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How Abel Helped Engineer a Neighborhood’s Transformation

A DJ Recounts the Gay Club History of Southbeach

Written by Thomas Barker

It’s the late fall of 1980. The streets are empty in South Beach. The quiet beachside community of retired residents closely resembles a gigantic old folks’ home — hardly the bustling world capital of music, modeling and muscle that it would morph into in just a few years. At the moment, however, there’s no nightlife and not much to see beyond the decaying Art Deco architecture. The Mariel boatlift, a recent mass exodus from Cuba, has flooded the area with newly arrived refugees. The few people who happen to visit South Beach can only find entertainment by crossing the bay and partying in Downtown Miami, Coconut Grove or Coral Gables.

But like most diamonds in the rough, South Beach just needed a little polish. There was one person who was present at the creation and helped lay the groundwork for what would become one of the hottest dance destinations in the world. Abel Aguilera had just arrived from Brooklyn, but the world would soon know him by the name DJ Abel.

“South Beach was a suburb,” Abel explains. “That’s the best way to describe it. Miami Beach was a retirement community. There was no young activity there whatsoever. It was a very limited scene at the time, but I could tell it was the beginning of something big.”

That is exactly what happened when Phil Smith, the owner of New York’s legendary Twilo, decided to bring his gigantic club concept to the sandy shores of South Beach. He named it 1235, after the club’s address on then still-dicey Washington Avenue. As more and more New Yorkers moved to South Beach, the club industry began to blossom, and 1235 was definitely at the center of it all.

Previously known as Club Z and currently as Mansion, 1235 was one of the first major developments that changed South Beach. “It was the biggest ‘Wow!’,” recalls Abel. “It was Miami’s Palladium of nightlife,” he says, referring to the New York megaclub of the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Imagine stars like Tina Turner performing for three to four thousand people.”

While Smith was putting his final touches on 1235, Abel was working as a radio DJ on Q FM 107, where he was honing his spinning in a variety of different formats, ranging from disco to pop — including, of course, House. He became somewhat of a local celebrity when Phil hired him to be the official resident DJ of 1235. Throughout the week, DJ Abel would spin for a different crowd every night.

“At that time, I was doing radio and gigs at 1235. I stayed at 1235 even after Phil Smith left,” says DJ Abel. “The owners of the building kept the name for years and ran it themselves. We had radio stations piped in, so every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday there were about 3,000 people. During the summer I would spin for the teens. Sundays we would do gay tea dances, and on Saturdays it would be more of a straight crowd. It was similar to what Space [in Downtown Miami] is today. The crowd was more educated when it came to music, and that really made a big difference in the club scene.”

More Clubs: Nu, Warsaw, Salvation

It wasn’t long before more clubs started to pop up in South Beach, and one in particular was changing the way people partied on the island. It was called Club Nu, and it was the place to see and be seen. Gianni Versace was a regular, along with his pal Madonna and their entourage of fabulosas.

“Eventually Club Nu opened up,” Abel recounts. “It was located in the building where Miami Beach’s new public library is now located. It was one of the most chic clubs in Miami Beach. It was all about fashion and all about the music. It was the place to be seen. For a while, it was a battle between those two clubs.”

As the nightlife began to grow, so did the number of trendy residents, who began crowding out the elderly Jews and Cuban immigrants. More and more New Yorkers flocked to South Beach to experience the “new thing,” and, like DJ Abel, made the decision never to leave. Many of them opened chic restaurants or restored the old Art Deco hotels to their original splendor. In this case of the “chicken and the egg” however, it was definitely the dance music that came before the people, and 1235 had a lot to do with that.
“I first noticed the shift from South Beach being a retirement community to South Beach being the epicenter of nightlife in 1991,” explains DJ Abel. “There was a big rush of people coming in from New York, and they were buying properties, opening stores, and fixing up the neighborhoods. That really helped create the vibe that makes South Beach so great today.

“I remember in ‘92 when Paragon held its opening night party at the 1235 space. There was something like 4,000 people crammed inside the space, listening to Frankie Knuckles. I just didn’t know where all those people came from, and there were probably another 2,000 people standing outside trying to get in. I knew at that moment that something big was happening.”

SoBe Finds Salvation

How right he was, as one of South Beach’s most legendary clubs opened its doors. The club — located almost around the corner from Paragon) — was the Warsaw Ballroom. It had taken over a cafeteria built in 1939 by Henry Hohauser, one of the architects who helped make the area the nation’s greatest repository of Art Deco buildings. Every Saturday night, it was packed with club kids, ravers, drag queens, trendoids, and everyone and everything in between. At the time, South Beach wasn’t just about glamour; it was about being over the top, accessorizing, and, of course, music.
As South Beach became more and more famous, so did DJ Abel. “Paragon took me to a whole new level, because I was fresh and new to that crowd,” DJ Abel recalls. “In ‘92, there was the beach and there was the mainland. The beach crowd was a more musically educated crowd of people, who loved music and knew all the DJs. That was what brought me up to that A-list level that was more national.”

As for Paragon, it would reach the heights of fabulousness when a certain one-named musician purchased the property in 1994. (At the time, he wasn’t going by the name “Prince,” but a weird symbol.) The songwriter-performer’s entry into the SoBe nightlife scene added to the celebrity of the island. Madonna (and her local gal pal Ingrid Casares), Sylvester Stallone and, of course, Italian designer Gianni Versace became some of the many bold-faced denizens of the neighborhood.

The high point of SoBe’s era of the megaclub came in 1996 with the opening of Salvation, on the fringe of South Beach on West Avenue at 17th Street. “When Salvation opened, it only made things even better for me,” Abel says, “because it put me on a national level even more, which just gave me more power and edge in my hometown.”

The End of the Megaclub Era

With Salvation, Warsaw, and Paragon running at full speed, the South Beach club scene was definitely popping. But the seeds of change had been planted, and, once sprouted, they took root and altered the existing ecosystem. In the case of South Beach, it was a slow easing of the scene. The factors were typical of a once-marginal area that had become hip. The very people who had been attracted by its cachet didn’t want to put up with the late-night noise (which, ironically, gave the area the cachet that brought there in the first place). As the area became more and more expensive, rising real estate prices made it hard for a large club to prove itself more valuable than a retail or residential building.

One by one, the megaclubs closed their doors. By the millennium, most of the large clubs had been replaced with smaller, more intimate dance venues. Bars that had some dancing, like Score on Lincoln Road and Twist on Washington Avenue, became the new gay hangouts. There, revelers could interact with the DJ, which marked a sea change. Today, more and more partiers don’t want to just see the DJ spinning records; they want to party with him. 

According to DJ Abel, South Beach is going through another transition. But even as it has become an upscale enclave of the moneyed class, he believes that the beautiful Art Deco neighborhood is still one of the hottest places in the country to party.

“There are still a lot of great places and lot of great clubs in South Beach,” says Abel. “All the clubs in South Beach are five-star clubs to me. There are just so many really great places, and there’s always going to be another new place opening up just around the corner.”

 

 

 

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