Limelight/Tunnel 'Club King' Peter Gatien releasing memoir

Peter Gatien, the ’80s/’90s NYC nightlife impresario who owned storied now-closed NYC clubs Limelight (originally a church that keeps changing tenants but currently contains a Grimaldi’s pizza place as part of it) and Tunnel (now mini storage) and Club USA (in Times Square) and Palladium (now NYU dorms), has written a memoir, titled The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife, which will be published by Amazon’s Little A imprint this spring. Here’s the back-of-the-book synopsis:

Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium—the cutting-edge, insanely successful, and notoriously decadent clubs that dominated New York City’s entertainment scene, their influences reverberating around the world. Across four decades, a single mysterious figure stood behind them all: Peter Gatien, the leading impresario of global nightlife. His clubs didn’t follow the trends—they created movements. They nurtured vanguard music acts that brought rock, house, grunge, hip-hop, industrial, and techno to the beautiful ones who showed up night after night to tear the roof off every party. But as Peter and his innovative team ramped up the hedonistic highs, Rudolph Giuliani was leading a major shift in the city. Under the guise of improving New York City’s “quality of life,” the club scene was targeted—and Peter Gatien’s empire became a major focus of the administration.

In this frank and gritty memoir, Peter Gatien charts the seismic changes in his personal and professional life and the targeted destruction of his nightclub empire. From Peter’s childhood in a Canadian mill town to the freedom of the 1970s, through the excesses of the 1980s and the ensuing crackdown in the 1990s, The Club King chronicles the birth and death of a cultural movement—and the life of the man who was in control of every beat.

The memoir is out March 1 on hardback, and hits paperback, digital and audiobook on April 1. Pre-orders are available.

Meanwhile, you can pick up a copy of another new related book. Walt Cassidy aka club kid Waltpaper recently released a club kid photo book. Both will look great on your shelf right next to James St. James’ Party Monster, the book that inspired the movie that had Macaulay Culkin playing Michael Alig and Dylan McDermott as Peter Gatien. Frank Owen’s Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture is another essential one for those interested in that history.