Save the Robots was an underground after hours club in New York City’s Lower East Side. Deb Diz Fearon was living in the building at 25 Avenue B, Manhattan before the ‘Robots’ moved into the basement. “We were the tenants that got kicked out so Save The Robots could move in,” she tells us. “We shared the first floor with the church. It was hard living under them on Sunday mornings, it was just best to stay at Am/Pm until church was over.”
Deb never worked at the club but her photos of the place transport us to another time before the corporate money rolled in. Captions are her own.
1982, 25 Ave B, basement of what would become Save the Robots. My homey, Marc Dodge. R.I.P brother and adventure buddy. Wish I still had that huge LA ll, aka Little Angel two.
Save The Robots ran from 1983 until mid-1984, when it was shut down for fire safety violations, reopening in 1986 after undergoing safety-related renovations and obtaining a social club license.
The club sold only vodka, soda and fruit juice. Patrons typically arrived after 4 a.m. and partied until the 8 a.m. closing time. At one point, talk show host Craig Ferguson worked there as a bouncer.
1982 A view out the front bars. I had just thrown away some stereo equipment. We had found a row of wooden folding shairs at the catholic school on ave A and 3rd, we dragged them home and put them in the front “foyer”. I spent many an hour transfixed by the street activity
great tags through out the building. 1983
Upstairs looking front, I think that might be Sal and or Perry the owners. signing the fateful lease. 1981
I used the upstairs of the building as a silk screening studio and sold these t-shirts at the hardware store down the street.
looking towards the front of the basement. there was a crack in the water main and constant running water under that graffiti, 1981
downstairs, in the back, 1981
It was used as the kitchen, I made fried chicken there once for LA 11 and Fab 5, a giant rat came out a hole in the floor and we left. never cooked there again!
The creepy upstairs bathroom where we were unable ot change the light bulb as you couldn’t get a ladder in there.
In 1996, the New York Times reviewed the then changed club:
For some nightclub denizens and barflies, 4 A.M., the city’s legal cutoff for serving alcohol, is just too early for last call. Dozens of illegal after-hours clubs cater to their early-morning cravings. For more than a decade one of the most famous, Save the Robots, was run behind a nondescript doorway on Avenue B near Second Street. It was a haven for East Villagers, club kids, drag performers, skinheads and sundry insomniacs…
Robots’ transformation is reminiscent of a speak-easy becoming a bar after Prohibition was repealed. “It used to be more raw,” Carolyn Coleman, 28, said, surveying the faux snakeskin walls and velvet furniture. “Now it’s more polished.”
In the old days the bouncer wore a mini. “I would stand behind a huge iron gate in a mini dress at 4 in the morning,” said the bouncer, Dean Johnson. “If you were walking by, you wouldn’t know it was a nightclub. If we saw someone we wanted to let in, we would open the gate.”
Autumn 1985
Mr. Johnson got at least 15 minutes of fame in the 1988 film “Mondo New York,” which caught his old band, the Weenies, playing at Save the Robots.
The police did not take kindly to the illegal club, so they raided it in 1986. “They took us to jail,” Mr. Johnson said. “We were put in a huge cell. But the party kept on going. Jail was just like an after-hours club.”
The club reopened quickly, drawing bartenders, bouncers, promoters and dancers looking for a place to go when they got off work. They reveled in the giant sandbox that was Save the Robots’ upstairs bar, with furniture instead of beach umbrellas.
Lady Bunny, the long-lashed drag performer who founded the annual Wigstock festival, used to hang out after leaving the stage at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. “The state that one is in when they’re actually at Robots is not conducive to memory,” Lady Bunny said. “I would say that Robots got a good thousand or two of my brain cells.”
Right across from the after hours club, Save the Robots. The Gas Station at 22 Avenue B, East 2nd Street, Lower East Side, New York City in 1995.
Liz Hurley, David spade, and i attend a rick james concert 1981
Deb in 1983
Bad Girl, 1983
booth in Woolworths, E14th btwn B&C
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