Shirley Mooney remembers a grubby mattress on the floor on which a man who repaired dentures for a living was rumored to have slept. The “before” pictures she kept have a pond-scum tint, as if mold had run riot in the space.
But she and her friend Tim Sullivan saw promise in the longtime club space on Belmont Avenue between Clark Street and Sheffield Avenue in Lake View that they agreed on the spot to lease for about $800 a month in mid-1983.
A baby-blue Formica bar went in along with glass-brick columns behind the bar and splashes of pink.
And thus Berlin Nightclub was born — a place that for 40 years celebrated its otherness with sequined body suits, sapphire-blue wigs and, as former patrons, performers and staff members recall, a we-welcome-everyone-here warmth.
“You could just go in — whether you were queer, straight, trans, a sex worker, it didn’t matter,” says Michael Shepperd, one of the original bartenders.
Berlin was closed for good last month amid a labor impasse between current owners Jim Schuman and Jo Webster and employees who said they deserved to be paid more than minimum wage. The owners cited “expenses of increased security, insurance and licensing, equipment, rent and more” for shutting down Berlin.
“The party ended at 5 a.m. November 19, 2023 — nearly forty years and more than 10,000 nights from when it all began,” the owners said on the nightclub’s website. “So the doors are locked. The music is silenced and our dreams are now memories. We hope you made some memories with us and that you smile when they visit you.”
‘This crazy, propulsive energy’
Memories have filled a Berlin Facebook page on which patrons — many from the club’s earliest days — expressed sadness but also gratitude for having had a place where they could go that was like no other in the city.
Dion Labriola, now 58, was 21 when he first got hired to work there to handle the lighting. He later moved to the DJ booth, where the crush inside the tiny space and the frenzy around it inspired his musical choices.
“There was this crazy, propulsive energy — like nonstop,” says Labriola, who worked at the club from 1987 to 2000 and now lives in Los Angeles. “It was nuts.”
Maybe he’d be playing a song by The B-52’s, or something by the industrial band Revolting Cocks or the nightly must-play music video: Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Marcia Baïla.”
Labriola came out in the mid-1980s in Akron, Ohio — a town with little going on musically in its gay bar scene to get his pulse racing. Berlin offered an “edgy” thrill, he says.
Shepperd, who also lives in Los Angeles, was hired to tend bar in the early days despite having zero experience.
“I walked in there at 21 years old —this 6-foot-6, queer, Black man — and I was absolutely welcomed right away,” says Shepperd, whose friends quizzed him with flashcards to help him learn to mix drinks.
One of the original bartenders told Shepperd his name was too drab. So he was given a new one: Modesty Blaise.
“It gave me a whole other side to explore,” says Shepperd, who occasionally dressed in drag while working at Berlin.
‘Our gay bar lives began’
Paul Campeol, 57, first went to Berlin in 1985. He had to sneak in because he was 19. Someone suggested a Corona. So he ordered one and sat with his buddies.
“We’re sitting there, and our science teacher from high school walks in,” says Campeol, who lives in Norridge. “He’s looking at us, and we’re not saying anything. And he’s not saying anything because he’s not supposed to be there — because he’s a Catholic school teacher. ... Our gay bar lives began.”
But Berlin wasn’t only a gay bar.
“I would go there with my female friends, and they would always find a straight guy because it was a place to meet straight women,” Campeol says. “Straight women hang out with gay guys.”
All were welcome “as long as you didn’t tread on us,” he says.
Joseph Giannini got a job in the late 1980s as the emcee of the Sunday night drag show. He was 17 and had never done drag before, but he knew he wanted to be a performer. Sullivan loved his audition — he did Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout” — and hired him.
Giannini, who lives in Hyde Park, took his role seriously, spending hours getting ready for the show — plucking unsightly hairs, dabbing his eyelids to create a “smoky eye base,” squeezing his 6-foot-2 “big girl” frame into a sequined body suit or glamorous gown.
On stage, it was often pure silliness. One night, after the huge Loop flood of 1992, Giannini — performing as Gina Taye — came out singing Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”
“I had shopping bags full of water and goldfish, and water was flying everywhere,” Giannini says.
Another time, he came on stage dressed as “fat Cher,” singing her hit “If I Could Turn Back Time” while cramming donuts into his mouth.
‘Successful pretty much from the day we opened’
Mooney, now retired and living in North Carolina, owned the bar with Sullivan for just over a decade. Mooney is straight, and Sullivan was gay, she says. Before they opened Berlin, they would occasionally go to gay and straight bars together.
“Why can’t there be a place that it wouldn’t matter [about] your sexuality?” she says they wondered. “So we said, ‘Why don’t we open a bar?’ But we just knew it would be successful. Literally, it was successful pretty much from the day we opened.”
Sullivan died of complications from AIDS at 43 in 1994. Schuman and Webster took over the club later that year.
Mooney says it’s “heartbreaking” that Berlin is closed.
“But, in the same sense, it’s heartwarming,” she says. “I’m amazed at how many people have reached out to me to let me know how much Berlin changed their lives.”
