Broadway Producers Plan To Convert Church Into Theater

The Limelight church will be getting some new spotlights.

Broadway producer Hunter Arnold, director Michael Arden, and film distributor Roadside Attractions have teamed up to transform the historic venue into a legitimate theater. “We believe that this is the most beautiful building in Manhattan, and what we would like to do is create a very kind of cultural institution … where we can present high-quality entertainment,” stated Scott Moore, the marketing director at Arnold’s production company.

According to the blueprints, the new theater will have a circular stage with about 320 seats spread across two levels. The 21,000-square foot space will also offer four bars for theatergoers, and dressing rooms for the performers will be built on the third floor of the building.

Marvel Architects, which renovated the Lyric Theatre for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and turned an old tobacco warehouse in Brooklyn into the St. Ann’s Warehouse theater, has signed on to oversee the project. It would be the second theater in Arnold’s growing real estate portfolio, as he also prepares to open an immersive theater underneath the Waterloo train station in London next year.

The Sixth Avenue site is best known as the former location of Limelight.

Opened in 1983, the dance club set in a deconsecrated church quickly became the epicenter of New York City nightlife. With rowdy raves and eccentric crowds, “[i]t was a place where people who were freaks in school could come and reinvent themselves or dress up in their sisters’ clothes or just be what they wanted to be,” recalled columnist Michael Musto.

But, when Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City in 1994, he set his sights on shutting certain nightclubs as a part of his “Quality of Life” campaign.

Police raided the hotspot several times and even padlocked its doors in 1995. But, the nightclub reopened, and prosecutors indicted its founder, Peter Gatien, with a conspiracy to distribute drugs in 1996. He was acquitted years later.

But, in 1999, Gatien pled guilty to separate tax evasion charges, and the accumulated legal fees forced him to file for bankruptcy and sell the institution. He was deported to Canada in 2003.

“This is the perfect example of what happens when the government loses,” complained his attorney, Benjamin Brafman. “They don’t like to lose, and, because they’re the government, they find a way to win,” he said.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch even once warned Guiliani that he was pursuing Gatien “like Inspector Javert [from Les Misérables] with an intensity that’s not acceptable.” Guiliani looked at Koch. “Who is Inspector Javert?” he asked.

The nightclub closed in 2007, and the historic building was repurposed as a marketplace and then as a couple of fitness centers. “To go from a place of worship to a place of sin to a marketplace to now a gym, it’s outrageous and creative,” described one former tenant. “It embodies the idea that you can do anything here,” the tenant continued, adding that “it’s just so New York.”