In the old movies, Cagney or Bogie would show up at an alley door, produce the secret knock and a gorilla in a suit would squint through a peephole, opening the gate to the hottest joint in town. After handing over the password -- “Joe sent me,” or, “I’m a friend of the family” -- and a palmed sawbuck, admission was granted. Inside, there were swells in swanky tuxes and flappers in sequined gowns dancing to a 20-piece band. These were the covert clubs of my black-and-white TV youth.

In the 1980s, the illegality, desperation and danger of the after-hours scene were drugs in themselves. I ran a joint called The World for some guys who were so unsavory that their lawyer partner seemed honest by comparison. After the filler patrons had all gone to bed, the owners would open the door for special friends and celebrities, who partied until dawn and beyond. In one of the boldest outlaw moves ever, a sledgehammer opened up a common wall to the burnt-out tenement next door. Squatters were rousted, and the space became the new It Club. Five-gallon jugs of vodka were hidden in the ceiling and connected to pipes and faucets, and the brew was served to Madonna, Carolina Herrera and Joan Rivers -- to Prince as well as paupers.

A typical Saturday night in the ’8os involved leaving The World at 4am for Save the Robots on Avenue B. It was easier to get lucky here than it was at regular-hours joints -- everyone was looking for one last drink, sex or a blow job traded for blow. After Robots, the drug scene extended to Brownies, where getting rolled for your wallet was always a very real possibility. There was Club 82 in the East Village and Stickball, as it later came to be known, where large bikers guzzled impossible amounts of hard liquor while consuming and dealing equally impressive amounts of speed. The place was filled with off-work strippers and hookers with ripped stockings and dripping makeup, amped on the stuff dreams are made of, all looking for 15 minutes of perversion with an improper stranger.

The clock could be pushing noon when a desperate band of zooted revelers would end up in a cheap diner or on the Staten Island Ferry -- going home was not an option. There were the California Hot Tubs on 3rd Avenue and 11th Street, where groups of 20 or more would rent a room with a clean, bubbling tub of hot water, get naked and proceed to dirty that water with extreme prejudice. Regular-hours fun had a hard time measuring up.

Chelsea’s Crisco Disco was a gayer offering that spilled into bathhouses later still. There was the rather large AM PM from Vito Bruno (of 2001 Odyssey, the disco made famous in Saturday Night Fever). The Beastie Boys shot from a small punk band to stardom there. The smartest set would attend the late, great Arthur Weinstein’s Jefferson or Continental, which became the center of a scandal involving the Russian mob and dozens of on-the-take cops. Here, Calvin Klein mingled with Grace Jones, Stephen Sprouse and Steve Rubell, tuxedoes and gowns recreational-slumming with the downtown art set. On one particular night, the door to an adjacent van garage was flung open, where the drugged diaspora settled into the backs of panel trucks. Ironically, the underground club they’d left behind became instantly passé.

Bruno started the outlaw parties, but it was the notorious Michael Alig who took them to the extreme. Alig’s idea was to pack venues like Red Zone and Mars on a boring Tuesday night, and then stage mass gatherings of club kids and the moths they attracted in burger joints, on subway platforms or on the steps leading up to the 32nd Street post office. A beatbox would blare, vodka got passed around, and they made enough noise to get raided. A flurry of glittered party monsters would scurry from the cops in all directions and reconvene back at the regular club. Alig was a fabulous success -- until he wasn’t.

The same can be said for after-hours clubs. The late-night (but aboveboard) revelries at places like Pacha and Greenhouse emphasize big DJs rather than madcap raging—shady joints get exposed too quickly in this era of blogs and text messaging. One spot, known as Remix, dabbled in late-night affairs off and on for three years, finally retreating to regular hours after an article in a weekly newspaper fueled the fires of an already irate community. The party moved six months ago to a SoHo spot that needed a quick cash infusion (most operators choose to go late when the only other option is to close the doors). But the hottest place for the hipster set is Serpentine, an unstuffy Chelsea venue that caters to a mixed crowd of artists, musicians and models. Located in the hollows of an historic and seedy sex club, the invite-only establishment transformed an empty pool -- the ghosts of wet orgies past -- into a dancefloor.

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