On a warm summer night in 1973, a popular gay bar in the French Quarter burned down with everyone inside, killing 32 people and injuring dozens more. The worst fire in modern New Orleans history was also a mass homicide by arson, but during the weeks and months ahead, no one would be charged for the crime.

Remember the Upstairs Lounge is the installation of Skylar Fein which documents the circumstances of a horrific fire that tore through a southern gay community in 1973 in New Orleans. One would think an exhibit such as this would be considered depressing, morbid, or controversial. In the beginning, the creator Mr. Fein felt that way himself.

“I had no idea how you’d take death, what was essentially a mass murder and turn it into art. I had never done anything like it, and I would go to the studio and try to make art about death, and it was incredibly depressing. I dreaded going to the studio, and I said, oh my god, something has to change about this. But I finally got some pictures of the bar, the inside of it before the fire. It has pictures of Burt Reynolds and his famous Cosmo centerfold, a picture of Mark Spitz and his Olympic Medals, and that was my way in, because those things made me smile. I have to be able to smile about this and laugh.

So I started making work that related to that part of the story, the pop culture in the US in 1973, the gay pop culture, New Orleans culture in 1973, and that gave me a way into the story. It’s about death, but its also about life. Before these people died they were having a great time, and I feel its another way to honor them.”

As progress through the faux bar and make your way through the swinging doors, the images on the wall, invoked in me what I had heard and thought of as the 70s. At the same time they did bring out a level of sadness and a bit of anger for the ignorance of a single person to lash out at a single place and yet cost so many people their lives.

Contrary to what some of you may be thinking, as I was suspect to thinking myself, the arson that occurred that night is not believed to have been that of a hate crime, but of a belligerent patron of the bar who was ejected from it earlier in the night for causing trouble. A gay man himself who later committed suicide, although never proven to be the one who started the fire.

The installation drew massive crowds in New Orleans, many of which even remembered the bar and some of whom were even there that night, like the firemen who first responded.

Now the creator has brought this installation to New York. He doesn’t expect as many visitors as those that came to see it in New Orleans, he knows the people here can never make the actual deep personal connection that those from New Orleans could. Which is very much akin he believes, to how he, a native of New Orleans, can never truly know what its like to gaze across the New York skyline and not see the once standing twin towers.

Mr. Feins main purpose is in telling the story of this place, that for awhile stood as a cultural icon and meeting place for scores of people that now resides only in the memory of those who remember it and in celluloid for those maybe just now learning of it.

Remember the Upstairs Lounge will be at 447 West 16th Street, in No Longer Empty from April 28th,  2010 to May 30th, 2010. More information can be found here.

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