It Was The Summer of Signal

By Arielle Lana LeJarde

“All Hours” is a column by culture journalist Arielle Lana LeJarde about the places, parties, promoters, and nightlife personalities that make Brooklyn light up after the sun goes down. A previous version of this story appeared under the column title, “Life of The Party.”

“Have you been to Signal yet?” a friend asked me back in March.

As someone who considers themselves fairly tapped into the city’s nightlife, it was admittedly embarrassing that this was the first time I had heard of Brooklyn’s newest club. But I was intrigued by the recommendation, and looked into it as soon as I got home. The venue had just soft-opened with underground staples like Ladymonix, Waajeed, Ash Lauryn, and Byron The Aquarius. Like Nowadays and BASEMENT, the club enforces a strict no-phones policy, and I wondered if the vibe might match the somewhat pretentious pitch of their Queens neighbors.

Signal officially hard-opened its doors at 175 Morgan Avenue in May, but my first visit was on a sweaty Sunday evening a month later, when I was greeted at the door by a security guard wishing me a “Happy Pride Month.” The outdoor area was filled with skin-bearing partygoers taking on the heat with crop tops and micro-skirts. Some are smoking, others are huddled in small groups—but everyone just seemed genuinely happy to be there.

Photos by Huas Peña & Carter Miades

I was called to the dance floor by a bass booming through the entrance to the main room—a small, dark, dank box filled with fog and lined with black leather couches. It’s so compact, I got a whiff of the tapas making their way across the room, and the mezcal drink the person next to me is holding is almost palpable from where I stood. The crowd is equivocally intimate, broken up into small cliques across the space. At first glance, I spot a queer couple making out in the middle of the room and three dancers holding onto the booth for needed support, grinding and winding to Byrell The Great’s East Coast club selections.

“Sunday brings a good crowd,” Sean Struss tells Brooklyn Magazine. Struss joined Signal as a “cocktail consultant,” but has since taken the reins as Beverage Director for the club. He aims to put over a decade of fine dining and hospitality experience to good use at the cozy (for a club), cavernous (for literally any other type of venue) mini-compound just a block west of the Newtown Creek. “Earlier today, I saw someone drinking a martini for a while, and since it’s so hot, I swapped out their old glass for a new, frosty one. I don’t think other clubs in Brooklyn are doing that.” He mentions that earlier today, he even prepared a fresh juice bar for the morning crowd, a small gesture that can elevate the experience of a crowd that can form and sustain momentum well after sunrise. “Any time we can do something that has synergy with the programming, whether it’s the music or the party, we try to seize the opportunity to exceed expectations.”

As a nightlife veteran, you get used to waiting ten minutes for a drink from an understaffed bar and tip-toeing across disturbingly sticky bathroom floors—but you don’t have to do that here. The attentiveness of its team and how they uphold the space is a breath of fresh air. At one point, an employee even chased me down with napkins for my meal (Side note: The shrimp skewers and salt cod croquettes are a must).

Photos by Huas Peña & Carter Miades

Was it all a fluke, though? I heard rumblings of Signal being similar to Public Records—full of FiDi’s finest, hedge fund bros and women in sparkly heels using the space as a watering hole for talking loudly over music spun by a DJ they don’t know or care about—but my first impression was that it appears to be bringing something new and special to Brooklyn’s club circuit. So, I cleared my schedule the following Wednesday to give it another go.

HOLE PICS took over the venue for the night, so the crowd was bound to be queer and sexy. DJs like ARCHANGEL, umru, and Armana Khan blessed the decks with thumping club music, packing the floor with sweaty bodies wall-to-wall, only parting, almost biblically, for a drag show to make its way to the stage at midnight. Whatever experience people were likening to the increasingly upscale, multi-sound-room Gowanus institution—I wasn’t seeing it.

Nick Spector, Signal’s co-founder and booker, was already aware of the comparison. And that was something he wanted to change. “The idea is to have some kind of door selection process,” Spector reveals about the venue’s upcoming policy shift. “I’m conscious of [how people perceive the Signal’s crowd] and it scares me out of my own club sometimes.” He also explains how Signal’s summer bookings defied the odds during a seasonal dead zone, with artists floating abroad for festivals or bound by radius clauses if they did happen to be stateside.

Photos by Huas Peña & Carter Miades

But the rest of Signal’s summer didn’t exactly disappoint. The club was bursting with hard-hitting parties and selectors from all over the world, lining their schedule with appearances from Tony Humphries, INVT, Leonce, and Physical Therapy.

Matt FX, a New York native and longtime DJ and producer, had the opportunity to grace Signal’s decks early on.”Signal is an incredible new addition to the scene that feels both extremely refreshing and like it’s been here forever,” he says. “This is not a club for EDM babies or dreaded dancefloor yappers, and thankfully, the sticker-on-camera policy does a great job discouraging them from choosing Signal with all the other options out there. So, so, so good!”