Tales from a past life: living at a nightclub

In the late 90s I used to share a workshop in a dilapidated old warehouse in the inner city. This was back in my shoe making days and due to distrust of the person who had the lease on that place and wasn't paying rental despite receiving rent from the rest of us, I decided to rent space at an artists studios further down the road. This place had previously been used by a grain mill and the offices had been converted to studio space and the main large warehouse was turned into an entertainment venue which mainly did exhibitions, art performances, live bands and the odd night with a DJ. This was a fun and interesting time but I decided to move again to another place a few blocks down, as I wanted to live and work in the same place. I did so for three years but once the lease was up in 2003, I decided to move on. I ended up going back to the previous studios and living there as a temporary measure. I couldn't find somewhere residential nearby so I ended up living at the venue.

image: Pixabay

In the three years that I had been away, there had been a change of management and focus and although there were still artists' studios, the main part of the business had become a mainstream, hugely popular nightclub playing techno music, which wasn't to my taste at all. I thought I could manage the noise factor by sleeping elsewhere on Saturday nights and in the beginning, I did. What I soon discovered was that there were many people who wandered around the back to see what mischief they could get up to in the converted office section. My complaints about drunk people urinating against my door didn't seem to register on the owner until one night, I had fallen asleep and forgotten to lock my door. I woke up to find some creep bending over me. I think he got a fright when I jumped out of bed in a rage and physically threw him out of the room - he didn't put up a fight. Coincidentally the owner was taking a nap in the back office that same night and woke up to find a strange man in the room. Suddenly, there were gates installed to keep people out.

This seemed to help, until one morning I came home from sleeping elsewhere to find that my studio had been broken into by people looking for cash. Although another gate was installed, I decided that it would be better to sleep there, despite the noise. It was pretty bad: some Sunday mornings, I went into the office bathroom and found that tiles had fallen off the walls, obviously caused by sound vibration. The windows would rattle all night when the club was open. I always used the office bathroom because the walls of the toilets used by nightclub patrons had these suspicious dried stains running down them that I didn't want to look at, let alone touch by mistake.

The other annoying part was trying to get in the door on Saturday night. I worked night shift elsewhere and would get home when the club was already in full swing and there would be a massive queue at the door as the bouncers processed people. Of course I wasn't going to wait to be let in so I would go straight to the door. This often upset the club patrons in the queue although coming home from work, I doubt that I looked like someone ready for a night of dancing. Whatever.

Eventually, I had enough of the noise and the fact that the alarm would often go off on Sunday mornings and ring for hours as the club manager couldn't be bothered to come and switch it off and I moved to the roof of a building in the city centre. This was good timing on my part as a few months later, everyone was given notice as the owner decided that she had a better use for the studios. That was a different adventure I will describe in another post