Good Times: A Night Out with Katie Longmyer

It's around 12 am on a Thursday night, unseasonably warm outside for the middle of March, and subMercer is getting crowded. There are two DJ’s on duty, Jacques Renault and Brennan Green, both spinning heart-pounding disco. As a result of their fine handy work, an impromptu break dance competition has formed on the small floor in front of the DJ booth – a dapper gent in a half-mullet rhythmically bouncing to the breaks, as a small girl in a green dress sort of gyrates next to him.

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Earlier in the evening, long before people started showing up, Katie Longmyer was worried that turnout might be a little slim tonight, on account of the gorgeous weather (subMercer is in a basement. Maybe people will favor a more open-aired venue?). But as midnight comes and goes, droves of SoHoites begin to flood the party (thrown along with Anthem Magazine). Longmyer stakes out a perch in the back room near the DJs, drink in hand, a small group of friends surrounding her, the early-evening worries are quickly proven unfounded.

Longmyer strikes an incongruous figure at a place like this. Pencil-thin women in high stilettos and sleek black skirts are dancing with becoiffed men in low-cut shirts, self-serious pouts on many a face. Katie is not pencil-thin, she’s smiling, and she seems to favor jeans and simple blouses over the more elaborate (and expensive) outfits of her guests. But on this temperate evening, this is her space, as it is once every month here at subMercer. Longmyer--who works under the pseudonym “The Queen Bee”-- may be unassuming, but she is a Queen of New York nightlife, a well-connected party-giver whose events have been getting more and more crowded.

Though she has been in the business for almost a decade, it’s only been fairly recently – in the past year or two - that Longmyer has seen her profile really start to ascend. Since 2005, Longmyer has run a party-promotions group called Good Peoples. She’s also co-owner, along with business partner Jennifer Lyon, of Meanred (Good Peoples is a subsidiary), which throws its own parties and shows at venues across the city and owns and operates the Brooklyn Yard, the open-air summer music venue next to the Gowanus Canal. Longmyer seems to know everyone in the scene – DJs, club owners, musicians and of course fellow promoters – in part because she seems to be everywhere. In addition to her monthly soiree at subMercer, Katie and Good Peoples have thrown parties at places like GoldBar, Von, Ella, Santos and a Chinese restaurant-turned dance venue called 88 Palace (which at times has the feel of an early ‘90s rave, without the parachute pants). This summer, Katie will be presiding over a monthly party on a refurbished civil-war era schooner called The Clipper City that docks at the South Street Seaport. And she says, she’s now in conversations with The Box about throwing parties there.

Take it as a sign of the times, perhaps, that Longmyer’s ascent has been so recent. A downed economy and the city’s apparent newfound hostility to some New York nightlife (witness the closing of Beatrice and the Jane, and city raids on a slew of bars for alleged smoking violations) have contributed to the closing of more than a few high-end clubs and bars. All this, plus a slightly more impoverished social set, have given no opportunities to independent promoters.  “The New York club scene is kind of on a weird tip right now,” says Jacques Renault, one of the DJs at the subMercer party. “A lot of people want to do loft parties, a lot of people want to do things that are special, and clubs are…” Renault trailed off. “We want to establish a place where you want to go, and all of your friends want to go.” He added, “And Katie is an instigator [for that].”

“Katie’s good at what she does,” says Joey Rubin, who runs a New York promotions company called TASTE, and who has worked with Katie on a variety of projects. “She’s really good at building real friendships, and I think that the general public wants to be around a tighter network of real friends and not just sterile [commercial venues].”

Longmyer’s email list is eclectic, and each of her party seems to bring out a slightly different group. “At the New York parties that I loved, all different types of people came, no matter who you were and what you were like, you all went into one big room,” she says, as we sit in a corner of the space, sipping cocktails before the start of the evening’s festivities. Dave Brubeck is playing across the speaker system.

Longmyer complains that in recent years, the nightlife industry has lost sight of itself and “turned into a business that defeated the whole point of nightlife. It was about moving product and volume, and you needed a certain clientele to buy a certain number of bottles and that changes your whole situation.” She adds “when the economy tanked you lost a lot of those dollars and if that’s what you rely on, that’s what you lose. That’s why a lot of those bars are closing.”