Area

The story

The building that held Area was originally built in 1866 as stables for American Express. By 1983 it was something else entirely: a themed nightclub on Hudson Street where 5,000 invitations arrived in capsules for opening night, and where the entire decor reinvented itself every six weeks around themes like Confinement, Suburbia, and Science Fiction. Celebrities and art-world luminaries packed the place through 1987. Its founders chronicled the whole strange run in a book published in 2013.