What was The Works?
In 1992 the most radical room in Scottsdale was a warehouse next to City Hall, and on a Saturday night the line outside it was a thousand people deep, some of them in their underwear.
The Works was the club Steven Rogers had wanted to build for years. He and his partner Greg Walker ran two bars he did not much like, a frat bar on Mill Avenue called Club UM and The Zone, a comedy club and restaurant at the Scottsdale Galleria. In 1991 they leased a 14,000-square-foot building off Scottsdale Road and Second Street, the former home of the theater company Actors Lab Arizona, a few steps from the Civic Center. The block had been the town’s cotton gin from 1920, and the historian Joan Fudala lists the club among the gin buildings’ later uses. It opened in the spring of 1992.
Inside it looked like a New York club dropped into a cow town: catwalks for go-go dancers, tiers of dance risers, lasers, a giant disco ball, a DJ booth on the second level and a 100,000-watt sound system with a wall of subwoofers. The house DJ, Eddie Amador, played from 9 p.m. to about 7 a.m. Later Markus Schulz took Saturdays. Both became international names.
The crowd was the point. Walker wanted the rave kids and Rogers wanted the gay community, and on opening night they got both, plus drag queens, club kids, and plenty of straight Scottsdale who came to stare and stayed to dance. It lasted five years, through police helicopters, two shootings outside and a city that never knew what to make of it. When the lease expired in the fall of 1997, the landowner wanted a parking lot. The site is now a hospital.
The nights people remember
Fridays and Saturdays were different clubs. Once the rave scene exploded, Amador split the week: Friday “soul sessions” of New York and Chicago house, and Saturdays of harder, faster techno that one regular called a rave every week. When Schulz arrived and took Saturdays, the room got more polished and, some regulars felt, less underground.
Underwear nights were weekly. Rogers liked to say that Dillard’s at Fashion Square called to thank him, because it sold out of underwear on those nights. Halloween meant big drag shows and everyone in costume.
The bookings were early. Moby and the Prodigy played in 1993, with John Acquaviva, Richie Hawtin and the Plus 8 crew, to about 150 people who were the core of the Phoenix rave scene. RuPaul did a show before most of Scottsdale knew the name. Charles Barkley, Dan Majerle, Pamela Anderson and Christopher Walken were spotted, and U2’s Adam Clayton came in with the band’s tour manager during the Zoo TV tour.
It added a pool. In its later years The Works built a VIP side bar, where rock and pop played for the sports-bar crowd, and an outdoor pool that one regular called the first day-drinking pool bar in Scottsdale. Promoter Steve LeVine later pointed out that the pool parties there were doing what Maya does now, twenty years early.
Getting in was work. The door policy was real and the wait could be hours. Membership cards got you to the front; regular dancers got in free.
A safe room in a Quaker town
To understand why people still talk about The Works, you have to remember the Scottsdale it opened into. Rogers’ own phrase for the early-1990s city was “Quaker town”: saloons like the Rusty Spur, resort bars, and almost nowhere to dance. The Valley’s underground was in places like the Silver Dollar in downtown Phoenix, a tiny bar with bikers, drag queens and a rave DJ, which Rogers loved and wanted to build “on a big scale.” When the Silver Dollar died to make way for the downtown arena, he hired its doorman and its DJ.
It was also a gay space when that was dangerous. A regular, Sloane Burwell, remembered that AIDS was still a major thing, ACT UP had barely started in town, and gay bars could be dangerous places; a club in Scottsdale where the gay crowd and the straight crowd danced together felt like safety. Rogers insisted the room was really “pansexual,” three-quarters straight by his estimate. Either way, it stood with BS West, open on Fifth Avenue since 1988, as one of the few places in town where everyone was welcome, and our LGBTQ Scottsdale history is thinner for how little of that era was written down.
The city noticed. Rogers remembered officials studying the dance floor for suggestive dancing, and a night with police helicopters overhead, mounted officers in the parking lot and a line in underwear around the building. Between 1994 and 1996 there were incidents outside, including two shootings, and they likely shaped the landlord’s choice in 1997. Schulz, who announced the final night on his radio show, said later that it needed to close: the internet was arriving, the times were changing, and nobody wanted to watch the original soul of the club change with them.
Honest assessment: The Works was loud, chaotic, sometimes dangerous and completely necessary. It was the first time Scottsdale had a club that belonged to its outsiders, it launched two DJ careers that went global, and it showed the bar owners who came after, from the Axis-Radius generation to today’s pool clubs, that the town would line up for nightlife if someone built it. Few of them have been as brave about who they let in.