The public is not allowed to applaud in the chambers of the New York City Council. “Just as dancing is illegal, it’s illegal to clap here,” the city councilman Rafael Espinal told a group of citizens. “You have to do jazz hands.”
It was a recent Monday, and the citizens, many wearing T-shirts that read “DANCING IS NOT A CRIME,” were only too happy to comply. They had gathered to argue for the repeal of New York City’s cabaret law, which dates to 1926 and prohibits dancing in venues that don’t have a cabaret license. The law does not specify what, exactly, constitutes dancing, but it defines a public dance hall as “any room, place or space in the city in which dancing is carried on and to which the public may gain admission.”
Of more than twelve thousand venues in New York that are licensed to sell alcohol, fewer than a hundred can legally allow dancing. Many are strip clubs (Pumps, Private Eyes) or concert venues (Terminal 5, the Village Vanguard)—or they’re the kind of night club (Output, Space Ibiza) where a Corona costs nine dollars. Many neighborhoods that have been the birthplace of global dance crazes, like Morris Heights (break dancing) and East Harlem (salsa), do not have a single legal dancing venue.
Espinal, who introduced the latest attempt to repeal the law, is youthful and bearded. His district encompasses parts of Bushwick, Brownsville, Cypress Hills, and East New York. Antonio Reynoso, who represents parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick, is a co-sponsor. “We’re both young Dominicans who represent North Brooklyn, but we’re also hardened criminals,” Reynoso said. “We’re dance outlaws.”
The hearing began at 1 p.m. For the next five hours, bar owners, party promoters, d.j.s, bachata enthusiasts, and Lindy Hoppers testified in defense of their favorite pastime. The first speaker on a panel of experts was Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, a co-founder of the feminist d.j. collective Discwoman and a prominent figure in New York’s techno scene. She wore business-casual clothes with her lavender-and-platinum-blond braids, and spoke about the racist origins of the cabaret law, which ostensibly targeted speakeasies but was also a way of regulating Harlem’s jazz clubs. Its text restricted certain instruments. “Just to really drive home what that exactly meant: saxophones weren’t allowed, but accordions were,” she said.
Those sections of the law were changed after a 1986 court challenge, but the rule remained, and was enforced with renewed vigor by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Bill de Blasio’s administration nominally supports repeal—in an e-mail, the Mayor’s office said that it is “working on a multifaceted solution.” But, in the meantime, the law continues to be enforced: twenty-seven criminal-court summonses for “unlawful cabarets” were issued in the first quarter of 2017.
Andrew Muchmore, the owner of Muchmore’s, a small music venue in Williamsburg, wore a pin-striped suit and a tie to deliver his testimony. After receiving a citation for dancing, in 2013, Muchmore, who is also an attorney, filed a lawsuit against the city that is still making its way through the courts. “What is the difference between dancing and swaying, or toe tapping, or head nodding?” he asked.
Rachel Nelson, the tattooed owner of the Brooklyn bars Happyfun Hideaway and Flowers for All Occasions and the gallery-bar Secret Project Robot, spoke of “the fear that is created by a patron who is having too much fun and begins to dance.”
Cabaret violations tend to be handed out not by local police but by a task force known by its acronym, MARCH (Multi-Agency Response to Community Hot Spots). “I love my local police,” Nelson said. “They keep me safe. They look cute in their uniforms. I have a great relationship with all the precincts I’ve ever been in.” She said that MARCH seems to be activated in two scenarios: when a venue is in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, or when it gets on some kind of “naughty list”—“sometimes for good reasons, like violence and drugs, and sometimes when, as in the case with art spaces, there’s a cultural misunderstanding.”
Other speakers questioned why inspectors need to show up surrounded by officers in tactical gear. “I thought it was a counterterrorism raid, like some ‘Bourne Ultimatum’ tip,” John Barclay said of the raid that resulted in a cabaret-license violation for his bar, in Bushwick. “It was like they found El Chapo in my bar or something.”
As the afternoon wore on, a bigger picture emerged, in which dancing was only one casualty of the homogenization of city life. “Greed and culture are incompatible,” Nancy Anello, a self-described “nineties club kid,” said. She recited a grim list of night-life casualties: the Palladium is now an N.Y.U. dorm, the Limelight is a gym, Electric Circus is a Chipotle, and Paradise Garage “is now an actual garage.”
Diego Lafi Vargas, a house-music advocate, said that the issue is existential. “New Yorkers need to let off steam. Otherwise we’d be blowing each other up and throwing each other onto the train tracks.” ♦
