Uptown #2
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
1978
After Uptown #1, a Disco, and a larger, freestanding building project failed, this much simplified version was built on the lot just south of Montego Bay which opened a year earlier. The two were connected by a common wall and one door, which enabled them to legally function under one liquor license. Disco was the new music, and my client wanted the songs to sound like the hit version, so he produced his own, in-house band.
It was basically a two story high 50'x50' room with three bar levels, the highest being over the entry and toilets. In the remaining corner was the bandstand with the dance floor in the center of it all.
The two walls adjacent to the band stand were mirrored and the two remaining walls were an acoustical sound trap, made by furring the walls out 6", filling them with acoustical insulation and covering them with spaced horizontal boards of varying widths and then clad with several different colored bands of carpet. The ceiling was a four foot modular grid of brass and chrome, each with four bulbs.
It was a huge hit, and on Friday and Saturday nights, the two mirrored walls gave the illusion of quadrupling the crowd of 300 that could pack in there.
35 years later, it's still there, but badly abused and misused. Montego Bay next door has been wonderfully restored as a structural engineers office.