Life Above the Limelight:

Growing up on the cusp of the city, Jonathan Kaplan immersed himself into the nightlife scene years before he had even started high school. He lived with his parents in Westchester, only a short train ride away from Manhattan where he would regularly crash on weekends at his older sister’s studio apartment in Soho.

Kaplan, who is now an education policy analyst based in Berkeley California, has an astoundingly sharp memory.  He recalls the weekends he spent in the city as his first taste of independence. His fondest and most vivid memories from these early days were at the 8th Street Playhouse– a legendary theater where he and his friends would go to see midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

“They would have a huge entourage acting out the entire film in front of the screen while the movie was happening. We would go get high and watch them do all this crazy shit, it was my first entry into being on my own in New York nightlife which was super fun. It was a total campy New York scene.” 

As his threshold of freedom grew throughout his high school years, these weekend trips became more and more frequent.

Kaplan remembers the rush to catch the last train, and the agonizing hours that awaited if you weren't quick enough. When he had to be back home early the following day, he relied on “the 2:20 a.m. train to get back to Metro North– if you didn't catch that train, you had to wait till 5:40 in the morning. And that always sucked, like the 2:30 to 5:00 o’clock wait at Grand Central Station while the rats are running all over.”

Once he finally got his driver's license, he would make the twenty minute drive down the FDR as often as he possibly could. “I could leave and say, I'm going over to my friend's house or whatever, drive down to the city, see a show, and come back.”

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Often credited as being the most famous nightclub in Manhattan’s history, Studio 54 served as stomping grounds to New York’s elite. But the peak of Studio 54 in all its glistening decadence had mostly fizzled out by the time the 80’s rolled around.

“I never actually went into Studio 54. It had half gotten a little played by the time I showed up to the scene. It was seen as fairly scary.” said Kaplan. “There was definitely lots of cocaine but it was more than that– it was past its prime. It was also really hard to get in. It wasn't somewhere you could just go to, even with a good fake ID.” 

Luckily, there were plenty of clubs and bars lining the bustling streets of Manhattan, making it the perfect place to indulge in the nightlife scene despite one’s lack of celebrity. Some of the coolest spots were easy enough to get into, even with a crappy fake id. 

The Limelight was a club built inside of an old church on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 20th Street. Following its immaculate conception in the early 80’s, the club soon became a pillar of New York City nightlife. 

The Limelight’s decor hinted at the building's rich history. Touches of the Gothic Revival style architecture created a dichotomy between the drunken twenty-somethings dancing beneath the wooden archways. Beams of light filtered through the stained glass windows, which had been restored and backlit to convey the sensation of sunlight at all hours of the night.

At the center of the circular bar stood a giant aquarium that towered at least two stories above the partygoers. The bartenders worked in an orbit around the aquarium, so you could watch through the glass as they mixed cocktails from any spot at the bar. 

These details were quite influential, Kaplan explains, since deciding which venue to attend “ was really about the physical environs of what the club offered.” 

“[The Limelight] had great music, a lively dance scene, and even though we had fake IDs, they weren't carding heavily.” From his family's home in Westchester, he could drive there in 30 minutes and find parking within a block's radius of the venue. Needless to say, Kaplan found himself at the Limelight as often as he could slip out of the house. 

“It was awesome,” he said. “Pure ecstasy.”

And ecstasy wasn't just figurative. 

Unsurprisingly, drugs ran rampant through the club scene. Throughout the 1980’s, cocaine plowed its way through New York City, and by the early 90’s the crack-cocaine epidemic was a national crisis. 

“For a few years there, it just was watching these people just going into a full on tailspin in a really bad way,” Kaplan recalls. Watching the rapid decline of his peers – what he describes as a fast-track to self-destruction, is what kept him from ever smoking crack-cocaine, though a line of coke once in a while wasn't out of the question. 

It got so bad that up in Westchester, wealthy parents were shipping their kids off to boarding school in an attempt to beat the curve. 

“One of the guys that I knew was a bit of a troublemaker earlier on in high school, so his father ended up shuffling him out of the New York area during the height of the epidemic.” Not long after, his son was thrown out of his elite prep school. He had become the school’s designated coke dealer. 

By the time Kaplan got to college, MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, was all the rage. 

“It was ‘the happy drug’ so blow ended up being kind of passé. In some ways it was already passé by the time ‘85 rolled around. Looking back on it, it was really more of a club scene drug a few years before. And before that we mostly just smoked pot… And not very good pot” he said, from his house in California.

“Just by the nature of my birth year, I probably missed some of that. Had I been three to five years older, it might've been worse for me because I might have gone to Studio 54 where it was almost impossible to avoid.”

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By: Caidin Ferrigno