The Intoxicating Promise of New York City’s Night-Life Flyers

The new book “No Sleep: NYC Nightlife Flyers 1988-1999,” edited by Adrian Bartos (otherwise known as the d.j. Stretch Armstrong) and the archivist Evan Auerbach, and featuring the collections of dozens of artists, designers, and clubgoers, commemorates a time when Manhattan was one of the world’s great party cities. Like any account of how much fun New York used to be, it is also a shadow history of real estate. It is intoxicating to flip through these pages and take in the radiant diversity of names and musical scenes that each laid claim to the same city. But there’s also a stark sense of distance between then and now. Few of the venues listed in these flyers still exist, and it’s astonishing to recall how much of the city once seemed beneath the interest of speculators: the spontaneous, open-air parties that sprung up on the abandoned High Line, now one of the city’s prime tourist attractions; the once-deserted corners of the meatpacking district or Lower East Side, where boutique hotels and parking lots now stand. The Palladium, one of downtown’s largest clubs, is now an N.Y.U. dorm. Moby tells of one party with no address, just a cryptic directive to “be on the L train at 8 P.M. on Wednesday night.” He waited on the platform, and when the train arrived it had been taken over by club kids.