{"id":623,"date":"2016-12-15T22:40:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T22:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.halcyon-sf.com\/main\/?p=623"},"modified":"2017-11-30T04:25:04","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T04:25:04","slug":"sf-weekly-halcyon-24-hour-party-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/sf-weekly-halcyon-24-hour-party-people\/","title":{"rendered":"SF Weekly – Halcyon: 24-Hour Party People"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n <\/em><\/strong>11th Street’s newest club wants to create an immersive, European vibe unique in San Francisco \u2014 while keeping the neighbors happy.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should be embarrassed that you haven\u2019t been here yet,\u201d Gina Milano<\/a>\u00a0says. She\u2019s kidding \u2014 slightly. The proprietor of Halcyon<\/strong><\/a>, 11th Street\u2019s newest electronic-music venue, Milano is a quick-talking, high-energy nightlife veteran who\u2019s owned and operated Le Club, Bambuddha Lounge \u2014 the predecessor to the Chambers Eat + Drink, inside the Phoenix Hotel \u2014 and worked at several others\u00a0on 11th Street. Returning to SoMa was a homecoming.<\/p>\n

Beatbox, the prior club in the space, closed in July, after Pride. Milano\u2019s team took possession in early August and opened on Oct. 28, reconstructing the stage and turning the upstairs office into a lounge for the dancers. Turnover was quick, and Halcyon<\/a> is not quite finished with its build-out just yet \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of electric saws buzzing this afternoon \u2014 because construction has to take place in spurts, when the venue is closed.<\/p>\n

Milano\u2019s ambition was to build an immersive space with a European vibe. Having a rare license that enables the club to stay open for 24-hour parties helps, as it\u2019s hard to match Berlin\u2019s level of decadence when the lights come on around 1:50 a.m. And after working next door at Audio for two years, then taking a year off to travel the world, Milano came up with ideas for what to do with Beatbox, which she\u2019d already known the owners were quietly looking to unload.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time you walked in here, the room felt good,\u201d she says. \u201cIt had good energy and good vibes. The guys were interested in selling it, but I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t want just another brick box in San Francisco with the usual lighting and stuff.\u2019 \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A visit to a club in Miami with \u201ccool lights on the ceiling, dancers and performers and mascots, crazy fun drag queens, and a robot\u201d coincided with a call from the Beatbox team. They\u2019d received an unsolicited offer and wanted Milano to have right of first refusal. So she cut short her travels and returned to California, building an immersive space with lots of pixel tape, which allows you to run different images and designs on surfaces throughout the room.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s next-level LED,\u201d she says. \u201cI also knew I wanted to do projection mapping, which is really difficult because you need someone to create content. I had a guy who worked for Audio come in, and he was like, \u2018Look, when you do your club, I want to run your lights for you.\u2019 So I had a boy genius in my corner.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are nine laser projectors, plus walls rigged with screens. The lights on the DJ booth communicate with the lights on the wall. And the Pioneer soundsystem is designed for a club of a much bigger size.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a Ferrari,\u201d Milano says of everything. \u201cWe\u2019re all learning how to drive it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the building itself is a fairly simple brick structure that\u2019s been a nightclub for decades, Milano did discover a few hidden spaces along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a secret hideaway that we didn\u2019t know about,\u201d she says. \u201cYou see that brick thing right there? That used to be a doorway that went to Paradise.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(She\u2019s referring to the club next door, but the unintended wordplay spurs Milano\u2019s sound guy to shout, \u201cYou\u2019ve been stuck in hell and paradise is just in there!\u201d from across the room.)<\/p>\n

The skylights and air-conditioning aren\u2019t the only additions; the entire roof is new. This was done to placate neighbors in several of the upscale residential buildings sprinkled among the precinct\u2019s clubs, and the Halcyon team members have gone in people\u2019s homes late at night to measure sound levels. But if the very thought of cantankerous condo dwellers threatening to make trouble for clubs that pre-date them makes you clench your jaw with worry, fear not.<\/p>\n

Eleventh Street<\/a> is \u201ca designated entertainment district,\u201d Milano says. \u201cThey\u2019ve now put the kibosh on any future development for housing, and this building can\u2019t be developed at all. The highest and best use of this building is a nightclub. So we\u2019re here to stay.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cocktails on tap \u2014 a margarita, a rum punch, a Bourbon Buck, and a Moscow Mule \u2014 are great to have, and make things easier on a bartender who\u2019s in the weeds. But they aren\u2019t what really gets people shaking their booties on the floor. Milano credits her booking agent, a longtime associate who divides her time between New York, London, and Ibiza, for securing acts.<\/p>\n

Because of the 24-hour license, Halcyon can throw parties that go long, but can also create unique, double-billed events with multiple headliners \u2014 a live act and a DJ, say, or label parties with acts on the same record company\u2019s roster. Or, as Halcyon did on Nov. 18, booking the house and techno DJ Dubfire with Italian electronic DJ Joseph Capriati.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t pick anyone else\u2019s talent buyer off,\u201d Milano says. \u201cYou have to do it your own way. And everyone who comes is like, \u2018I\u2019m not in America anymore. We\u2019ve had people say there\u2019s not a bad spot in the room\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Richie, again shouting from afar, says, \u201cThis is the biggest little club in America!\u201d)<\/p>\n

Daybreaker<\/a>, the sober, diurnal dance party, will make an appearance later this month. And because Halcyon can easily be set up with cabaret tables, Milano wants to create a noirish cabaret on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. (She booked well-known S.F. drag queen Donna Sachet for a holiday-themed affair with a baby grand piano, but envisions something a little freakier on a permanent basis.) And there might even be line-dancing and other participatory events with an all-night happy hour.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019s still learning. This past Sunday, from 5 a.m. until noon, Halcyon hosted Raunch, an after-party associated with HustlaBall, a fetish-themed gay event with erotic parties all over the world. The promoter called to make sure that coat-check would have bags, and Milano didn\u2019t understand why he would ask that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018What do you mean, \u201cbags\u201d?\u2019 He said, \u2018For the guys to put their clothes in!\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Wait, they take their clothes off?\u2019 I said I\u2019d have to check with my coat-check girl.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

–\u00a0Check out the original article here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.sfweekly.com\/dining\/bar\/halcyon-24-hour-party-people\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11th Street’s newest club wants to create an immersive, European vibe unique in San Francisco \u2014 while keeping the neighbors happy. \u201cYou should be embarrassed that you haven\u2019t been here yet,\u201d Gina Milano\u00a0says. She\u2019s kidding \u2014 slightly. The proprietor of Halcyon, 11th Street\u2019s newest electronic-music venue, Milano is a quick-talking, high-energy nightlife veteran who\u2019s owned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press","tag-sf-weekly"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1004,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/1004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halcyon-sf.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}