In 1985, the restaurateur Florent Morellet opened a 24-hour diner, called Florent, in the old R & L Restaurant building at 69 Gansevoort Street. The abandoned piers were popular cruising grounds and attracted gay and trans sex workers as police were raiding queer bars nearby (the piers also attracted artists like David Wojnarowicz and Gordon Matta-Clark, who famously carved holes into the walls and floors creating site-specific sculpture). A year after the film’s release, the first reported cases of AIDS were in New York, which would cast a pall over the area as a destination for unbridled sexual behavior. The Mineshaft was depicted in the controversial 1980 film Cruising, directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino, which garnered protests and praise for its representation of the gay community. As the meatpacking industry declined, gay bars, nightclubs, and sex clubs began to fill the former factory spaces, including the Zodiac, Cycle, OK Coral, and the Mineshaft (a famous BDSM club frequented by the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and the French philosopher Michel Foucault). Located adjacent to New York’s most historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood, The West Village, and bordered by a working waterfront and piers, the Meatpacking District became a haven for the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s.
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