Tunnel was a nightclub located at 220 Twelfth Avenue (between 27th and 28th Streets), in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It operated from 1986 to 2001.

Venue: Tunnel (New York nightclub)
Town: New York, US

Tunnel was a nightclub located at 220 Twelfth Avenue (between 27th and 28th Streets), in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It operated from 1986 to 2001. The nightclub was located within the Terminal Warehouse Company Central Stores Building, also known as Chelsea Terminal Warehouse, which is now part of the West Chelsea Historic District. Tunnel, also known as The Tunnel, was owned by Boaz Aharoni, a real-estate developer, and Elli Dayan, founder and former chairman of Bonjour International, a company best known for blue jeans. The club was built in a space which was formerly a railroad freight terminal. Dayan sold the property to Marco Riccota in January 1990. Party promoter Peter Gatien acquired nightclub in 1992. Tunnel closed late in 2001 due to non-payment of rent and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign. Gatien had been accused of drug trafficking, charges he was acquitted of, although he and his wife pleaded guilty to tax evasion and were deported to Canada in 2003. The club was named for the tunnel-like shape of the main room, in which train tracks from the early 1900s ran through a sunken area of the dance floor. These were a relic of an era in which railroad sidings from the Eleventh Avenue freight line of the New York Central Railroad ran directly into warehouse buildings in that area, so that goods could be transferred to and from freight cars which crossed the Hudson River on car floats from Hoboken, New Jersey. The club was architecturally distinctive: a long, narrow space with multiple rooms on several levels. The dance floor featured several dance cages. The decor of the club changed frequently. One room, decorated by artist Kenny Scharf, was called the Kenny Scharf Lava Lounge. Others were decorated as Victorian libraries, S/M dungeons, and lounges. The club featured unisex bathrooms, which were the converted locker rooms formerly used by the freight terminal's workers. They had modern stalls with partiti