Palladium

Palladium was a New York nightclub in the former Academy of Music on 14th Street, a cavernous venue whose scale made it both a spectacle and a challenge to the art displayed inside. Andy Warhol’s diary follows its emergence from a proposed club into a busy social landmark: its grand interior, opening-night crowds, parties, fashion shows, and awards events repeatedly brought artists, celebrities, and clubgoers into the same space. Its central contradiction was visible from the start. The room could make art part of nightlife, but once the dance floor filled, the crowd could make the art difficult to see.

From Theater to Club

In 1984, Steve Rubell took Warhol and others to see the Palladium Theater, then a club in preparation. The building on 14th Street had originally been the Academy of Music. Its vastness prompted an immediate enthusiasm from Rubell, who repeatedly asked whether his visitors loved it. A famous Japanese architect was working on the project, and its theatrical setting offered a scale unlike that of a small neighborhood club.

By May 1985, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were managing the club. Warhol noted that they were managers rather than owners because, as he understood it, a police record could prevent someone from owning a club. He connected the arrangement to his own earlier experience with The Dom, where the people involved had been fingerprinted and checked. The distinction between management and ownership was thus part of the club’s practical organization, not merely a detail of its glamorous public image.

The club’s preparation also brought Warhol into its working routines. Ian Schrager called him about the design of the drink tickets; Warhol finished the design, Vincent Fremont had the tickets Xeroxed, and Warhol took them to Steve Rubell. He also recorded Rubell for an hour and a half for the Party book. These tasks show Palladium as a site where Warhol’s creative and social work met club operations: design, documentation, and publicity were part of the same relationship as attending the parties.

Opening Night and Visual Spectacle

The opening on May 14, 1985, began amid ordinary complications. Warhol recorded a sick associate, an unexpectedly expensive roof-painting job, and the strain of moving through a large, spread-out office before heading to the club. At Palladium, he entered through the back door on 13th Street while electricians and construction workers were still working quickly. In Steve Rubell’s office, phones rang as staff dealt with invitations and a door list that was said not to exist even as people kept arriving with lists. The opening’s glamour depended on hurried coordination behind the scenes.

Once inside, the interior presented a deliberate contrast between a dirty exterior and a pristine, highly finished interior. Warhol described white columns, lacquered surfaces, blue poles, and stairs that recalled the Ziegfeld Follies. Francesco Clemente was painting a ceiling, and Keith Haring had made a backdrop that could be lowered from the ceiling to the dance floor. Steve Rubell joked about not lowering it often if it failed to please him. Art was not simply hung in a gallery-like room; it was made part of a club environment, subject to the decisions and practical uses of the venue.

The opening-night crowd included Halston, Cornelia Guest, Boy George, and artists and fashion figures. Warhol recorded the arrangements and the social friction as well as the spectacle: some guests were disappointed that drinks were not free, while Cornelia obtained Cristal from Steve Rubell’s driver, who had become the club’s general manager. Warhol was unsure whether the manager’s agreeable manner suited the job. The club’s public image of abundance therefore sat alongside the everyday judgments and negotiations through which a new venue was being run.

A later account of a Palladium gathering emphasizes how carefully the room could be staged. Guests were led upstairs by people holding candles; in the Mike Todd Room drinks were served, while tables on the dance floor held flowers lit to intensify their colors. Silver-sprayed chairs, five glasses at each place, and a powerful sound system made the setting part dinner, part performance space. Peter Duchin played through the night. The Pointer Sisters performed six or eight songs after dessert, reportedly for a fee of $100,000, with Warhol seated at table seven in front of them. The room’s scale enabled spectacle, while its arrangements directed attention toward particular performers and guests.

Art, Crowds, and the Club’s Prospects

Palladium’s blend of art and nightlife also produced Warhol’s uncertainty about what the art could accomplish there. At its opening, he compared it with Area, which was already successful and regularly changed its themes. He wondered whether Palladium would need to draw patrons from beyond Manhattan to keep the large space full, and whether its success might serve as an indication that the recession was over. These were questions rather than predictions: the club’s size made attendance an economic necessity as well as a visual effect.

Warhol later made the difficulty of exhibiting art in a disco explicit. When a crowd packed the room, he observed, people could no longer see what the art was meant to be; the dance floor became a mass of moving bodies, and the surroundings ceased to register. His account does not treat this as a simple failure. It captures a tension built into Palladium’s format: artworks and installations could lend a club distinction, but the club’s success at filling the room could also overwhelm them. The same crowdedness that signaled popularity changed how the space was experienced.

The club nevertheless remained a venue for events in which art and entertainment circulated together. Warhol went to Keith Haring’s party there and found the enormous place packed. On another occasion, he attended an Andre Walker fashion show at Palladium. While standing at the balcony, he discovered that a crystal he wore beneath his clothing had fallen onto the dance floor; Wilfredo found it. The incident briefly connected the upper-level vantage point, the crowded floor, and the personal objects that accompanied Warhol through his nights out.

Palladium also hosted a showing associated with Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes program. In May 1986, Vincent Fremont told him that the show had won the Fashion Show Video Award at the Palladium event. The award linked Warhol’s television work to the club’s fashion and video culture, extending the venue’s function beyond dancing and live performance.

Celebrity Gatherings and Later Events

A party for Prince at Palladium showed the club operating as a meeting place as much as a performance venue. After Prince’s concert at Madison Square Garden, Warhol and Wilfredo went to the Mike Todd Room, where reserved tables had been set up and the room was nearly empty. Prince, dressed in a white coat and pink bellbottoms, greeted each guest, shook hands, and remembered Wilfredo by name. Warhol and his colleagues asked him about appearing on a December cover of Interview; Prince referred the matter to his manager, while the group pointed out that the manager had directed them back to him. The encounter joined personal hospitality to the magazine’s business of securing celebrity participation.

In July 1986, Palladium hosted a television presentation with John Sykes onstage. Warhol described a show assembled by an MTV employee in five hours, in which participants took turns teasing Sykes in the manner of a roast. The venue could thus accommodate a rapidly produced television event as well as club nights and fashion presentations.

The Palladium was also the setting for the September 1986 MTV awards. Steve Rubell invited people backstage beforehand, but the event’s scale was evident outside: the venue was roped off, and even reaching the sidewalk required a ticket. Warhol sat in the balcony; Grace Jones was assigned to his table, and her manager asked whether he would accept her award if she arrived late. He declined, and Jones appeared only seconds before she was due onstage, wearing a hat that extended several feet around her. Palladium’s theatrical architecture, controlled access, and celebrity spectacle converged in an event that made the club itself part of the show.