There were certainly plenty of factors exterior to the nightclub that fueled the city’s character change in the 1980s, but the Starck Club represents a moment when music, dancing, and drugs found a common denominator among this city’s segregated subcommunities — where the rich and nonrich, white and black, gay and straight blended in a sleek, Bauhaus-inspired room designed by a Frenchman to facilitate the blending. Opening in late 1984, just 20 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Starck helped knock off Dallas’ Stetson.
Which brings me to the photo you see above. It is the lead art for Peter’s story. Cain let us borrow the picture of two anonymous club-goers in their ’80s finest. Except one of them is no longer anonymous. I have it on very good authority that the smiling guy on the left is Braden Power, best known as one half of Power Properties, the outfit that renovated and now operates some 40 residential buildings near downtown.
To Power we say, “Like, totally gnarly, man! High five!”
