Tunnel Club

Tunnel was a nightclub in New York City, located at 220 Twelfth Avenue, in Manhattan, New York. It was situated in the Terminal Warehouse Company Central Stores Building, which is now part of the West Chelsea Historic District. Tunnel was opened in early 1987 by Peter Gatien, in a space which was formerly a railroad  freight terminal. The club was named for the tunnel-like shape of the main room, in which train tracks from the early 1900s ran through a sunken area of the dance floor. These were a relic of an era in which railroad sidings from the Eleventh Avenue freight line of the New York Central Railroad ran directly into warehouse buildings in that area, so that goods could transferred to and from freight cars which were floated across the Hudson on barges from Hoboken.

Tunnel was architecturally distinctive with a long, narrow space with multiple rooms on several levels. The dance floor featured several dance cages and the decor of the club changed frequently. One room, decorated by artist Kenny Scharf, was called the Kenny Scharf Lava Lounge. Others were decorated as Victorian libraries, S/M dungeons, and lounges. The club featured unisex bathrooms, which were the converted locker rooms formerly used by the freight terminal's workers. They had modern stalls with partitions and doors for privacy, with extant rows of old lockers attached to the wall, as well as marks where the former shower stalls had been removed.

Tunnel frequently hosted Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, Merritt, Little Louie Vega, Eddie Baez, DJ Corbett, Bobby Rios and Hex Hector after the close of the original Sound Factory in the mid-1990s. It later presented Kurfew, a trance-techno oriented Saturday night party hosted by promoters such as DJ Urbanox, Amanda Lepore and DJ Steve Sidewalk. While the club attracted primarily gay audiences, it also attracted members of the hip-hop community. One advantage of the multiple rooms of the club was the ability to host different types of parties, with as many as five or more DJs spinning different styles of music to varying crowds.

Famous actor Vin Diesel was once a bouncer for the club. Tunnel closed its doors late in 2001 due to non-payment of rent and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign. Gatien had been accused of drug trafficking, charges he was acquitted of, although he and his wife pled guilty to tax evasion, and were deported to Canada in 2003. Since then, there have been some efforts to rejuvenate the place and find new owners through digital advertising campaigns but with no result…