The Last Days of Disco
At Circus Disco's 33rd anniversary celebration last weekend, owner Gene La Pietra was dapper in a scarf and tie, happily reminiscing about how he started the Hollywood club with credit cards and a mission to let in the door anyone who could pay. The venue started life in 1974 and, in 1990, he converted the Union Ice factory next door, renaming it Arena Nightclub. He's also added parking lots, a private venue, and other nearby parcels to his portfolio, creating a four-acre nightlife compound for the ages at Santa Monica Boulevard and North Las Palmas Avenue. Since the very first night, La Pietra has manned the front of Circus, micromanaging his loyal staff. And that's where he was last Friday, in the rain, telling the valets where to park the nice cars, advising workers to roll up the carpets, and helping move extension chords out of the way as the skies opened up.
It was probably the last anniversary party for Circus's loyal old-schoolers. The last days of Circus Disco, and Arena, are at hand if a $62-million buyout of La Pietra's property goes through as planned this week, he says. The prospective owners are hoping to erect a massive, mixed-use development - housing, retail, the whole deal - with Circus and Arena likely to be razed in the process, the club owner tells us. For many nightlife denizens in Los Angeles, these venues are sacred grounds. La Pietra says he started Circus because he was out with friends - black, Latino, gay - who couldn't get into a nearby club to celebrate a birthday in the early '70s. And so, Circus became a mecca, perhaps the first of its kind, for the area's burgeoning community of gay Latinos. In the '90s, both Circus and Arena became home to popular mixed nights as well, from rave-like events to Power 106's "Power Tools" DJ-mix shows. But if you think La Pietra, who says he's 60, is reluctant to see the clubs destroyed, you're wrong.
"It's nice to know there won't be someone here to mess it up," he says. "You know what's exciting - going out on top. Thirty-million people have come through here. The time has come to start a new adventure."
La Pietra says he'll forever let go of the reigns and start to live a little with his 27-year-old husband. They occupy a manse in Los Feliz and have a beach home near Rosarito, Mexico. In summer, La Pietra went overseas for the first time in his life, flying to London. It's a long way from the streets of Hollywood, which La Pietra says were his home as a 19-year-old newcomer from Rhode Island at the dawn of the '70s. In 1974, after working odd jobs and cofounding a coffee shop and adult bookstore, he and partner to Ermilio "Ed" Lemos pooled credit card money and loose cash to rent a brand new warehouse and turn it into a dance club and provide a haven for groups that felt shut out of the straight, white L.A. nightlife. When the owner found out, he tried to pull the plug, and so did local authorities, he says.
"There were many attempts to try to close us down," he says. "Hollywood wasn't ready for a couple thousand blacks and Latinos."
But by end of the 1980s, Circus was his for $1.8 million. He also bought the Arena property next door for $2.1 million. Lemos died in 1990. Seven years later, he married his new partner. He also bought more adjacent property. And La Pietra started to welcome a new generation of club-goers raised on techno, house music, and ecstasy culture to his clubs. Many Eastside-bred DJs made their names at Circus and Arena. Montebello-bred "hard house" DJ Irene started her career, homeless and drug-addicted, at Arena, only to arguably become the top woman in global mix-CD sales. La Pietra was known for giving work to the desperate and down-and-out. In the late '90s Circus became home to "Magic Wednesdays" rave nights. And in 2000, San Francisco club owner Dave Dean came to town and promoted the area's first true, European-style "super-club" nights at Circus with name-brand spinners flown in from across the globe. Superstar DJ nights have remained a staple of Circus, even as the competition increased with the establishment of nicer, newer venues in Avalon Hollywood and Vanguard, also nearby. Still, Circus and Arena's engines were fueled by the gay Latino community to the very end, with nights such as "Club Macho Man" and "Caliente."
"We didn't start out to try to be social reformers," La Pietra says. "Clubs are strange vehicles to change social patterns. We were always very mixed clubs. You find less of a need for that now."
James Gomez says he started coming to Circus as a teenager in 1975, fake ID in-hand. "It was a paradise," the 48-year-old Hollywood hairdresser says. "Was it about sex, drugs, and disco? Absolutely. They were nights you didn't want to end."
In December of 2003, DEA agents and local police tried to put an end to Circus. They staged a massive raid and claimed to have found 10,000 ecstasy pills. Five people, including two Circus employees, were arrested, but La Pietra was never prosecuted and, today, the club owner says the raid was purely political. That year La Pietra had become the leader of the Hollywood secession movement, putting nearly $1.5 million of his own cash into the ballot effort to have the community become a city separate from Los Angeles. The impresario also made no secret of his desire to become mayor, should cityhood succeed. It did not. A month before the raid, L.A. Weekly published a cover story highly critical of La Pietra, stating that "he talks big, and can be loose with the facts." The police action, he says, was not about the club's clientele; it "was about me."
And still, La Pietra stands out in the cold, directing workers, greeting old friends, and taking customers' questions. ("For years," he says, "people thought I was the doorman.") This coming New Year's Eve is being promoted as "the last dance," but La Pietra won't confirm rumors that it will indeed be the closing night for Circus and Arena. To be sure, however, the end is near.
"How lucky can a guy be to come to L.A. and have this long a run?" he says. "It's the Johnny Carson exit all the way - short, sweet, and right on top."
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