Jason Binn and Selita Ebanks at Marquee. (Patrick McMullan)

When describing Marquee, the recently reopened upper-Chelsea nightclub, you might find yourself falling back on that Talking Heads song “Heaven.” You know, the bar where nothing, nothing ever happens? When a nightclub reopens exactly one decade after its first inauguration, in the exact same spot, with the exact same owners and the exact same name, it’s hard not to drift back to the verse: “When this party is over, it will start again; it won’t be any different, it’ll be exactly the same.”

Marquee, located in the dead zone of 27th Street and 10th Avenue, might not be exactly the same as it ever was, but it’s close. It’s also not heaven—and neither is it Heaven, the gay club on Sixth Avenue. Instead, it is a beacon of not-quite-old-enough-to-be-nostalgic New York, which had its heyday in the early to mid-2000s. Founded in 2003 by the then-newly minted Strategic Group, launched by party promoters Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg, Marquee took the space of a former taxi warehouse at a time when Chelsea was the place to be, and not yet the place to avoid at all costs. (Today, it should be said, the reasons for avoiding Chelsea at night are quite different from those in the pre-Marquee era: it’s no longer dangerous, but simply full of misguided gents who still think bottle service is a fine way to impress women.) Stars and scenesters mingled at Marquee, forging a tentative detente with the gossip columnists who lurked in the shadows, avoiding the pulsating lights and straining to hear anything at all above the din of a deejay with oversized electronics.

But by 2008, the scene at Marquee grew stale, and even its owners got bored, preoccupied with their new Marquee outposts in Las Vegas and Australia. (Not to mention LAVO, AVENUE, TAO and the Venetian.) Six years in the running, four years dormant, and now: rebirth. And it won’t be any different, it will be exactly the same. More or less.

As Mr. Tepperberg wrote in an email to The Observer via email:

A lot of people, not just in New York, had a real fondness for Marquee - it was a special place to so many of us and we wanted to preserve that. At the same time, we knew we needed to update it and make it a place that spoke to today's nightlife culture, which is why we completely redid the entire space... At the opening, we were astounded by the feedback we got from everyone. People just went crazy. We knew there was a nostalgia there associated with the old Marquee, which is why we had the doormen greet everyone with "Welcome Back to Marquee," but what really blew us away was how much people loved the new concept. You could tell that people have been missing that in New York, which is why I think the response was so overwhelming.

Outside the new/old Marquee on opening night, guests were greeted by a collection of golf carts topped by with luminescent toadstool roofs like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Whether these decorative flourishes were also functional was a topic of conversation among those waiting in line. We never found out.

Tall, muscular drag queens—a once-prevalent local bird sighted less and less frequently over the past several years, since high-profile Chelsea clubs like Marquee were shuttered or forgotten—were peacocking at the entrance. The imposing bouncers seemed to know each of these ladies personally, and opened the black velvet rope (so much more chic than its red counterpart) to let them pass.

But there was also an element of new: the door “list” was no longer a physical entity, but a “constantly updated spreadsheet,” according to the slim-lipped man at the door. “If anyone ‘just put you on’ on their list, I would know,” he replied curtly to the people ahead of us, who were apparently trying to talk their way into the opening-night festivities. His eyes never left his iPad mini, which was so small we wondered how he could read any names off it at all. “Now, when you’re not on the list, there’s no excuses. If you call someone who can add you on the list, I’ll see it updated in 10 seconds.” The group stood to one side, dejected.

It had just turned 10, the official start time of the party, but already an assortment of hipsters, aging club kids, Jersey boys, models and celebrities was arriving. Legendary nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan was snapping the beautiful people, who that evening included Tyson Beckford, Timbaland, Nicky Hilton, Brandon Davis, Eve, Swizz Beatz, Akon, Busta Rhymes and Patricia Field. If Messrs. Tepperberg and Strauss couldn’t exactly rewind the clock, they could certainly make their guest list (for one night at least), look like it had back in 2003.

Inside, we ran into Mr. Tepperberg at coat check. We asked what he most hoped to see in the crowd that evening.

“A lot of old friends,” said the Strategic Group co-founder, who really looked as if he had just walked off the set of The Shield, or possibly The Sopranos. It was an odd choice of words, since Marquee seemed packed with young faces: models danced on the catwalks crisscrossing the vast two-story structure, while pulsing lights and a giant—God, is that? Yes it is!—disco ball in the middle of the room kept us pleasantly disoriented. One young-looking man named Jensen was particularly eager to walk us through the difference between old nightlife and new nightlife, as he was developing a “social networking service for models and events.” (Woof, there’s something that we don’t miss.) “What people are looking for in models has changed, although it’s kind of the same,” he said. “They’re always looking for tall women who you know, stand out. But today you also want to see a girl with good skin.” Skin? Really? Pushing aside images of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, we convinced ourselves this new focus on the epidermis was due to upgrades in lighting over the past decade.

“Also, people didn’t use to be on their cellphones this much,” he complained, pulling out his cellphone and to dash off a text. “People used to actually talk to each other.”

At least we think that’s what he said. The music was so loud we couldn’t be sure.

After admiring the view from the second story—where hundreds of books were stacked along the wall next to the black couches, a nice, classy touch—we scooted downstairs, where we ran into man-about-town Justin Rocket Silverman.

“This place looks exactly the same,” he said.

Downstairs, we ran into Du Jour’s Jason Binn, who told us, “This place looks completely different.”

“I guess there might have been a different staircase over there,” Mr. Silverman conceded.

Unlike the relaunch of, say, the Beatrice Inn, there was no judgment passed over the changes or lack thereof at Marquee that night. Everyone just went with it: a party was happening, and everyone was there.

And, as we found out during the stampede toward the coat check, Marquee had another thing in common with the bar in “Heaven”: Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.

dgrant@observer.com

Marquee awaits! (Instagram)

Nightlife bro-friends Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss are at it again with tonight’s opening of Marquee. No, not that Marquee, a new one! Located at 289 Tenth Avenue, this club will have everything: a stage for musical acts, “light jockies,” Brooklyn-themed wallpaper designed by Mike D. of the Beastie Boys and 2,000 vintage books treated to look like a graphic equalizer.

There’s no night like opening night, so grab yourself an invite (or try to sneak in as a plus-one) and party till the morning.

Marquee, 289 Tenth Avenue at 26th Street, 10pm. Invitation only.

As a teenager, Taylor Plimpton went clubbing in New York when he returned home to East 72nd Street on breaks from boarding school.

"Back then, one of the first clubs I went to was Limelight, which was just a totally crazy scene," said Mr. Plimpton, recalling his introduction to nightlife in the early 90s. "Like, transvestites in Santa Claus suits. It was totally out of control. Good times."

It was after 9 p.m. on a Thursday in early July, at a place called the Park, a bar and restaurant the size of an auditorium on 10th Avenue. Mr. Plimpton was explaining why he has written a memoir about going out to nightclubs and why, considering that he conceived the idea when he was 24 years old, it is only coming out now, when he is 34.

"Really, it was my friend Zoo who had the idea," he said. (Zoo is Taylor's sidekick in the book who feeds him medicinal shots of Dewar's.) "We went out a lot back in the day and did our thing. In his mind, if I wrote the quintessential book about New York nightlife, then we'd get in everywhere, no problem. Like the Playboy Mansion...and Mark Twain said, 'Write what you know,' and that was something I knew."

Mr. Plimpton was dressed in jeans, a pin-striped gray blazer and a blue polka-dotted tie done into a double Windsor. He has his father's deep-set eyes and the childlike grin, topped off with matted-down blond curls.

"It didn't happen as quickly as we had planned, and now that it's finally coming out, we don't even go out that much," Mr. Plimpton continued. "There was a whole process of transcribing notes and organizing them into chapters. There was a whole process to the creation of it. Going out and raging till 4 in the morning is actually not conducive to waking up and getting to work in the morning. ... By the time it sold, it was in pretty good shape, because I edited the shit out of it."

Notes From the Night: A Life After Dark, out later this month from Crown, is a memoir told as a composite of all the nights Mr. Plimpton has spent out at places like Lotus, Lot 61, Bungalow 8 and Marquee.

Like other city kids, Mr. Plimpton, born in Southampton, went places he shouldn't have been before it was legal for him to be there. As a seventh grader at St. Bernard's on Upper Fifth, Mr. Plimpton used to sneak drinks from his parents' parties. When home on breaks from St. Paul's, the boarding school in New Hampshire, he checked out Tunnel and Life and the Upper East Side's anonymous Irish bars. On another break from Reed College, he discovered Moomba, the club that epitomized the '90s New York of Leonardo DiCaprio and VIP rooms. And it was after college, when Mr. Plimpton was working as an assistant at Men's Journal, that he became a regular at the clubs along Manhattan's West Side.

To talk about Taylor's upbringing is to talk about George Plimpton the father and George Plimpton the husband to his first wife, Taylor's mother, Freddy Espy — both roles secondary to George Plimpton the editor. In George Being George, an oral biography of Mr. Plimpton published in 2008, friends, rivals and former lovers describe how fiercely Plimpton resisted marriage, how much he resented Freddy for making him a husband, how, despite being married, he was still mostly available to women and how Freddy eventually began to drink. (Taylor reviewed the book for The Rumpus, writing, "I remember feeling sick with a kind of envy of the kids at the Review, many of whom he treated a lot more like his children than he ever did me...(I was his real son, you know? Where was the love, the time, that spotlight of attention for me?).")

The family home at 541 East 72nd Street was not just where Mr. Plimpton and his older sister, Medora (now a nurse and mother of two in Vermont), grew up, but where The Paris Review's offices were situated on the bottom floor; where Leonard Bernstein gave Mr. Plimpton big slobbery kisses and, as one story in the book goes, once slipped into Mr. Plimpton's bed, only to be pulled out by Jay McInerney; where George began seeing Sarah Dudley, who became his second wife; and where Ms. Dudley Plimpton, now Taylor's stepmother, will throw him his book party later this month.

"My sisters have been raised very differently," Mr. Plimpton said of the 15-year-old twins from his father's second marriage. "My stepmom is not laissez faire. In my teenage years, I could get away with all sorts of crazy shit and they definitely can't, and they seem super-innocent as a result."

Notes From the Night is less a narrative of events with characters and a plot than a literal collection of notes, an internal monologue written almost like instructions on how Mr. Plimpton and his friends maneuver nightclubs. There are sections on surviving hangovers ("grilled cheeses, fries, and bubbling, cold Cokes"), on convincing doormen to let you in ("for me that means being a gentleman — and beyond that, fuck it"), on dancing ("I'm a complete idiot on the dance floor"), on women ("Thank God for all the infinite varieties"). There are friends named Fatdog, Hobbes, Stibbs, Tako and G; Mr. Plimpton goes by Tap. There are larger questions, too, which appear to propel the book: Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing here? At first there are no concrete answers. Then: No one, nowhere, nothing. And finally: It doesn't matter. 

The book seems to be about enjoying the process, the hunt for something in those clubs, though we never quite learn what that is.

"The whole idea sounded a little nebulous to me," Jay McInerney, who blurbed the book, told The Observer. "I knew for years he was writing a book about nightlife. But I was impressed when I finally read it.

"It must be difficult for Taylor," he added. "His dad was a very prominent writer, and it can't be easy to write in that kind of shadow. Just the fact that this has come into existence, to some extent, he's gotten past that. It could be real daunting. I wouldn't necessarily want my son to become a writer."

A galley of the book also went to Terry McDonnell, editor of Sports Illustrated and an old friend of Taylor's father, who said he enjoyed it. "Taylor is doing his own thing," he said. "I don't think George would have written about that stuff in quite the same way. George would put himself in a situation where he was clearly a fish out of water. It was in that context that he was so effective. Taylor is not a fish out of water."

Back at the Park, a little after 10 p.m., the clientele began to appear younger, louder, more intoxicated. A wobbly young man accidentally backed into our table and slurred an apology. "The world I'm describing is not at all what's going on now in my life," Mr. Plimpton said, looking around. "I'm older and my body just can't take the abuse anymore. And I have a long-term girlfriend so, as far as a man's impetus for going out in the night, it takes away that sense of infinite possibility." (Mr. Plimpton and his girlfriend, an actress, live on the Upper West Side.)

Mr. Plimpton is currently working on a book of essays about his father. Asked what their relationship was like, that grin, strained and a little goofy, spread across his face again. "I think I'm still figuring that out."

ialeksander@observer.com

The New York State Liquor Authority (S.L.A.) has denied the club's request for an all-night permit on New Year's Eve, according to the New York Post.

The agency is "cracking down on applicants" for the permit -- which allows bar operators to skip the usual 4 a.m. last call and keep selling booze an extra four hours on the Jan. 1 holiday -- "denying permits to nightspots that haven't reported their plans to the NYPD, as mandated, or that have serious charges on their records," the Post reports.

Back in July, the S.L.A. voted to suspend alcohol sales at the 7,500-square-foot former garbage-truck garage turned celebrity hotspot at 289 10th Avenue -- where a bottle of Grey Goose costs $375 -- amid multiple charges of "permitting the storage, possession, use and trafficking of a controlled substance," among other complaints.

The Observer's Spencer Morgan previously spoke to the club's attorney, David Jaroslawicz, about the charges:

Irina Aleksander sweet-talked her way into Liam McMullan's 21st birthday party and discovered that the sons of society photographers like a good pair of Brooks Brothers pants just as much as the next guy.

Ms. Aleksander also got on the horn with socialite-slash-actress (aren't we all!) Annie Churchill to gab about her new online venture: a fashion retail website and online fashion-lifestyle TV show (ooh!) hosted by (you guessed it!) Ms. Churchill herself.

And wide-eyed Caroline Bankoff fell under the spell of Benicio Del Toro at a screening of his new movie, Che. Mmmm, more, por favor!

As suspected by nightlife blog Down by the Hipster and others, nightclub impresario Noah Tepperberg’s Marquee was not shut down earlier this summer solely because of a water main break. Documents (click for .pdf) from the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control filed on July 8 charge that a months-long undercover sting yielded seven different occurrences of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of a controlled substance” at the club, and one instance of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of marijuana.”

The alleged body of evidence resulted in charges against the club owners, Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss, for failing “to exercise adequate supervision over the conduct of the licensed business,” and on July 18 an emergency summary order of suspension of their liquor license was put in effect.

Suspend the license? “The club was never closed to my knowledge,” Mr. Tepperberg’s lawyer, David Jaroslawicz, told the Transom. “They may have had a water main leak,” he added. Another client of his had a fire not long ago. 

Mr. Jaroslawicz eventually came to the point. “That fact that some idiots tried to sell drugs—you know, do everything you can to prevent it, but you know, if some idiots want to sell drugs, they’re going to sell drugs,” he said. 

As for the swift, seemingly seamless handling of the matter, the lawyer said everything was by the book: Cops had a lawyer, State Liquor Authority had a lawyer and Mr. Tepperberg had him.

“You always, always try to cooperate with the police,” he said. “Because they’re protecting you from the crazies, but they’re also the ones who control things.”

In this instance, cooperating meant allowing the police to supervise the installation of additional security equipment. “It was not cheap at all, I can tell you that,” said Mr. Jaroslawicz.

Mr. Tepperberg did not return several calls for comment.

Marquee was already on thin ice for an alleged assault and a health code violation in ’06, among other things. Was this a sweetheart deal?

“I don’t think they got a sweet deal. They got a very, very specific arrangement, which was approved by the proper authorities,” he said. “For you to say they got a sweet deal, I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”

smorgan@observer.com

Samantha Stein-Wells, the daughter of Manhattan real estate broker Linda Stein, who was murdered in her Fifth Avenue apartment last November, is about to turn 35. To celebrate the milestone, she is throwing a birthday party at Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, tonight.

Here's the invitation Ms. Stein-Wells sent to friends: