Tunnel: Wild Photos From 1990s Most Creative NYC Club

New York City after dark in the ‘90s was an ecstatic fever dream fueled by club kids’ outrageous fantasies, and as house photographer for Peter Gatien’s four iconic clubs, Steve Eichner had a ringside seat for all the action. To celebrate the October 20 release of “In the Limelight: The Visual Excess of NYC Night Life in the 90s,” Eichner’s new book with Gabriel Sanchez, Patch takes you back to his old stomping grounds. Our club-hop continues at Tunnel, a former railroad terminal, complete with tracks, that Gatien turned into a multi-level pleasure palace.

Built in the early 1900s, the enormous tunnel-shaped building that gave Tunnel its name spanned an entire city block on the far West Side near the Hudson River. When Gatien added it to his kingdom in 1992, it quickly became a mecca for the Club Kids’ creative chaos, and the line to get into that 80,000-square-foot mecca was as long as the club itself.

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“The line stretched all the way down 27th St. from 11th to 12th Avenue,” recalls Eichner. “Having a long line outside fed the buzz, and the club hired door people to choose who got in right away and who got relegated to the back of the line. Single men were almost always sent to wait, but if a guy turned up with a group of ladies he was whisked in. Club Kids and VIPs parted the velvet ropes instantly, and creative skimpy costumes showing a lot of skin worked for both women and men. The more exclusive it was, the more people wanted to get in. Some stood there freezing for hours.”

Those lucky enough to get past the velvet ropes never knew what crazy art installations they would find inside. “One time, the entrance was transformed into a bathroom lined with urinals and toilets you had to walk past to get in,” remembers Eichner. “There was a ‘log cabin in the woods’ installation with taxidermied deer jumping out of actual trees, and an ‘insane asylum’ theme with a person in a padded cell in a straitjacket. The most disturbing one was at a party for the actor that played Eddie Munster, when they created an installation of headless torsos and severed body parts.”

There were also some permanent Tunnel features amid the ever-changing installations, like the Kenny Scharf’s spacey Cosmic Cavern and the club’s notorious bathroom. “It was my first time experiencing a co-ed bathroom, which was shocking enough,” says Eichner. “It also had a full liquor bar in the center with a shirtless model-looking guy bartending. I thought this is brilliant! People were always doing drugs and hard partying in the bathroom, so why not make it an official party room? It also made it much easier to find my subjects. I recall Dave Lee Roth posing for photos near the sinks.”

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The popular ball-pit, filled with thousands of yellow balls you could slip and slide around in, was also fertile hunting ground for Eichner. He shot Boy George in the pit, as well as gossip columnist Michael Musto, wearing an outfit inspired by the Post’s Page Six, a boldfaced hotbed of Gatien club-goers. Eichner also caught celebs in the wild throughout the Tunnel maze, snapping Marc Jacobs with fellow designer Tommy Hilfiger and scoring a stupendous close-up of Brendan Fraser giving a big, fat finger to the lens.

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Though he never slacked off on his Gatien mandate to shoot Page Six-worthy celebs, Eichner also loved capturing the whole Tunnel vibe, from the skateboarders blasting Ollies on the half-pipe at the far end of Tunnel to the imperious Sophia Lamar deciding which wannabe clubbers were cool enough to get in. “Those are the unpublished photos that I really want to share in the book,” says Eichner. “There are some celebrities sprinkled in. But the book is really about the culture, about all the different things that came together to make it a special moment in time.”

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Check out more from the series below:

- The Limelight - Stunning Photos From 1990s Favorite NYC Nightclub

- Palladium - Fab Photos From 1990s Most Futuristic NYC Club

All photos are by Steve Eichner and are featured in his new book called "In The Limelight - The Visual Ecstasy of NYC Nightlife in the 90s"

Steve Eichner is a legendary nightlife photographer. After his tenure in the clubs, he worked as a staff photographer for Women's Wear Daily for nearly two decades. His photographs have been published in Vogue, The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, Rolling Stone, People, Vanity Fair, Cosmo, Details and GQ.