In Memoriam: 10 Much Mourned Brooklyn Institutions
2001 Odyssey
What’s your favorite karaoke song? Mine is the BeeGees “I Started a Joke,” which, by the way is a very ambitious song to sing. I do it poorly. But with love. So anyway, disco. I don’t really mourn disco per se, but in thinking about the institutions that Brooklyn was once known for, I thought about what Brooklyn—or parts of it—used to mean to me. What I’m trying to say is, I saw Saturday Night Fever when I was about 9-years-old, which was a ridiculously young age to see a movie that involves rape, suicide, and buying a shirt on “layaway.” All three of those are concepts that I had no understanding of until I was much, much older. Saturday Night Fever was based on an article in New York magazine about a night club in Bay Ridge called 2001 Odyssey. I don’t know about you, but I wish it still existed. “Formerly a Norwegian soccer club,” 2001 Odyssey was a family-run business that was, in its way, just as ground-breaking an institution as the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was accepting of all types of people and, in fact, hired one of the first performers to receive a sex change, after that performer “Christine Jorgensen, was “shunned by the Copacabana.” What I miss about the existence of a place like 2001 is that it initially was seen as the Brooklyn alternative to places like Studio 54, but wound up differentiating itself enough so that it became iconic in a sui generis kind of way. Just like Brooklyn did, in a sense. And really, I guess the lesson here is that as much as we mourn these things that we lost that we’re never going to see or experience again, there will definitely be new institutions springing up all around us, making an impact and changing Brooklyn forever.
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