On the evening of January 12th, red lights blinked, sirens whined and a fortress of fire trucks blocked off traffic beneath an overpass on Bushwick's Myrtle Avenue. Steely-eyed firefighters, in the final stages of combating a third-floor residential fire, resembled action figures waddling through a large, smoking dollhouse from a distance. One glided past the building's upper floors on an aerial ladder. Another on the rooftop appeared to strike a window below with a halligan. On the second floor, a firefighter shone his flashlight across the walls, ostensibly carrying out a primary search of the building. A growing crowd of onlookers formed across the street, some quietly recording the scene on their phones and walking away, others gesturing toward the building as they spoke among strangers. It is difficult for humans to look away from tragedy, even when it is close to home.

Owner John Barclay was lounging on his couch not far from Bossa Nova Civic Club when he received a call about a fire above his venue. He immediately raced there and scaled the roof, where he and the club's graphic designer Julian Duron attempted to control the blaze, an effort Barclay describes as futile. "It was an inferno at that point," he tells me over email. The New York Fire Department ultimately arrived, rescuing the tenant and quelling the flames before they could snake down to the floors below. But the fire still left behind an entirely incinerated third floor, an injured resident, a dead dog and two lower floors, including Bossa's, swamped with fire hose water. "It was like swimming under a waterfall," Barclay says of the fire's initial aftermath downstairs. "When there's that much water," Barclay continues, "The sheetrock rots and you have to tear it down."

The walls, ceilings and floors have since been gutted. There's waterlogged furniture, lighting and gear in need of replacement. Until Barclay hears from the building owner's insurance company, what exactly these costly next steps will look like remain uncertain. The afternoon following the devastating event, Philly-based DJ BEARCAT and former Bossa booker Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson launched a GoFundMe campaign requesting $300,000 in an effort to support the club's recovery, as well as the staff and tenants impacted by the tragedy. "Bossa has endured but survived an extreme amount of adversities, during a pandemic no less," the campaign's description reads. "This level of harm needs the full backing of the community to restore."

First conceived as a punkish countercurrent to the venues of its time, there is much to appreciate about the shuttered 140-capacity club after a near-decade in operation. At some point, most of its trusted regulars have brandished a laminated membership card at the door, instantly permitting them free entry for the night. A now defunct tumblr called "is bossa poppin'?" once cued in-the-know clubbers to make their way onto its checkered dance floor (or to stay the hell home). In 2019, Bossa's free, fruit-flavored "rave water" inspired the creation of its own cheeky Instagram, the forerunner to a similar account documenting the club's infamously lengthy line—a rite of passage that proved to be almost as lively as the venue inside. Even New York's favorite club beverage, White Label Yerba Mate, is the unpretentious brainchild of Bossa's owner. And whenever a moderately comical incident took place at the club, memes hyperbolizing the event flooded certain internet circles before the venue flicked its lights on the next day. Many were shared by Bossa itself.

I have fallen in love with music innumerable times at Bossa, on any day of the week. It's the one club in New York that I could attend alone with the peace of mind that I'd run into a few regulars I could kick it with or if not, choose to embrace my anonymity and dance my social anxiety away in the comfort of the omnipresent fog. On countless occasions, I've made my best drunken attempts to synopsize the past few months of my life to acquaintances who I've always shared a special connection with, but solely saw after-dark at Bossa's neon-hued bar, dawdling over a Mezcal sour. "There would always be some regulars, there would always be some really random drunk bro or two, there'd always be a couple of DJs there to see their DJ friends," writer Emily Witt recalls of the club. "It just felt like a rare place to have a spontaneous encounter with people you didn't know." The word "community" is often regurgitated in dance music scenes with a liberalness that, in most cases, is aptly met with a weary eye-roll. But Bossa might have been the first club in Brooklyn's post-DIY scene era where regulars at least felt like they could collectively be a part of something culturally monumental.

When Bossa opened its doors in December 2012, the former banquet hall, rumored by locals to be home to old New York tales of gambling and organized crime, had humble beginnings. Inside, the venue, which is endearingly called "Techno Cheers" by regulars, was a convivial sight, with local mainstays like Umfang, Kim Ann Foxman and Bookworms gracing the decks at its early shows. Longtime patrons speak of nights focused on disco, house, hip-hop and outré live ambient before Bossa's programming shifted to its present-day techno focus. Dance music had always been Barclay's niche, but there were initial concerns that large swaths of clientele would be driven away in the club's effort to exclusively program dance music. At the time, the neighborhood housing the bar was still considered a risky location to found a venue—much less one centering electronic music. Unlike the present day, in the early '10s, the beloved Myrtle strip wasn't alight with a wealth of trusted venues and cadres of amused revelers eager to prance across a dance floor on a weekday night. "I remember having some Manhattan friends, they were kind of scared to go out to that area." Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson tells me. "No one was really around there at that time," she continues. "Myrtle Ave had a particular reputation of being dangerous."

Many were reminded that the area hasn't entirely lost this reputation when scores of clubbers, newly vaccinated, crawled out of their pandemic hibernations and onto their old stomping grounds. During 2021's post-vaccine summer, it seemed like there was an alarming incident inside and outside the club every few weeks. In September, a stabbing inside the venue that left someone hospitalized sent shockwaves across the Brooklyn dance music scene, compelling the venue to up security measures at the door. Someone else I interviewed around the time shared that just a month before, he had a knife pulled on him by a different person outside the club. "The security refused to do anything and even let the guy back in the venue," he says. "I put them on blast and they didn't respond to any of my messages. Now of course it happened again but tragically even worse." Writing on one of Bossa's walls once famously read: "If You Touch A Woman Against Her Will In This Establishment, We Will Literally Ruin Your Life," but on Twitter, concerns from women about an increasing amount of sexual assaults, as well as attempted assaults, taking place at the club began to trickle onto my timeline. As recently as December, a friend I had invited out was hesitant to come after someone they knew had been roofied there.

People often club to forget the weight of their daily oppressions, but some of Bossa's patrons learned the hard way that this wasn't always possible. To make matters more complicated, gentrification has a nasty habit of shrouding neighborhoods like Bushwick in the illusion of safety for gentrifiers and natives alike. But garish street art, renovated bodegas and nouveau riche residents don't effect much change to the continued unrest of violence, rampant drug addiction and poverty that still overwhelm the trendiest Brooklyn streets.

Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson

The dawn of Bossa's tenure was set against the backdrop of a troubled era of New York nightlife, one marked by the suppression of its DIY scene due to rampant gentrification, frequent police raids and one racist, Prohibition-era regulation. Enacted in 1926, the New York City Cabaret Law is widely believed to have targeted racially mixed Harlem jazz clubs by prohibiting dancing in clubs that didn't own a cabaret license, something notoriously difficult and expensive to obtain. Though the law had been amended several times since its inception (an original version banned the use of traditional jazz instruments like wind, brass and percussion) a recent interpretation was weaponized under Mayor Giuliani to shutter dance music venues at the end of the millennium. Then, in the '10s, an extension of this period was reflected in the ubiquity of M.A.R.C.H., an NYPD-led task force whose presence was considered a grim reaper for small, underground music venues.

Once Bossa opened, it didn't take long for the club to collect its own experiences with M.A.R.C.H., who would often conduct SWAT-like raids of the venue, finding any opportunity to issue tickets, even on a slow night. As a club open seven days a week with some of Brooklyn's finest techno lineups, the venue became an easy target for unwelcome encounters with law enforcement. Over time, the venue was forced to close its backyard, prohibit any kind of dancing inside and ultimately, their liquor license was threatened to be revoked. If carried through, that would have been a death sentence for the club. In 2017, Barclay and longtime friend Hutchinson decided to combat The Cabaret Law, with a campaign Hutchinson called "a perfect storm." An eager-to-be-re-elected Mayor De Blasio had just come into office, and in the midst of vital conversations involving race that Trump's election had elicited, their emphasis on the law's racist legacy proved effective. Within a year, the Cabaret law was repealed, and an exciting new era of New York nightlife was on the horizon. Barclay described the feat as "the moment I'm the proudest of, without a doubt."

As one of the first legal, programmed clubs in Bushwick, prior to Bossa's arrival, most of New York's legal venues were concentrated in downtown Manhattan. While an ecosystem of DIY nightlife, including now-shuttered venues like Silent Barn, Body Actualized Center and 285 Kent Ave. (which Barclay also owned for six months), took hold of Bushwick and Williamsburg. The repeal in 2017 not only made it easier for legal clubs to open, it allowed more of them to stay open. That year, two venues that are now essential to New York dance music held their first events: a tiny, queer bar called Mood Ring located just a short walk from Bossa, and Elsewhere, one of the city's largest clubs, erected on the other side of Bushwick. Whether legal or DIY, a club with programming every night of the week was, and still is, mostly unheard of in New York. Current club programming around the city "wouldn't be like the way it is right now if it weren't for Bossa," former resident and Haus Of Altr head MoMA Ready tells me. "They were the only club that had resident DJs every night of the month."

But no venue, however noteworthy, can shift culture by itself. Bossa's success was possible not only because of its unprecedented hours but also due to the work of its regular DJs, many of whom were at the forefront of a Brooklyn techno renaissance that was overwhelmingly Black, queer and feminist. In the late '10s, techno cognoscenti and socially-aware music platforms such as the Black-owned Half Moon Radio and the Make Techno Black Again campaign encouraged artists, clubbers and promoters to take a more intellectual approach to dance music by honoring the genre's Black and queer roots. It's no wonder then, that many of Bossa's best nights were architected by artists of marginalized identities. LSDXOXO's delectably queer series Floorgasm got its footing in Bossa's close quarters before it traveled across Europe. Over the years, Jasmine Infiniti's New World Dysorder techno party gave POC queer and trans DJs a sanctum to let it all out, while Umfang's Technofeminism residency offered a memorable name to the growing movement of denouncing all-male lineups.

Around 2018, DJs MoMA Ready, AceMo, Kush Jones and DJ SWISHA, a crew emblematic of New York's Black dance music ethos, were becoming local celebrities and Bossa was one of their favorite haunts. MoMA Ready admits that he only began frequenting the club when Hutchinson, a woman who was more than happy to veto a lineup of all-white men, was brought on as booker from 2018 to 2020. "I know what Bossa was like before—that is the reason why I didn't go, you know what I mean? Like, it was white guys. This is back when Ron Morelli was the king of Bossa, you know what I mean?" he says. "If Bossa's going to be in the middle of the hood, it should see what's good with the culture of New York."

Kush Jones, AceMo, DJ Swisha and Fauzia at Bossa

As a programmer, Hutchinson was largely responsible for the shifting demographic of both Bossa's lineups and patrons. Outside of that role, she shared a symbiotic relationship with the club. She met Umfang in Bossa's early days and Discwoman, the feminist DJ collective they would helm together with Christine McCharen-Tran, found a long-term platform in the venue. "I don't know what would have happened with this group if Bossa wasn't there," Hutchinson admits, speaking of her serendipitous encounter with Umfang. "I mean, that's really what it's about. Isn't it? That's how you create—is by meeting people that kind of feel that spirit to create something." Years later, Hutchinson also launched Brooklyn's first electronic music festival centering local Black talent, dweller, which was first held at Bossa in 2019. Countless careers have been elevated to extraordinary levels after being associated with either platform. Discwoman's mix series is esteemed enough to transform a rising DJ into a regularly booked artist, and a dweller gig is a celebrated acknowledgement of a DJ's position in or proximity to the Black electronic music canon.

For many local artists, a future of New York nightlife without Bossa is unfathomable. Several fundraisers launched over the past few weeks speak to this. Three days after the fire, local acts Rose Kourts, JADALAREIGN, Honey Bun and DJ Lita played at Bushwick club Heaven Or Las Vegas, with a slice of proceeds going to Bossa. Two weeks later, Myrtle Avenue's latest techno club Rash held a night called "Bossa Forever" with Umfang, Kush Jones, DJ Swisha and DIME. On February 10th, Good Room held a similar fundraiser with the likes of DJs Kilopatrah Jones, Lychee and Katie Rex. "Anyone who is a member of the Brooklyn dance music community owes so much to this little club," the event description read. "So many DJs got their start there while dancers found a place they could call home."

"The fact that [Bossa] was quite cozy linked to it being an intimate experience, which is something that I really valued as I continued to become the DJ that I am today," says quest?onmarq, who tells me they struggled to sleep after hearing about the fire. Their new $5 EP raising funds for the club is named after two classic beverages served at Bossa: Tropical Goth / Rave Water. "Learning how to read a room and cater to the room really happened there," they say before an emotional pause.

Bossa's own fundraiser currently inches closer to the halfway point of its goal, meaning the clubbers who have scuffed its dance floor still have ample time to reflect on what it got right, and what they can urge the club to do differently next time around. What does John Barclay wish he'd done differently? "There's a few things that come to mind," he says. "But the most notable one is I wish we had invested in a better property insurance policy."

RA donated $1,000 to the Bossa Nova Restoration, Staff & Tenant Fund. The campaign is still accepting donations here.