Brooklyn finally has its own Ruff Club. The glamour party of lipstick, dirty grunge and tequila shots that abandoned the Lower East Side last year after three and a half years — some say it died of an overdose of hipsters and Madonna — has been reborn by some of its former DJs into a weekly Greenpoint frenzy called Germs NYC.
I got on the free admission list by friending one of the DJs on Facebook (it’s oh-so-exclusive, don’t you know?) on Friday night, and made my way to Club Europa at Manhattan and Meserole avenues. Finally, I had found the filthy, freak-nasty dance party I’d been looking for.
Germs NYC night is what the venue was made for: Two rooms filled with multiple DJs, cool lighting, a smoke machine and a cheap bar.
Hiro from TMJ Records pumped the main floor with a high-energy, bass-infused smack in the face, while former Ruff Club diva Danzie kept a darker adjacent room packed by spinning the hits (New Order? Yes, thank you). Each new set gave us a great mix of the new and old, a breath of fresh air amid Manhattan’s Top 40 stink.
The spinmeisters were happier, too.
“The Ruff Club turned all of our music into somewhat of a competition to stay alive,” said Hiro, also known as Irving Ortega (hear the entire set I heard on Friday night on BrooklynPaper.com). “Brooklyn’s not competitive like that, so we invited people here. I just wanna hear loud music and speakers pumping.”
So did the rest of the club’s new-found regulars, who kept filtering in despite the closing of the G train for the next few weekends — the club’s only reliable mode of nearby transportation at night. And if all those train-less kids made it out, why couldn’t the Park Slope girls? (Apparently, they still think Brooklyn has nothing to do.)
But for me, Germs is yet another reason to steer clear of that other island every Friday night.
Germs NYC at Club Europa [98 Meserole Ave. at Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, (718) 383-2322]. Admission is $10 (or get in free by friending one of the DJs on Facebook).
