious Limelight nightclub, the disco that brought the world club kids and the occasional decapitated drug dealer, is being transformed into an "upscale" mini-mall. Yesterday the Daily News updated us on the process.

Even Jesus is for sale at the new Limelight Marketplace. The former Chelsea church that became one of the city's most notorious nightclubs is being transformed yet again - this time, into a cathedral of capitalism. The new high-brow indoor bazaar opens in March, and the Daily News got the first peak inside. "It's Disney World meets Manhattan," said Marketplace CEO Jack Menashe, standing in the middle of the Street of Shops - a replica of London's Covent Garden shopping district. Inside, not much remains of the building's past - both holy and unholy - except two dozen 19th-century stained glass windows depicting Jesus and a host of saints. Workers discovered the windows hidden under 30 inches of drywall while renovating in April. "We built these shops around these windows," Menashe said. But being nearer to Jesus doesn't come free: Shops will have to pay a premium to be located by the religious treasures. "It is a real destination. People want to see these windows," Menashe said. The windows date back to 1844, when the Sixth Ave. landmark was the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, said Marketplace designer James Mansour.

Reportedly, 44 out of the Limelight's 60 retail spaces have "deals in motion." Neighborhood activists, who worked unsuccessfully for 20 years in their quest to close the Limelight, are worried that the building will still be used as a party space.

Shopping Monsters Only, Please

Chelsea's notorious Limelight, the nightspot that gave us club kids, Amanda Lepore, and a murdered drug dealer or two, is finally about to reopen as a sort of mall. PageSix reports that the venue will be called Limelight Marketplace.

Jack Menashe, who owned nightclub Lounge in SoHo, is turning the long-vacant, 1849 Gothic Revival church into Limelight Marketplace with the help of designers James Mansour and Melisca Klisanin. Mansour told John Norwood of guestofaguest.com, "We're taking a place that was a blight on the neighborhood for so long and turning it into a shopping haven."

After original Limelight owner Peter Gatien was deported to Canada, the building sat unused before resurrecting for a few years as a disco called Avalon. The movie Party Monster was based on the habitues of the Limelight.

Bathhouse Betties

The current issue of The New Yorker features an article about the Ansonia Hotel, former home of the legendary Continental Baths:

What is it about the Ansonia Hotel, at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, that makes people want to take off their clothes? In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, naked men, sometimes ten thousand of them a week, used to hang out downstairs in the sauna, Turkish baths, and massage parlor of the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler got her start (clothed), singing torch songs poolside, accompanied by Barry Manilow, to an audience of men wearing white towels (black towels on formal nights)—the very same outfit worn by the undercover cops who frequently raided the place. In 1977, women started getting naked, too, when the baths reopened as Plato’s Retreat, the heterosexual swingers’ club. (Of course, they might have been there for the all-you-can-eat buffet of bagels, lox, and Scotch.)

Look for more skin at this location now that it has been transformed into the newest branch of Loehmann’s. Many New York women have traumatic memories of zaftig matrons in giant bras and girdles preening in front of mirrors in the famous communal dressing room, and asking strangers to unzip them, while bored husbands sat in soiled armchairs by the curtained doorway, hoping to catch a glimpse of thigh. As one veteran shopper said recently, “As a child, everything scary I knew about women and female anatomy I learned in that dressing room.”

Turning the site of a former bathhouse into a women's discount clothing outlet is a classic sign of the times, isn't it? However, I'm happy to report that despite earlier press accounts, another Manhattan landmark, the former Limelight nightclub is not becoming an H&M outlet after all. Several weeks ago the building resurrected itself one more time as its last nightlife incarnation, Avalon, and is packing in the boys on Saturday nights once again.