By Hub Station.

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• Clymer's Album
• Aaron's Album

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Across the street from st James church, saved in 1986 by the ancient order of hibernians.

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New York City
Spring 2004

Among the electronic dance music “heads” in New York, Paul McKinley is known as “The Professor.” It’s an endearment he picked up during the years he was a regular at Twilo, the last undisputed champion of New York City nightclubs. McKinley now lives in Salt Lake City, but he flew back on March 12th to see Sasha and John Digweed play at Crobar, the new nightclub in West Chelsea. It had been nearly three years since the Giuliani administration closed Twilo and thus ended the renowned British DJs legendary dance sets at the club. For McKinley, as for the rest of the Twilo Diaspora, the return of Sasha and Digweed to a big New York club was a portentous event, and he was inside Crobar by 10:00pm in his trademark faded peach tennis visor, a dark t-shirt, and sneakers.

“It’s like a reunion,” he said noting the many faces in the crowd familiar from Twilo nights long past. The old guard was impressed with the new club. Crobar’s owners, Callin Fortis and Ken Smith, spent $18 million to transform the 30,000 square foot space on West 28th street which was once the staging area for the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The club’s dominant motif is polished concrete, and the feel remains industrial, high tech but raw. A tunnel with sunken lights leads unsuspecting first-timers to the cavernous main dance area where exposed steel girders arc cathedral-like over a profusion of spotlights and an enormous disco ball.

“It’s not all glam and Disneyfied,” said McKinley approvingly. “It’s a warehouse.”

Around midnight on Friday, with a capacity crowd of nearly 3,000 jammed into the main dance area, a steady, expectant bass began to build in the massive Phazon sound system. Eight robotic light clusters descended in unison from the ceiling like so many black widow spiders, each spinning freely on two axes and flashing colored beams. Squeezing through the crush of bodies, McKinley smiled as he felt the hair on his arms rise and fall with each beat.

“That’s the feeling of Twilo,” he said, and looking up he noticed that Digweed had just begun his first set.