Bonds

Bonds was a Broadway clothing store transformed into a disco, and its change of use gave it a striking presence in the diary’s New York nightlife. The venue appears first as a planned reopening and then as a place to visit: enormous in scale, beautiful to the diarist, and socially unpredictable. Its musical stairs and free admission offered a memorable welcome, while the difficulty of finding its owner and the shifting company inside made the club feel less like a small, familiar gathering place than a large room through which people passed.

From Clothing Store to Disco

The transformation of Bonds began with its identity as a huge clothing store on Broadway. In April 1980, news arrived that the store would soon reopen as a discotheque. The announcement belonged to a wider moment of change in the diary’s nightlife: the same conversation brought news that Studio 54 had shut down and been sold by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The diarist marked that closure as the end of an era; Bonds, by contrast, was presented as a venue about to begin a new life.

By June, that anticipated conversion had become a working club. John Addison’s new venue occupied the large former store, and the diarist went to see it on its opening days. The shift from retail space to disco is central to the impression Bonds made: its scale was not incidental background but a defining feature. The building’s former commercial purpose remained legible in its vastness even as music and dancing supplied a new use for the space.

Scale, Design, and Arrival

On the first recorded visit, the diarist and companions looked around for John Addison but could not find him. The place was so large that the search itself became a small measure of its scale. They stayed briefly, yet the visit left distinct impressions: entry was free, the waiter received a twenty-dollar tip, and the stairs were musical. The diarist called the place beautiful, singling out a detail that made moving through the building part of the experience rather than merely a way to reach the dance floor.

These observations offer a compact portrait of how Bonds operated on the page. Its size could make a host difficult to locate, but its designed features made the place memorable. The free admission and the tip belong to different parts of the evening’s transaction: access cost nothing, while the diarist still chose to pay the waiter generously. The diary records both without turning either into a general rule about the club.

A Stop in the Nightlife Circuit

Bonds was also one venue among several in a changing city scene. Its planned arrival was noted alongside the closure of Studio 54, while the same entry mentioned Halston going to Xenon with Bianca. That juxtaposition places Bonds within the diarist’s attention to clubs and their movements, but does not suggest that the different venues or their patrons were interchangeable. Bonds enters the record first as news of a reopening, then as a place the diarist could visit and assess firsthand.

A later visit shows the club as a brief stop within a social evening. John Samuels IV was there, and the diarist felt that he had become mean despite seeming to try to be nice. They remained only a few minutes. Mr. Law danced while his wife worried aloud that he might have a heart attack. Bob Colacello was also present and appeared sour; the diarist connected his inability to enjoy himself without a drink to a wider pattern, observing that he and Fred Hughes seemed bored when princes were absent. Bonds therefore serves not only as a setting for dancing but as a place where tensions, judgments, and expectations among acquaintances become visible.

An Unsettled Social Atmosphere

The impressions of Bonds do not resolve into a single portrait of a successful night out. The first visit combines beauty and novelty with the practical failure to find the person they had come to see. The later one brings familiar company, but also perceived meanness, worry, and boredom, and ends after only a few minutes. These contrasting visits keep the club from becoming a simple emblem of glamour: it could impress through its architecture and still offer no guarantee of an enjoyable evening.

The diary’s account is deliberately specific about small encounters rather than the club’s broader reputation. Musical stairs, a twenty-dollar tip, a difficult search across a huge space, a few minutes among acquaintances: such details show how the place registered in lived experience. Bonds’ significance in these passages lies in its dual identity as a conspicuous conversion of a clothing store and as a social environment whose mood changed with the people present.