It’s just past midnight when the front door of Paul’s Casablanca swings open to reveal a man wearing a dark suit and a black t-shirt. He’s tall, smiling, and speaks with an energetic, slightly hoarse voice. In a few strides, he’s crossed the front bar room. Not unlike Rick Blaine in the film from which this club takes its name, he checks in with a few staffers, shakes his GM’s hand with a smile, and sits down at his table. Paul Sevigny owns the place.
It’s hard to quantify the potential historical significance of a nightclub while it’s still active, but if you look back through the great nighttime haunts of New York history, you kind of know it when you see it. The places that make history tend to be the places that everyone wants to get into: Studio 54 in the ‘70s, The Odeon a decade later. In the same way, it’s impossible to tell the story of contemporary New York nightlife without talking about Sevigny’s clubs.
On any given weekend, Paul’s Casablanca (and its companion club, Paul’s Baby Grand, currently temporarily closed per COVID-19) accounts for hundreds of people waiting along sidewalks in sweltering summer heat and heavy winter snowfalls. Inside is the party Sevigny always wanted to create. “I wanted to come to New York and be an artist,” says Sevigny. “Then, I kind of realized that a lot of the people who were somewhat successful were kind of being pushed around by the galleries, and that never really jived with me as far as art’s concerned.” So he dove into the belly of the beast to make a living, joining a friend of his on the commodities exchange working in the World Trade Center. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go down to the trading floor and make my money there, and paint what I want to.’”
Eventually, he got tired of the work. “I left business to try and do something fun,” he says. “Sure, I’m managing an office full of thirty people, but that’s not why I did this and I’m not really interested in the math. I think there’s better businesses to move into if that’s your goal, and maybe you should stay out of nightlife. This isn’t a business play, this is a fun play.”
What started with The Beatrice Inn quickly grew to his concepts in the Tribeca Grand Hotel, now The Roxy, and Casablanca. He collaborated with Armin Amiri on Los Angeles’s Smoke and Mirrors, but ultimately realized his unique style belonged in New York. After the pandemic forced all restaurants, bars, and clubs closed, Casablanca was the first one to open back up as soon as restrictions were lifted. At 305 Spring Street, on the far western reaches among warehouses and storage centers, the club is removed from the bustle of tourists late at night in the city. The people that show up for the line at Casablanca are coming out knowing that there’s not another bar that’s just as good down the corner, but try their luck anyway. In the post-quarantine version of the city’s nightlife, it’s become one of the beacons that survived the pandemic and is out the other side with a renewed sense of what the bar means to people downtown and an expanded list of people turning up for a night out.
Inside, the dance floor is full. Ty Sunderland, Sevigny’s handpicked DJ, is working the crowd. And that crowd! They’re a curated group, as fits a place where throwing a few grand down for a table gets you nowhere. (Having a distinctive look and an interesting personality, perhaps in that order, goes far.) It’s a striking, if intentionally rough-around-the-edges crew, where the “going out shirt” could be a vintage Blondie tee or a chic find at Buffalo Exchange.
That’s what the nightlife has become since people have been able to go out again. While safety procedures are still in place, the days of people opting for a quiet Friday night in with Netflix and Seamless seem to be being universally passed over—after 18 months of that being the only option, obviously—for a night out. The forced closures of bars and clubs put a strain on so many businesses though that hundreds of neighborhood favorites were forced to shut down. When the curtain was lifted again this past Spring, it sent even more people looking to go out with fewer places than ever available to do so. That push has made the top tier of nightlife destinations home to not just the downtown glitterati of celebrities (including Paul’s sister Chloe Sevigny), tastemakers in fashion, music, and pop culture, and the regular run of party people eager to get back out on the town.
Walking through to the back room, an annex covered in Moroccan tile and colorful archways, groups of beautiful young people are dancing, kissing, clinking glasses together, and pointing their phones up at the disco ball for a story on Instagram, something Sevigny picks up on. “It’s not about models and bottles anymore. I don’t know if there’s as much room for that now, since the advent of the smartphone,” he admits. It’s also why the man at the door of the club was trained by Sevigny himself. “I really wanted to make a point that there’s a different way to do this,” he says of bringing on gatekeeper Ludwig Persik. “I was trying to make sure we were on the same wavelength. It’s important for me to have people that speak the same language I do and we have the right kind of people. So Ludwig and I would sit in the front window of the Dean and Deluca on Broadway and as people would pass by I would ask him who he would or wouldn’t let in the door of the club.”
Stepping outside, Ludwig corroborates the story of being hired. “It was the end of August and it was really warm out, and he was wearing a Paul Smith suit, even though it was so hot,” Persik recalls. “We were sitting in the window and he asked, ‘Where do you think they’re from?’ about a group of people. I said Murray Hill. He laughed and followed up if I’d let them into the club. When I said no, he said ‘Good, good, good.’ We did that for an hour or two with different people passing by. The other half of it was, he would call me when he knew the door wouldn’t be busy and quiz me on who someone was that would be notable.” Ludwig’s eventually become a celebrity in his own right within the NYC nightlife ecosystem, constantly fielding texts ahead of people showing up in the line. “It was a little nerve wracking, but he’s definitely on my side,” he offers. “Everyone he hires is like a weird artist. It’s like a family.”
Looking around the room, even peers from other clubs and hotspots regularly make appearances at Casablanca when not working at their own posts. Tucked into a booth in the back, between the writer Isabel Weeks and fashion creative director Matthew Woodruff, is Frankie Carattini, who mans the door at ACME. He’s a player in the generation of club kids raised in the Sevigny Era, and he’s taken notes. “It’s been inspiring the way he runs the business and promotes a really inclusive environment for nightlife,” says Carattini.
There’s no VIP room or elevated tier within the club for the celebrity clientele that rolls through here, just three rooms for people to roam between. “When you’re in there, though, everyone’s equal. That doesn’t happen at some other places.”
And while Sevigny’s version of nightlife may be more traditional to New Yorkers than the boundary pushing or queer movements that have made their way out to Brookyln, many of the faces that overlap with those parties still frequent Casablanca whether its Ty Tea’s Sunderland or host of a party series Terence Edgerson (AKA NY Social Bee). Where out in Brooklyn parties fan out in the ample space, the music and guest lists are still developed from the Sevigny era model that continues to breed the next generation of what nightlife in the city will look like.
As the 4am closing time approaches, people start filing out onto Spring Street, the sun is starting to rise on a very New York group. This is why there’s not going to be a Paul’s Casablanca Miami, or a “Baby Grand Las Vegas.” For all the ideas he’s got cooking for what to do next—potential new clubs of different shapes, sizes, and music styles—they’re all going to be built around an authentic approach.
“There might be other people that are more successful than me, I guess, in monetary terms,” says Sevigny. “But I’m not really interested in being around those sorts of people.”