ROOM WITH A VIEW Awesome Color and awesome color fill the Glasslands.

Courtesy of the Glasslands Gallery

It was 1:15am on a July night in Brooklyn and the party was moving into high gear. A well-known hip-hop DJ and writer, among the many acts scheduled to play till sunrise, had just launched into a set of hard, bumpy ’70s funk, bringing the hundred-strong crowd to a sweaty boil. Handmade decorations of all shapes and colors hung from the walls and ceiling; the few choice make-out spots were all in use. In the next room, another DJ was driving a similar crowd into a frenzy. Upstairs, a couple dozen people doing karaoke sang lyrics off notebook pages, laughing hysterically, while down the hall a veteran local musician was anxiously explaining some slides to a bemused audience. The roof, too, was filled with joyous people at perhaps the city’s last great recurring party, an underground institution we’ll refer to as R. (An event such as this doesn’t last by throwing its name around in the press.) “Things got really weird [around 1994],” says S, who has run the R party with a partner since then. “I was in a band that was doing pretty well, but it had become not fun to play out. It wasn’t just the money: Before then nightclubs had discos and bands—plus installations, and art, and performance artists. Then somehow it all got segregated into these weird, personality-less zones—bands only played in bars, and discos became large, with thousands of people, just blank. ”

The same weekend as the R party, 20 people sat on folding chairs and the floor of the basement of a Lutheran church in Greenpoint, waiting to hear Katie Eastburn of the band Young People play a solo set. It was the sort of gig that’d seem more natural somewhere like Missoula, where tiny scenes coalesce in rented halls. But every weekend, dozens of low-profile, off-the-radar events pepper the outer boroughs, ranging from the peaceful (and legal) church setting to the bacchanalian (yet orderly) R. More and more creative young New Yorkers pursue their nighttime fun in spaces like these, so much so that an increasing number of musicians and DJs are opting out of aboveground clubs entirely.

“Why go through that system?” says Derek Stanton, guitarist for Awesome Color and Used to Be Women, about the city’s legal clubs. “It’s not a music scene, it’s just music business. Even if you book an 8pm slot on a Wednesday, they’ll tell you not to play anywhere else two weeks before or after your gig. The way they count heads [to divvy up door money] makes bands compete for a small amount of cash—even the smaller clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan do it,” he adds, naming the laid-back Cake Shop as the only real exception among proper venues.

Though the settings vary, the people behind these sort-of clubs draw from the same playbook: Events are “gallery openings” or “private parties”; admission and drinks are by “donation,” which tend to be markedly lower than at aboveground venues; some, like R, purposely have no profile at all on the Web, but others, such as Death by Audio, have MySpace pages and get listed regularly in magazines like TONY. For obvious reasons, hardly anyone will talk on the record about what they do, but they all take pains not to give the police any reason to drop by. “We’re just on our game,” says one Williamsburg artist who operates a space. “We don’t let people drink out in the street, and we don’t let massive crowds form out there.”

One venue, the Glasslands Gallery, aims to have the best of both worlds. “We’ve seen all these places we loved get shut down, and we don’t want that,” says Rolyn Hu, one of a pair of artists who run the space. “I’ve already had two [underground venues] in the past,” says her partner, Brooke Baxter. “I was getting shut down almost every time I did an event—it was exhausting.” Since taking over the spot last year, the two have worked to obtain a certificate of occupancy and a liquor license, and are on track for a September opening as a legitimate club—complete with band practice spaces and arts-organization offices; they also plan to give a portion of their proceeds to a different local charity each month. “The idea all along was to become a community art center,” Baxter says, citing the R parties as inspiring their vision for the Glasslands. “We want to have after-school programs for kids; no way could we do that if we were having illegal parties at night.”

Legal or less so, all this activity is clearly the result of years of hyperactive police attention initiated by Rudy Giuliani and continued, albeit more quietly, by the Bloomberg administration. “It’s just impossible in New York,” says S. “It isn’t just underground parties: Everyone involved in any kind of art and entertainment has been under siege. We hadn’t planned [to begin R] back then, but for me it was an epiphany when I realized making money from your art wasn’t the most important thing. That’s when you can start making something you like and are proud of.”