Saturday Night Fever Club Closing

You might be surprised to hear that the Bay Ridge club where the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were filmed finally closed last week. Yes, it still existed!

The Times has a piece in Sunday’s City section about how pieces of the club’s famous floor are being auctioned on Ebay:

In front of the closed dance club at 64th Street and Eighth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a red velvet rope lies in a trash bin, an echo of a legendary place and era.

The velvet rope is a remnant of Spectrum, which is being sold and which shut its doors a week ago. It was here in 1977, at a place then called 2001 Odyssey, that a white-suited John Travolta strutted across the lit-from-below dance floor and into cinematic history in “Saturday Night Fever.”

In the nearly three decades since, even as Asian immigration changed the face of a neighborhood that was once heavily Italian and Norwegian, the dance floor remained a constant, welcoming a diverse new generation of gay clubgoers along with those nostalgic for the movie and the disco era.

Jay Rizzo, who has owned the club since it became Spectrum in 1987, said the place was an especially popular stop for Europeans. “I guess it was on a list somewhere of things to see in New York,” he said. “They would take a cab from Manhattan just to see the dance floor, and of course we wouldn’t charge them.”

The wood-and-plexiglass floor was built specifically for the movie and remained essentially unchanged over the years. “The only things that were different were the light bulbs,” Mr. Rizzo said.

I can’t believe no one took the velvet rope as a souvenir! What exactly is the Museum of the City of New York there for if not for detritus like this?