Danceteria — where Madonna launched

Danceteria was a multi-floor nightclub at 30 West 21st Street in the Flatiron district that operated from 1982 to 1986 and served as the primary incubator of the New York dance and hip-hop scenes during a period when those scenes were about to explode into mainstream culture. The club's resident DJ Mark Kamins heard a demo tape that Madonna had given him and brought it to Sire Records executives, directly enabling her record deal. She had also worked at Danceteria as a coat-check attendant and waitress, and performed some of her earliest live shows on its second floor stage — an audience of downtown art-world regulars and club kids who became her first constituency.

Danceteria in the early 1980s occupied the intersection of several New York scenes that would shortly be transformative globally: the downtown art world of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the emerging hip-hop culture moving from the Bronx toward Manhattan, the post-disco electronic dance music that would become house, and the post-punk and new wave that was the era's other dominant sound. Madonna's early music — 'Everybody', 'Holiday', 'Borderline' — emerged from exactly this environment, and Danceteria was the place where it all coexisted in a single building on a Wednesday night.

The club closed in 1986 and the building at 30 West 21st Street has been used for other purposes since. The Flatiron neighbourhood retains much of its late nineteenth-century commercial architecture but little trace of the cultural moment that Danceteria represented. The fact that one of the most commercially successful careers in recording history began with a coat-check job and a demo tape in a club on West 21st Street is a quintessentially New York story.