We didn’t want to overly aestheticize them to curate any certain crowd.” Our parties were all over the map-it wasn’t ever pure techno or house. It was a weird oasis away from the typical nightlife setting. “If you had even been there once, you understood it. “There was an air of freedom that everyone just instantly knew,” Pawley explains. And of course, there was the marvelously relaxed policy on cigarettes and other typical club contraband. Then, there was the venue's far-flung location, which only contributed to its off-the-grid allure. For first-timers, China Chalet would reveal itself one part at a time, starting with a steep entry stairwell that led into a main dining room, for lounging and gossipping, and finally through a mirrored hallway onto a packed dance floor-which was notoriously known to shake under the weight of hundreds jumping in unison. Part of this broad appeal had to do with the functional and physical layout of the space. There was a Manhattan contingency that didn’t really venture into Brooklyn or maybe weren’t even into electronic music. “But it was distinctly different from a warehouse party and other electronic DJ-oriented underground stuff that happened in Brooklyn.
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“I don’t know how to describe the scene at JACK댄스-it was just a lot of people from the internet,” Pawley says. The same year, The Observer documented an indie film after-party at China Chalet with an attendance of “ex-pat jet setters, debauched hipsters, and local lowlifes.” And the fashion house Opening Ceremony collaborated with homegrown psych rock band Gang Gang Dance for an album release party at the restaurant.
In Manhattan, temporary pop-up arrangements helped party-throwers find loopholes around the city’s draconian nightlife laws.īy 2011, the New York Times waxed of China Chalet’s instantly recognizable “chintzy floral carpet and pagoda paintings” in a trend feature on fashion-and-art–scene pop-up clubs, which also included Madame Wong’s, an exclusive party once hosted in the Chinatown establishment Golden Unicorn. As the moment of downtown stalwarts like Beatrice Inn and Bungalow 8 began to fade in 2009 amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, the city’s cool kids decamped to various new stomping grounds, from old-school holdovers like Indochine and Lucien to warehouses in far Brooklyn. The end of the aughts was an inflection point for nightlife. Or you’d see Chloe Sevigny there, dressed in a bucket T-shirt and jeans drinking whiskey at the bar.” Skaters could show up in ripped jeans, and then Alexander Wang could walk in behind them. It wasn’t like when you went to a Bushwick party and you didn’t look DIY techno, so they didn’t accept you. “There was no one specific ‘genre’ of people. “Anyone could come, and you could do anything you wanted,” Kellogg recalls of his first impression of the space, at a party thrown by Sex Magazine’s Asher Penn in 2013. In the last decade, the venue was visited by the likes of the Olsen twins, Timothée Chalamet, and Jay-Z-plus, pretty much any young person who went out in New York City. (Following the venue’s closing, owner Keith Ng has declined to comment for press.) Alex Kellogg, the venue’s party booker at the time it closed, says he’d heard of parties rumored to have been thrown there by Madonna in the 80s, but that the venue’s most prolific era began in the late 2000s.
It’s unclear when, exactly, China Chalet started moonlighting as a nightclub, even to those who worked there toward the end. For one, it was one of the only remaining full-service, multi-room dim sum banquet halls in the Wall Street area, but most famously, it was one of only DIY party venues in Manhattan where New York City nightlife could be everything it’s been promised to be since Studio 54: liberating, inclusive, and spontaneous. Opened in 1975, the two-story Cantonese dim sum restaurant was the last of its kind in many ways. One of the most beloved queer events in New York City in recent years, Heaven on Earth would also rank among the last of the great parties thrown at China Chalet, which shuttered last month in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.