The Underground was a discotheque built beneath Andy Warhol’s office at 860 Broadway. Its arrival turned the building into more than a workplace: construction interfered with the office’s heat and elevator, while the nightclub’s opening brought music that traveled through the shaft and shook the rooms above. By June 1980, its stream of sharply dressed clubgoers had become a familiar feature of the scene around the office.

Setting and Construction

The office occupied the third floor of 860 Broadway, a building to which the Factory had moved in the summer of 1974, only half a block from its previous location. Around the move, Warhol had directed receptionists to stop answering the phone with the name Factory; he considered the label dated, and the operation became simply the office. The discotheque later took shape on the ground floor, placing a new entertainment venue directly beneath the workplace.

By January 28, 1980, construction appeared nearly complete. The entrance and interior were being made to look like a fortress, and large air-conditioning machines were being installed. Warhol had heard that the people behind the project had also run Infinity, a club that had burned to the ground. That was hearsay recorded in the diary, not an established account of The Underground’s own history.

A Club Below the Office

The construction affected the office before the nightclub opened. On February 18, Warhol arrived after an absence to find the building closed for the holiday, the heat off, and the elevator out of service. He connected the problems to the work downstairs, though the diary records his suspicion rather than confirming their cause. The invitation to the club’s opening, arriving while construction continued, sharpened the contrast between the new venue’s planned hospitality and the disruption its building work was causing above it.

As the opening approached, the music became an immediate presence in the office. Warhol could hear it through the elevator shaft; the volume was already so great that the repeated calls to turn it up seemed almost absurd, and the building shook. The nightclub’s sound thus reached the workplace before its patrons did, making the shared structure a channel through which the two spaces pressed against one another.

Clubgoers and the Neighborhood Scene

By June 22, Warhol described people filing into The Underground in recognizable styles: some wore mustaches, alligator T-shirts, and jeans; others wore leather trousers and jackets with sunglasses. His label for them was clones, presenting the crowd through its repeated, conspicuous looks. The observation makes the club legible not only as a venue but as a place where a scene assembled and displayed its shared fashions.

The Underground’s presence also marked a change in the immediate surroundings of Warhol’s office. The Factory’s earlier setting at Union Square West had been part of a downtown network that included Max’s Kansas City, where artists, fashion figures, musicians, and filmmakers gathered. At 860 Broadway, the nightclub occupied the ground floor beneath the office: the social life of the district was now built into the same address as Warhol’s daily work.