The Chelsea Church That Became the Most Notorious Nightclub in New York History

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On a winter night in 1983, people in sequined jackets and feathered boas lined up on Sixth Avenue — not to pray, but to party. The building they were waiting to enter had been a Gothic Revival church for 137 years. It was about to become something the city had never seen before.

This is the story of The Limelight — and the remarkable layers of history packed into a single stone building on a Chelsea corner.

The Church That Outlasted Its Congregation

The Church of the Holy Communion opened in 1846, designed by architect Richard Upjohn — the same man behind Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. He built it in the Gothic Revival style: pointed arches, carved stone, stained-glass windows, and a deliberate sense of permanence.

It sat at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 20th Street, in a working-class Chelsea neighborhood far removed from the wealth of the Upper East Side. For over a century, the congregation gathered every week under its vaulted ceilings.

By the 1970s, attendance had fallen. The building was deconsecrated in 1976 and sold. For several years it became a rehabilitation center. The pews stayed. The stained-glass windows stayed. The building waited.

Then Peter Gatien came to New York.

The Club King and His Cathedral

Gatien was Canadian, 31 years old, and wore a black eyepatch from a teenage hockey accident. He had already opened successful clubs in Atlanta and Miami. He was looking for something bigger.

When he walked into the old Chelsea church, he did not see a problem. He saw a venue. The soaring arched nave was a natural dance floor. The side chapels were ready-made rooms. The Gothic windows would look extraordinary under colored lights. He was right on every count.

The Limelight opened in November 1983 without removing a single stone of the original architecture. The spires stayed. The tracery windows stayed. The dark wooden beams stayed. What changed was everything that happened inside.

Gatien hired creative directors and performance artists to design theme nights. The side chapels became rooms with their own music: new wave in one, hip-hop in another, house music in the basement. Drag performers and fire-eaters worked the crowd. The line stretched down Sixth Avenue.

Other clubs competed on celebrity or exclusivity. The Limelight competed on spectacle.

When New York Came to Dance

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the Limelight became the center of New York’s creative underground in a way that few venues before or since have managed.

Artists, musicians, fashion photographers, and downtown personalities all passed through its arched doorways. The parties were productions: circus performers hanging from the rafters, live painting on the gallery walls, theatrical concepts staged in what had been a house of worship. It was a level of ambition most modern clubs would not attempt.

It was also a product of its moment. This was still a New York where artists could afford to live in Manhattan — where Chelsea was genuinely industrial, the Lower East Side was rough, and the city was restless and hungry. The Limelight fed it.

Nothing quite like it had existed before. Nothing quite like it has existed since.

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The City Pushes Back

The Limelight’s run was never smooth. Through the 1990s, city authorities targeted the club as part of a broader crackdown on New York’s nightlife scene. Peter Gatien faced federal charges that transfixed the city.

In 1998, a Manhattan jury acquitted him after a complex and highly publicized trial. The charges did not stick.

But the era was ending regardless. By 2003, the legal battles had taken their toll. The Limelight closed as a nightclub and reinvented itself as Limelight Marketplace — retail vendors selling vintage clothing, jewelry, and artwork in the same vaulted spaces where thousands had once danced.

New York shrugged, and moved on.

What You’ll Find at the Corner Today

Walk past 660 Sixth Avenue today — the corner of Sixth and 20th in Chelsea — and the Gothic stone facade looks exactly as Upjohn designed it in 1846. The pointed arches, the tracery windows, the dark stone that absorbs the Chelsea light in a way no modern building manages.

The building is now an Equinox fitness club. Members work out in rooms that once held ecstatic crowds. The nave that hosted a thousand Saturday nights is now cardio equipment and mirrors.

If you know the history, you stop for a moment on the sidewalk. New Yorkers rarely explain every building’s past — the city accumulates stories silently, layer by layer, until an ordinary street corner carries decades of memory. The people inside have no idea what happened in these rooms. That’s fine. The walls remember.

The Limelight is a perfect New York story: a single building that has been a place of worship, a place of pure spectacle, a place of controversy, and now a place to work out — all without moving a single stone from where Upjohn placed it in 1846.

The corner of Sixth and 20th is just a corner. If you’ve read this far, you know it isn’t. Stop by on your next trip to Chelsea, look up at the Gothic windows, and remember what happened here — and how New York never stops finding new uses for the spaces it inherits.

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Plan Your New York Trip

Ready to explore Chelsea and the streets where New York’s most extraordinary nights unfolded? The Ultimate New York Travel Guide has everything you need to plan your visit — from the High Line above the old rail yards to the buildings that carry the city’s most layered histories.