A wet night in November and Steve Mass — a compact figure in baseball cap and stubble — was strolling through a jostling nightclub in TriBeCa. Voices were rising, drinks were beginning to slosh and serious déjà vu was setting in: More than three decades after closing the anarchic Mudd Club, he was presiding over a roiling reunion.
In the downstairs lobby at the Roxy Hotel, the singer Kate Pierson (late of the B-52s) was a burst of goofy glam, with neon-red hair flowing over a screaming-pomegranate top. A Zen-calm Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith's guitarist, with his endless legs and gray mane, paced through the crowd looking like an elegant heron. Near the staircase, cameras closed in on Deborah Harry, the New Wave's Catherine Deneuve. Deadpan and apparently ageless, she was Blondie-chic in a rubber jacket with a jaunty WTF splashed across the bodice.
As it happened, the festivities at the Roxy (until recently the TriBeCa Grand) were inspired by the Mudd Club, once tucked into a converted warehouse two blocks away. (A plaque marks the spo t, at 77 White Street, though a condo has replaced the building.)
Mr. Mass, an intellectual provocateur who ran a private-ambulance service, had opened the dingy hideaway with two partners in October 1978, when New York night life was defined by the hard-edge glamour of Studio 54.
Their outpost (named in honor of Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated John Wilkes Booth) drew adventurers to the wilds of TriBeCa for real-time updates on the avant-garde. "It was a dance hall, drug den, bar and pickup joint," said Richard Boch, an artist who made live-or-die decisions as its alpha doorman. "And within that, it was an incredible incubator for talent."
Photo Steve Mass, an owner of the Mudd Club in TriBeCa, in its Jayne Mansfield Room in 1981. Credit Kate Simon
William Burroughs performed at the Mudd Club; so did the Talking Heads and the proto hip-hopper Fab 5 Freddy. On a given night, the crowd included creatives coming into their own (Cindy Sherman, Anna Sui and Kathryn Bigelow) as well as fast-trackers who succumbed to the era's scourges: Jean-Michel Basquiat overdosed on heroin in 1988, and Keith Haring died of AIDS in 1990.
The club closed its doors in 1983, but on Nov. 19 a portrait of Mr. Haring surveyed the exuberant crowd of writers, artists, fashion addicts and sundry downtown dwellers who paid $100 and more to revisit it all. And, happily, to take bits of it home.
Organized as a rummage sale to benefit the Bowery Mission Women's Centers, the event was rich in artifacts donated by notable Muddgoers. Priced from $20 to $2,500, the concatenation of fashion, jewelry, photographs, artwork and stage props (new as well as vintage) was charmingly random: Tables in Django, the hotel's nightclub, were arrayed with treasures including the cowbell and Mickey Mouse toy piano played by the B-52s' Fred Schneider (a bargain at $155 for the pair); black rubber bracelets like the ones that the stylist and photographer Maripol designed for Madonna, and a black leather tote from Marc Jacobs.
Photo A portrait of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by William Coupon. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times
Continue reading the main story An Odinesque mannequin designed by Kenny Scharf towered by the checkout desk; originally $2,000, it was marked down to $750 (and eventually hauled up the staircase by a bargain hunter). The tallying continues, but by last count the event had raised more than $50,000.
It was Mr. Mass, known to acolytes as Dr. Mudd, who developed the idea of a club-themed fete. An expatriate who moved to Berlin in 1990, he began to consider the possibilities last summer as his 75th birthday approached. Eager to reunite with his family and in need of minor medical care, he flew to New York last month and settled at the Roxy.
"In the back of my mind," he said, "I thought, 'Maybe there's some way to do an event.'" Not content with a simple birthday party, he asked the hotel's event staff to suggest a suitable cause; they introduced him to the Bowery Mission Women's Center nearby.
On the evenin g before the sale, Mr. Mass was settled on a stool in Django, looking slightly weary. Partnering with an agency serving women on the Lower East Side, he said, was particularly gratifying: "I thought about the girls at the Mudd Club, the minority who fell between the cracks. Some of them were very vulnerable. They came to New York wrapped in fantasy and didn't realize the kind of trouble you could get into. They didn't think twice about doing heroin or taking a job as an escort."
Old friends including Maripol and the style arbiter Glenn O'Brien helped reach alums who could pitch in. Though the Mudd Club he opened in Berlin in 2001 flourished until he shuttered it in 2011, Mr. Mass had dropped out of the mainstream; these days, he spends much of his time golfing.
Clothing racked under the color-block ceiling in the lobby vividly evoked the over-the-top Mudd scene: Here was a leopard-print jumpsuit from Ms. Harry (grab-it cheap at $120); there, a sequined shift from Ms. Pierson. Edgier treasures beckoned, too: a black leather vest stenciled by the fashion muse Edwige Belmore (who died in September) for $130, and a burgundy cummerbund embellished with safety pins ($75) by the designer Victoria Bartlett.
Not everyone searching the racks was driven by nostalgie de la boue. Looking like Mia Farrow as an eighth-grader, the fashion writer and actress Tavi Gevinson (in fact, an adorably self-possessed 19) approached the offerings like a connoisseur. "I knew there would be really good vintage here," she said. "And you can see and touch things, unlike on eBay."
Photo Tavi Gevinson. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times
In a red vinyl jacket and long denim dress, Ms. Gevinson (who discovered a simple black Haring-print frock amid the rock-chick finery) looked more au courant than anyone at the event.
But it was Legendary Damon, a party planner and "curator of culture," who made the biggest statement. Mr. Damon, a Detroit native "obsessed with New York in the early '80s," strode into Django in a vintage Donna Karan coat draped with a yellow rabbit-fur stole and accessorized with a rap-style grille, gilded rings crafted in Africa and a club-standard porkpie hat. Though he belongs to the post-Mudd generation, he said, "people tell me I'm helping keep the era alive."
Talking with friends in a corner of the club, Ms. Harry was vague about her own outfit, which included wide black trousers and a necklace of hammered-metal owls. Her own porkpie hat, she said, was "in honor of 'Breaking Bad,'" while her jacket came from the London designers Vin and Omi. "I liked it because it's nasty," she said. Beyond that, Ms. Harry said, "I just like to look odd."
As she spoke, guests were flowing into the darkened nightclub. Mr. Kaye had performed earlier; Ms. Pierson was about to cap the evening.
Photo From left, the Mudd Club owner Steve Mass (in cap), Debbie Harry, Kate Pierson and Richard Boch, the Mudd Club's longtime doorman. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times
During her high-energy set, it was impossible for anyone who had not crowded the stage (or mounted a chair) to see Ms. Pierson. Instead, in a scene that would have been impossible to imagine at the Mudd Club, one could glimpse her in miniature over the heads of almost everyone in the crowd, on screen-after-glowing-cellphone screen. Raw, it was not.
Afterward, the lights came back up, Chic's seductive "I Want Your Love" brought revelers back to the dance floor and Mr. Mass prepared to scramble.
His friend Paul Sevigny, it seemed, was hosting an after-party at his private club upstairs, and the night was just beginning. Though his birthda y benefit had rocked the house, Mr. Mass pronounced it "a little … tame," adding, "I'm not leaving without a wild party."
