The 1970s: the disco decade, thinly documented

The clubs of the 1970s

The era of the dance floor: Nationally, the 1970s were the disco decade, and Fort Wayne danced — but the honest statement of this record is that no Fort Wayne disco palace, no Studio 54 of the Summit City, survives in the press, directory, or institutional record reached for this section. The decade shows up instead in people and in firsts. Its best-documented nightlife figure is a dancer: Harry Paul, known everywhere as Disco Harry, a Fort Wayne fixture of the disco craze whom NBC's "Real People" featured in 1979 — the show that gave showy non-celebrities their moment — and whose entrances a local disc jockey, Rick Hughes, announced in the formula the syndicated accounts preserved: "Disco Harry has entered the room." Paul danced on into old age at Piere's in the 1990s before his death in 1994, and the arc of his fame — national television in 1979, a beloved room fixture thereafter — is the disco era's fullest Fort Wayne trace.

The decade's documented firsts: The 1970s also opened the two nightlife lines this section treats in their own entries below. In 1971 Charles Miller opened Tulisa's, the city's first gay bar — the founding act of the gay-bar record, told in full in the gay bars entry. And in about 1976 an adult nightclub use began at 1407 South Calhoun Street, the earliest date in the gentlemen's-club record, which the federal courts would still be sorting out four decades later; that record is the next-but-one entry's. The Keenan's demolition in 1974, told above, closed the hotel-lounge era in the same years. What the 1970s left Fort Wayne, on the record reached, is not a room but a transition: from lounges to dance floors, and from a tolerated, unlisted nightlife to named rooms that the directories, and eventually the courts, would have to reckon with.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, "Disco Harry Paul" (People, D surnames) — Harry Paul's 1979 "Real People" appearance, DJ Rick Hughes's "Disco Harry has entered the room," and the syndicated account "Disco Harry has one last dance" (July 3, 1994); his obituary ran in The Journal Gazette, July 15, 1994.
2. After Dark Nightclub press release (January 2, 2023) and the Journal Gazette report as carried by Windy City Times (January 8, 2023) — Tulisa's opening, April 29, 1971; told in full in the gay bars entry of this section.
3. 1407, LLC v. City of Fort Wayne, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana (January 25, 2019) — the 1407 South Calhoun Street property used as a sexually oriented business from approximately 1976; told in full in the gentlemen's clubs entry of this section.