The Sound Factory (nightclub)

The Sound Factory Bar was a nightclub at 12 West 21st Street in New York City's Manhattan. The club was originally called Private Eyes and was a very popular nightspot in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

It was then purchased by the owners of The Sound Factory, and, since the space was smaller, it was called the Sound Factory Bar. The club was an integral venue during a peak period of house music in New York. Wednesdays housed the recently resurrected Underground Network parties, hosted and promoted by recording artist Barbara Tucker and Don Welch, with Grammy Award winner Little Louie Vega as resident DJ. On Thursday nights, "Factoria 21," a tribal house gay night with DJ Merritt and Lord G, and on Friday nights, "Godfather of House" Frankie Knuckles helmed the decks. On Sunday afternoons, it was the host for "Body Positive Tea Dances," (a social for HIV positive men and their friends); the DJs were Mark Cicero and Mark Thomas. Closing out the weekend on Sunday evenings, "Purgatory" a tribal and progressive house gay night with DJ Merritt and DJ Andrew Tonio. Also, (in the latter Cheetah years) Cafe con Leche, Cafe Futuro, and Asseteria were weekly Sunday parties.

Other prominent DJs, artists, and parties appeared at the club as well during this time. There were legal troubles regarding the name of the venue after the business partners of Sound Factory split up. The space was resurrected as "Cheetah," but it has since closed. It become the Pacha New York.

In 2005, the owner, Richard Grant, of the Sound Factory, once one of Manhattan's hottest nightclubs, was acquitted by a jury on charges that he turned the club into a den for rampant drug use and sales. Drug dealing was so rampant at the Sound Factory nightclub that regular partygoers called it the “Crack Factory,” according to testimony in the trial of the club’s owner. Benjamin Barbieri, a regular customer at the shuttered Hell’s Kitchen club, said he overdosed there after doing a mix of drugs in October 2002. “I woke up in the hospital. I had an oxygen mask on,” Barbieri said. Barbieri was the first witness to testify in the Manhattan federal trial of Sound Factory owner Richard Grant and co-defendant Randell Rogiers, a club security director. Richard Grant is now deceased.