On St. Marks Place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club 57 became the beating heart of downtown queer creativity — a DIY performance space, art gallery, drag playground, film den, and anything-goes party room where the East Village’s wildest thinkers came to experiment.
Run by Ann Magnuson and fueled by a rotating cast of queer artists, punks, filmmakers, and downtown misfits, Club 57 was the opposite of polished: cheap beer, thrift-store décor, Xeroxed flyers, and performances that blurred art with nightlife. Keith Haring, John Sex, Klaus Nomi, Kenny Scharf, and countless others carved their early identities here, long before museums and mainstream culture paid attention.
Part queer salon, part punk church basement, Club 57 became an incubator for a generation that redefined New York art and underground culture — messy, intimate, political, hilarious, and utterly unrepeatable.
