Disco Socks - A Night In Paradise

The Paradise Garage crashed onto New York’s nightlife scene like a tidal wave. When it opened in 1977, the dance club, housed in a former parking garage on 84 Varick Street, offered a counterpoint to its glitzier uptown cousin, Studio 54, where the rich and fabulous went to be seen. The Garage, which did not sell alcohol and wasn’t open to the general public, was strictly about the music. For a decade, until the club’s closing in 1987, it was a utopia for New York’s increasingly liberated black and Latino L.G.B.T. communities, who went there to dance until sunrise (and often beyond) to the cutting-edge sounds of disco, soul, funk, R&B, new wave and an emerging genre that would eventually be known as house music.