What is Club Rawhide?
Club Rawhide is a 160-capacity room on West 26th Street in Chelsea, opened on 12 June 2026 inside what used to be a private men's club. Founders Bob Fluet and Rob Hynds kept it small on purpose and spent on the part that matters, a custom sound system built by Scott Clungan. The Carry Nation and Junior M opened it, DJ Miss Parker took the second night, and the booking instinct so far reads house, disco and the queer dancefloor lineage rather than big-room names.
Why borrow a dead bar's name?
Because the name carries the city's memory. The original Rawhide was a Chelsea gay bar from 1979 until 2012, when it closed after 34 years as the neighborhood gentrified around it. The new club is not directly attached, but it claims the name and the spirit, and it backs that up with an installation on Chelsea nightlife history by the writer Michael Musto.
The references on the wall are The Roxy, Tunnel, Twilo, Limelight, the rooms that made New York a clubbing capital before the rents took them.
Using memory as programming is a real position, not decoration. It tells you who the room is for and what it thinks it is continuing.
Can intimate nightlife survive Manhattan rents?
That is the bet. New York has spent two decades watching its big rooms close to redevelopment, licensing fights and rent, and the few that survive tip toward bottle service and tourist money. A 160-capacity space with a serious rig and a clear sense of where it comes from is a different model: not scale, but a room that can feel like it belongs to the people standing in it. Whether the economics hold in Chelsea is the open question, but the instinct is sound.
