Your Guide to Creative China
Project Shanghai: Chinatown
Published September 23, 2009
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For this week's Project Shanghai, CreativeHunt sat down with the man behind new burlesque club, Chinatown, Norman Gosney. Gosney has had a long and storied career in designing and building night clubs in all genres and on both sides of the Atlantic, and was at the ground level -- the pervert's row, if you will -- for the American burlesque/vaudeville revival of the mid '90s.
Read on for Gosney on importing the sleaze back to Shanghai, the Big Apple vs. the Pearl of the Orient, and on the celebratory regression to pre-television entertainment.
For more logistical information on Chinatown, check out this SmartShanghai Radar article.
So this venue used to be an Egyptian-themed KTV? How did you find it?
Gosney: Yeah. A really, really, really terrible one. The stage was a giant King Tut and I think the KTV girls came out the front of it.
I knew what I was looking for -- I've built over 400 clubs in my life -- and since the mid-'90s, I've been doing small burlesque and vaudeville clubs -- I built The Slipper Room -- which was kind of ground zero for the whole business, and so I knew what I was looking for.
And I did it the old fashion way: I got on a cycle and cycled around town for three months. And, you know, there's some gorgeous building here, but if you did this in New York, you'd see a building and then you'd just go to the records department and within a day you were onto it, but of course, that's not the way things work in Shanghai.
So I found about fifty odd buildings that I liked the look of and wanted to get inside, and then I saw this place. But it's very opaque and it's very hard to find out information about places in Shanghai, but I got lucky. The third time I was up here, I had a Chinese-speaking person with me and he asked a question to someone walking by on the street, and that person happened to be the building manager.
He informed us that we would never get such an august building, and you know, you have to be tenacious to make these things works, and after six months of blah, blah, blah, we found ourselves in front of the right people, and I got to meet the governor of Shanghai and the head of cultural affairs and all that.
And we got an amazingly enthusiastic response. I think they were very interested in us bringing better nightlife, you know, not kids, up to Hongkou.
I've built a lot of clubs that are "destinations" rather than on the strip, to some great success, mostly in New York. I did Area, Palladium, Danceteria -- bit of success there.
But the last time that I'd been excited about a building was when we did Limelight in an old church, and then I saw this place [Chinatown] and it was two months of negotiations before I even got to see the interior, and I gutted this place...
What's the history of the place before it was used and abused as a KTV?
Gosney: It was built in 1931 by a Japanese architect as a Shinto/ Buddhist place, but he used the Hindu style as his inspiration. I've only found one photograph of the building before the revolution, and it had an amazing frieze of animals with humanistic faces that the Red Guard took a dislike to and chipped off. There was also two alcoves at the base of the building that had two Hindu Gods -- they're gone.
But luckily they left a lot of it... and I hope that by the time I've really finished the renovations, after we've been in it a while, I hope that I do the building justice, because it's a gorgeous space.
Were you working with other people when designing the renovations? Architectural firms, design firms...
Gosney: Nope. All myself.
What about the actual construction of the place? Were you working with local contractors?
Gosney: Yeah and how can I say this... I want to be diplomatic.
I imagine there were some snags in the process then?
Gosney: Yeah, I'm spoiled. I've lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, so I've lived in this kind of bohemian supermarket with a lot of talent around. And I did a lot of clubs in the '80s, where there was a huge pool of creative talent. I had Keith Herring and Kenny Shaw up there doing the bathrooms of those clubs, so I'm a bit spoiled. And I have my own workshops up in the Bronx and I have six guys who do all my finishing and stuff.
And we have it down. I literally say to these guys, 'Okay guys, this is a Number 9-type club. We're going to do this, this, and this.'
It's been very difficult here in Shanghai, and I have a great Chinese contractor but the Chinese have a certain way of making everything look new and shiny, and I wanted to really knock the corners off the place, you know. I want to make it look lived in and comfortable, and I want people to be able to relax.
I built my first club in the summer of 1966 in London, and our house band was "The Pink Floyd" -- they're never going to do well [Laughs] -- but I've always felt that no matter what kind of club you go to, a rock club, a dance club, a techno club, if you get it right, you're building a movie that people walk into, and their reality should be suspended for a while.
I think what we do here, we're not for everyone, but it's a big city and there's a growing hip Chinese class that will get us; I'm not relying on fucking expat laowais -- what a miserable bunch they are...
Total bastards.
Gosney: [Laughs.] They've got no money, and they show up for the opening of an envelope and then you never see them again. I'm only joking, of course.
But yeah, my demographic is 15% expats, 30% Chinese, and the rest will be people travelling through the city. The thrust of my publicity is not here in Shanghai, its elsewhere.
(Photograph: Charlie Xia)
How did you get involved in building and running burlesque clubs in New York?
Gosney: Me and a guy called Tony Morando, we opened an illegal club called Dutch Weismann in '95. We started building these small illegal clubs in New York doing true burlesque -- filthy shit -- and the second night we were open, Bobby De Nero and his crowd came by and we were made. And I sort of developed out of that.
But now burlesque and new variety is a whole nightlife industry in the States. Every town pretty much has a successful one and then a lot of copies. At the good level its great entertainment, but I've always been more of the Ziegfeld mind -- I want beautiful girls who are well-trained, and in New York I was always very spoiled because my six-girl troupe were the best burlesque dancers in the world -- Miss Tickle, Lady Ace -- and I was worried about who we’d find here performer-wise, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
I come from a theater background and a theatrical family, but I don't like the church of theater, I don't like that whole, the audience is quiet thing, you know... I want to fight for my fucking audience. Against drink and people flirting with birds, and that whole thing.
And we're just giving people a good time. It's not high art. I call it the new high and low brow. That’s what we're going for. And I think we'll find a crowd.
But I seem to have gotten it legal here, which is not easy, and to go back to the architectural point of view, I had a great shell to work with.
In the club design, were you taking inspiration from your burlesque clubs in New York?
Gosney: Well, another thing I've been doing in New York for the past 10 years is a lot of black box off Broadway theater spaces, and a lot of them have tarted themselves up -- like old vaudeville houses -- so with other people's money, I've been building some spectacular stages in the last ten years. I just renovated a 600-room theater on upper Broadway that I'm very proud of.
What were the major challenges to renovating the place? Where there any major set-backs?
Gosney: All of it. The real truth is this: we broke ground last September, and we were cleared to open after the last Chinese New Year holidays, and then the whole world financial thing hit the shitter, and our 50%-backer was an Australian real estate mogul, so that pretty much tells you that story right there.
So we had to stop construction and re-finance, and it wasn't a good time for venture capital to be looking at food and beverage. But I was saying, 'Listen guys' -- I owned a bar called Downtown Beirut in New York in 1988, and that was right when the New York stock exchange thing hit, and New York really got hit because so much of New York money is Wall Street money, but my bar did the best business it ever had.
The best escapist joint in town will always do well in hard times. I'm surprised at some of the clubs in Shanghai, how successful some of them are, because all those ‘80s-themed places -- well, that's what they look like to me, they look like it's 1992 -- they would die in New York. Celebrating being rich and flashy doesn’t really play anymore.
But I think we'll find our crowd.
You'll be here all the time, sucking up the free drinks and all that press. All you whores of the fifth estate. [Laughs.]
(Photograph: Grant-Oh! Buchwald)
But yeah it's real entertainment. Real entertainment. One of the reasons that burlesque happened because you've got a couple of generations now that have had their entertainment mediated through a monitor. And there’s a real backlash against that. I actually call the body of work that we do "pre-television" because it goes wrong. And it's real. That’s real girls' ass up there, that's real guys making a fool of themselves. I like that.
And it goes right sometimes too.
***
Address and booking information for Chinatown right here.
Read on for Gosney on importing the sleaze back to Shanghai, the Big Apple vs. the Pearl of the Orient, and on the celebratory regression to pre-television entertainment.
For more logistical information on Chinatown, check out this SmartShanghai Radar article.
So this venue used to be an Egyptian-themed KTV? How did you find it?
Gosney: Yeah. A really, really, really terrible one. The stage was a giant King Tut and I think the KTV girls came out the front of it.
I knew what I was looking for -- I've built over 400 clubs in my life -- and since the mid-'90s, I've been doing small burlesque and vaudeville clubs -- I built The Slipper Room -- which was kind of ground zero for the whole business, and so I knew what I was looking for.
And I did it the old fashion way: I got on a cycle and cycled around town for three months. And, you know, there's some gorgeous building here, but if you did this in New York, you'd see a building and then you'd just go to the records department and within a day you were onto it, but of course, that's not the way things work in Shanghai.
So I found about fifty odd buildings that I liked the look of and wanted to get inside, and then I saw this place. But it's very opaque and it's very hard to find out information about places in Shanghai, but I got lucky. The third time I was up here, I had a Chinese-speaking person with me and he asked a question to someone walking by on the street, and that person happened to be the building manager.
He informed us that we would never get such an august building, and you know, you have to be tenacious to make these things works, and after six months of blah, blah, blah, we found ourselves in front of the right people, and I got to meet the governor of Shanghai and the head of cultural affairs and all that.
And we got an amazingly enthusiastic response. I think they were very interested in us bringing better nightlife, you know, not kids, up to Hongkou.
I've built a lot of clubs that are "destinations" rather than on the strip, to some great success, mostly in New York. I did Area, Palladium, Danceteria -- bit of success there.
But the last time that I'd been excited about a building was when we did Limelight in an old church, and then I saw this place [Chinatown] and it was two months of negotiations before I even got to see the interior, and I gutted this place...
What's the history of the place before it was used and abused as a KTV?
Gosney: It was built in 1931 by a Japanese architect as a Shinto/ Buddhist place, but he used the Hindu style as his inspiration. I've only found one photograph of the building before the revolution, and it had an amazing frieze of animals with humanistic faces that the Red Guard took a dislike to and chipped off. There was also two alcoves at the base of the building that had two Hindu Gods -- they're gone.
But luckily they left a lot of it... and I hope that by the time I've really finished the renovations, after we've been in it a while, I hope that I do the building justice, because it's a gorgeous space.
Were you working with other people when designing the renovations? Architectural firms, design firms...
Gosney: Nope. All myself.
What about the actual construction of the place? Were you working with local contractors?
Gosney: Yeah and how can I say this... I want to be diplomatic.
I imagine there were some snags in the process then?
Gosney: Yeah, I'm spoiled. I've lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, so I've lived in this kind of bohemian supermarket with a lot of talent around. And I did a lot of clubs in the '80s, where there was a huge pool of creative talent. I had Keith Herring and Kenny Shaw up there doing the bathrooms of those clubs, so I'm a bit spoiled. And I have my own workshops up in the Bronx and I have six guys who do all my finishing and stuff.
And we have it down. I literally say to these guys, 'Okay guys, this is a Number 9-type club. We're going to do this, this, and this.'
It's been very difficult here in Shanghai, and I have a great Chinese contractor but the Chinese have a certain way of making everything look new and shiny, and I wanted to really knock the corners off the place, you know. I want to make it look lived in and comfortable, and I want people to be able to relax.
I built my first club in the summer of 1966 in London, and our house band was "The Pink Floyd" -- they're never going to do well [Laughs] -- but I've always felt that no matter what kind of club you go to, a rock club, a dance club, a techno club, if you get it right, you're building a movie that people walk into, and their reality should be suspended for a while.
I think what we do here, we're not for everyone, but it's a big city and there's a growing hip Chinese class that will get us; I'm not relying on fucking expat laowais -- what a miserable bunch they are...
Total bastards.
Gosney: [Laughs.] They've got no money, and they show up for the opening of an envelope and then you never see them again. I'm only joking, of course.
But yeah, my demographic is 15% expats, 30% Chinese, and the rest will be people travelling through the city. The thrust of my publicity is not here in Shanghai, its elsewhere.
(Photograph: Charlie Xia)
How did you get involved in building and running burlesque clubs in New York?
Gosney: Me and a guy called Tony Morando, we opened an illegal club called Dutch Weismann in '95. We started building these small illegal clubs in New York doing true burlesque -- filthy shit -- and the second night we were open, Bobby De Nero and his crowd came by and we were made. And I sort of developed out of that.
But now burlesque and new variety is a whole nightlife industry in the States. Every town pretty much has a successful one and then a lot of copies. At the good level its great entertainment, but I've always been more of the Ziegfeld mind -- I want beautiful girls who are well-trained, and in New York I was always very spoiled because my six-girl troupe were the best burlesque dancers in the world -- Miss Tickle, Lady Ace -- and I was worried about who we’d find here performer-wise, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
I come from a theater background and a theatrical family, but I don't like the church of theater, I don't like that whole, the audience is quiet thing, you know... I want to fight for my fucking audience. Against drink and people flirting with birds, and that whole thing.
And we're just giving people a good time. It's not high art. I call it the new high and low brow. That’s what we're going for. And I think we'll find a crowd.
But I seem to have gotten it legal here, which is not easy, and to go back to the architectural point of view, I had a great shell to work with.
In the club design, were you taking inspiration from your burlesque clubs in New York?
Gosney: Well, another thing I've been doing in New York for the past 10 years is a lot of black box off Broadway theater spaces, and a lot of them have tarted themselves up -- like old vaudeville houses -- so with other people's money, I've been building some spectacular stages in the last ten years. I just renovated a 600-room theater on upper Broadway that I'm very proud of.
What were the major challenges to renovating the place? Where there any major set-backs?
Gosney: All of it. The real truth is this: we broke ground last September, and we were cleared to open after the last Chinese New Year holidays, and then the whole world financial thing hit the shitter, and our 50%-backer was an Australian real estate mogul, so that pretty much tells you that story right there.
So we had to stop construction and re-finance, and it wasn't a good time for venture capital to be looking at food and beverage. But I was saying, 'Listen guys' -- I owned a bar called Downtown Beirut in New York in 1988, and that was right when the New York stock exchange thing hit, and New York really got hit because so much of New York money is Wall Street money, but my bar did the best business it ever had.
The best escapist joint in town will always do well in hard times. I'm surprised at some of the clubs in Shanghai, how successful some of them are, because all those ‘80s-themed places -- well, that's what they look like to me, they look like it's 1992 -- they would die in New York. Celebrating being rich and flashy doesn’t really play anymore.
But I think we'll find our crowd.
You'll be here all the time, sucking up the free drinks and all that press. All you whores of the fifth estate. [Laughs.]
(Photograph: Grant-Oh! Buchwald)
But yeah it's real entertainment. Real entertainment. One of the reasons that burlesque happened because you've got a couple of generations now that have had their entertainment mediated through a monitor. And there’s a real backlash against that. I actually call the body of work that we do "pre-television" because it goes wrong. And it's real. That’s real girls' ass up there, that's real guys making a fool of themselves. I like that.
And it goes right sometimes too.
***
Address and booking information for Chinatown right here.
