This October, Soho nightlife is turning green. Jon Bakhshi, impresario of meatpacking district hot spots Home and Guest House, is set to open his third club: a new eco-friendly space called Greenhouse. Mr. Bakhshi, known as “Jon B.” along club row, envisions an environmentally friendly venue with guests dancing on flooring made from recyclable material. Gyrating ladies, with their blown-out hair and glittery tops, will shimmer under low-voltage lights. Guys, lounging on buttery couches made from recyclable material, will sip on organic alcohol mixed with fresh juices. In early designs, Mr. Bakhshi pictured two floors, with a gigantic waterfall and a ceiling bursting with live plants. (He’s since scaled back.) The toilets? They’d flush efficiently.

“People can’t wait for me to open,” said Mr. Bakhshi, 31, the promoter turned club owner who escorted the bridge-and-tunnel masses into the meatpacking district in the mid-’90s. “For me, I just want the perfect venue.”

During Fashion Week in Paris last fall, leggy supermodel duo Jessica Stam and Carmen Kass hosted a celebratory party for Greenhouse at swanky Parisian club Le Baron. “I’m not sure an eco-friendly nightclub is gonna fly,” Ms. Stam told a Women’s Wear Daily reporter at the party, “but it’s raising awareness.”

Nearly a year later, with gas prices soaring and the words “energy crisis” tumbling off even the most un-Gore-like lips, the whole project of greening up nightlife seems perfectly prescient. The typical club—with its blasting sound systems, sweat-cooling air-conditioners and lights blazing three nights a week—gobbles up 150 times more energy than a four-person family every year, according to Enviu, a Netherlands-based, environmental nonprofit group. In New York City, dance spots tend to be open five to six days a week, making their consumption that much higher. And consider the thousands of bottle-service remnants and beer cans to recycle, cocktail napkins to toss and thousands of toilets flushing the night’s debauchery away. We may never see the end of tacky string-tie tops and gold chains, but our clubs, at least, can get makeovers.

For some clubs and bars, greening up has been a gradual process. The Village Pourhouse on Third Avenue, a spot near the N.Y.U. dorms that attracts a frat-boy crowd, uses certified green cleaning supplies, proffers organic beers and vodka and uses recycled paper products. (The bar’s laundry is also done in-house to reduce carbon emissions.) Fort Greene’s Habana Outpost, a chill-out spot famous for its margaritas, has tables made from sawdust and recycled plastic, and a composting system. There’s also a solar-powered cell-phone charger to juice up iPhones and BlackBerrys. But for others, replacing the Clorox with Seventh Generation isn’t enough: People like Mr. Bakhshi want to start from scratch and get LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ) certification, a kind of gold star of approval for environmentally friendly construction practices from the U.S. Green Building Council. With LEED certification, an owner can market his club as a hip, organic sanctuary for the environmentally conscious. (Paging Leo! Adrian! Cameron!)

And with some clubs donating part of their profits to green charities, clubbers can, literally and figuratively, dance to save the world.

SWEAT-POWERED NIGHTLIFE

But might it be possible for club owners to take eco-consciousness too far? At London nightspot Club Surya, which takes its name from the Hindu sun god, even partiers’ sweat helps power the place. The floor is designed to harness the energy of its dancing patrons, which is used to power the club. As partygoers bop around on the spring-loaded floor, it dips about 2 centimeters, which sends a flywheel spinning to capture the resulting kinetic energy (think of how spinning on a bicycle can light an attached bulb). Press materials for Club4Climate, the nonprofit launched by British real estate mogul Andrew Charalambous that runs the club, claim that the floor powers 60 percent of the place. The rest is supplemented by solar panels and wind power.

But that’s not all. The aforementioned sweat turns temperature-sensitive walls different colors, toilets flush with rainwater and bartenders serve aloe-vera-infused “bio-beer.” An idea we especially like: Bouncers offer free admission to clubgoers who traveled there by walking, bicycling or using public transportation.

And Club4Climate, which donates profits to the Friends of the Earth foundation, has an office in New York City. Organizers are currently scouting for new club sites.

Club4Climate representatives did not return several phone calls for comment (and an e-mail sent to an address published on their Web site bounced back). Their mascot, a bald-headed, pale man in a white suit called Dr. Earth (just throw a Persian cat on his lap and you’d have Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies), urges clubgoers in an online video to have a “spiritual experience” while dancing the night away. In Dr. Earth’s 10-point plan to being a “greener self,” he claims that “passion and hedonism is your ecologically friendly right. Do it. Don’t be frightened of it.”

But until we have our own Surya-like space, Galapagos Art Space should satisfy the most eco-conscious among us.

Galapagos, which first opened in 1995, has been in the process of relocating from North Sixth Street in Williamsburg to a 102-year-old, 10,000-square-foot former horse stable at 16 Main Street in Dumbo for the past year. In late 2005, Galapagos’ rent on North Sixth Street was raised by 30 percent, resulting in a $10,000 increase to their monthly costs. That, along with increasing electricity fees and maintenance problems, meant that Galapagos couldn’t afford to stay in the neighborhood it helped establish.

But the move offered an opportunity for club owner Robert Elmes to give his business an eco-makeover. The new warehouse-style space on Main Street includes a “hyper-efficient” air-conditioning system for hot summer nights. Instead of oil-powered heaters, hot water pumps through pipes in the walls to keep the dance floor warm in the winter. A 1,600-foot decorative “lake” is fed by a water well that Galapagos drilled for the new building. The toilets use less water than the average john, and there’s energy-efficient lighting, too (only 7.5 watts per square foot!). The new venue has been open sporadically this summer, showing films and hosting small events, but it should be fully operational by next Tuesday and open full time by September.

Mr. Elmes is currently seeking the much coveted LEED certification for the building.

“Certainly, we’re at a crisis with energy and climate,” said Mr. Elmes. “Our idea has to be to participate as much as we can in creating solutions. If we can lead by example, we will.”

Galapagos plans on holding tours to explain how they made the building more environmentally friendly.

Mr. Elmes explained that every detail of the construction has to be considered for LEED certification. The entire process, he said, makes entrepreneurs think more creatively, not only about their clubs, but about the institutions as cultural venues. “We’re not in the same kind of thinking model as a regular business,” he said. “If the artists can’t pick up their heels and lead, who can?”

Aaron Levinthal, a partner with environmentally friendly events production company GreeNow, said that when companies are thinking of getting eco-friendly, they should consider that other kind of green, too. “It’s an easy thing to market,” Mr. Levinthal explained. “You say your event is more green, it’s easier to get sponsors, and you can start getting tax breaks.” He said it’s also cheaper to use energy-efficient generators. “It’s almost stupid not to do it.”

GreeNow, which is only six months old, organizes recycling programs and powers outdoor events with generators that use 99 percent biodiesel. They even use biodiesel-fueled forklifts and trucks to transfer equipment. One prominent client is the city’s River-to-River concert series; GreeNow also powered the lights that lit up the Pope in Yonkers when he visited the city in the spring.

Mr. Levinthal, a technical director and producer of corporate events for 18 years, said Al Gore’s documentary on the climate crisis, An Inconvenient Truth, changed everything. “That stupid movie was such a baseball bat to the face to what is going on. My wife and I changed the way we lived when we were at home, and me and my business partners became much more eco-aware.”

WINDY CITY

Barcade, a Williamsburg bar lined wall-to-wall with old-school video game machines, looks like a monster of energy consumption, with its Rampage and Ms. Pac Man flashing all over the place. But at the bottom of the beer menu, patrons might see a curious note about the venue: The bar runs on 100 percent wind power. Owner Paul Kermizian said that customers’ first reaction is to look up into the skylights and search for some kind of wind turbine in the dingy ceiling.

“I have to explain to them that that’s not how we get it,” Mr. Kermizian said. Barcade purchases their electricity through ConEdison Solutions, a subsidiary of ConEd that offers “green” energy. So when a customer operates one of the 28 arcade games in the club, their Donkey Kong character is lit up with electricity coming from 20,213-foot-tall wind towers on Fenner Wind Farm in Madison County, N.Y.

Barcade also exclusively serves craft beer, made at independent breweries in the States, which usually run on wind power or have alternative energy sources.

“We use quite a bit more electricity than regular bars,” Mr. Kermizian explained. “We wanted to try to do something that lessened our impact, looking into alternative providers. It’s a little more expensive, but it evens out with the amount of goodwill we feel and good publicity that we get.”

Chuck Hunt, executive vice president for the New York Restaurant Association’s metropolitan chapters, said that the city’s clubs, bars and restaurants consider greener practices “one of the most proactive situations going on right now” in the industry, and added that the association plans on setting up a hot line and information program on how to be more environmentally aware owners.

But not all clubs have been keeping on top of more eco-friendly practices, said Mr. Hunt. Or if they are, “they aren’t bragging about it yet.”

Except for one.

“You’re talking about the world, and the water is melting and the temperature is changing,” said Mr. Bakhshi, the club owner who plans on opening Greenhouse. “This is something we can do to change things. I think that everybody in every business and in everybody’s lives are going to have to adapt to things like this. I think that’s going to be the way of life.”

Greenhouse has already held publicity parties at the Cannes Film Festival and Sundance, in addition to Paris Fashion Week. Mr. Bakhshi plans on throwing a huge opening bash in New York when the club opens in the fall, and to donate a portion of the proceeds to green charities. “The whole idea of giving back,” he said, “we’d like to really focus on that. We’re a green club.”

Mr. Bakhshi added that he’d like Al Gore to host the party. “I definitely have to reach out to him for sure.”

greagan@observer.com

Mr. Elmes owns Galapagos, the long-standing performance-art space in Williamsburg, and he is looking either to open an outpost in Berlin, or to entirely relocate the operation to the German capital.

He’s already scouted out an abandoned high school, which looks promising, and a round building once used to store natural gas. “Next we’re going to be taken around by some cultural-ministry people to look at spaces that are sitting on the shelves of the Berlin government,” Mr. Elmes said the other week. He was planted outdoors at a café called Godot, on Kastanienalle, a street dubbed “Casting Alley” due to the constant parade of native and expat hipsters up and down its boutique-and-café-lined sidewalks.

Back in Williamsburg, Galapagos is housed in a former mayonnaise factory, which Mr. Elmes, 39, claimed in 1990. That was before the Brooklyn land grab went full throttle. Recently, the rent went up again.

Hence, Berlin. “This is Williamsburg in the early 90’s, writ large citywide,” Mr. Elmes said. His hair, grown to a bohemian shoulder length, is brown, while his sideburns are gray. “It’s a fascinating, inclusive, tolerant environment with a very low cost of entry. And that spells magic for the arts, frankly. Berlin is going to be the New York City of the United States of Europe inside of 10 years.”

It’s well on its way. Whatever happened to D.J. Dmitri, of Deee-Lite fame? The Kiev-born New York adopter ditched his loft at Houston and Broadway and made his home base Berlin. Last year, Adrian Piper—one of the biggest names in contemporary art—took off from Wellesley for a research fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. According to Exberliner, the English-language magazine of Berlin, even KRS-One is in town.

As the East Village and Williamsburg dull down and age up, what’s not to love about Berlin? The population is significantly atheist. The mayor is a fun-loving gay dude. In Berlin, the mullet is more lifestyle than haircut.

And as of the end of last year, Berlin has more resident Americans than expats from nearby France.

The writing on the wall about Berlin’s future as a cultural capital—one especially attractive to New Yorkers—has been interpreted in many ways since the late 90’s, when the incursion of former New York residents suddenly went from a trickle to a gush. Some describe it as a sea change, the beginning of long-reaching transformations for the city. Others are less convinced, claiming that Berlin, for New York expatriates, is simply another Prague: an exoticized pit stop offering low-cost living and cultural experimentation only until either the rents in New York go down or the expats’ income goes up.

Some even scoff that Berlin is already past its prime. Leipzig, just two hours south of Berlin, is, for artsy Germans, the new hotness. Williamsburg’s Pierogi Gallery opened a branch in Leipzig a few months ago. “When you have no money, then you go to Leipzig; then you have a better life,” said the effervescent art dealer Judy Lybke, of his hometown. “Big flats, three girls, three men, every day. It’s good. When you have more money, you can do it here.”

Still, you can find the New York expats in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the former east part of Berlin, slamming back cocktails at White Trash, the nightspot whose former location is where Peaches got her start. Spy them at the teenybopper queer-boy night, called “Berlin Hilton.” There they are in Kreuzberg, a lefty enclave that many expats insist on likening to the East Village of yore, where punks with green Mohawks talk on mobile phones and second-generation Turkish kids spout hip-hop rhymes in German. They ride through Mitte, the city center, on their way home to their dirt-cheap, beautifully renovated apartments, which would cost them an arm and leg at the near end of the L train. Each bezirk has its own character and flavor of resident, so much so that Berliners complain that the city is a bit like a conglomeration of towns.

“In Berlin, we’re looking at Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain—those two areas, maybe Neuköln,” Mr. Elmes said. That last district, David Bowie named a song after. “And then we’re looking really farther east, because we want a clear 10 years before anything really changes around us. We had that in Williamsburg, and that was a blessing. We want to go to a quiet little corner of Berlin and begin our experimental project all over again.

“We are an interesting group, the emerging arts, because in a way, we’re the canaries in the cultural goldmine,” Mr. Elmes said, then cleared his throat and self-edited. “In the real-estate goldmine, excuse me,” he said.

Jean-Ulrick Désert used to command a six-figure salary in New York. “I was always an artist making artworks, but I needed a ‘job.’ Like many New Yorkers, that job ended up overwhelming my art production,” he said. He worked as an exhibition designer for the firm Appelbaum, leading such efforts as the Jackie O. and Duke and Duchess of Windsor exhibitions at Sotheby’s. Mr. Désert never got credit for his work from his employers. “You know how key that is in New York,” he said.

An arts residency took him first to Paris, and that was good, but stuff happened and he ended up in Berlin, where studios run as low as a couple hundred euros a month. He has lived here for three years.

“This is still a renters’ town,” said Mr. Désert, who sometimes wears skirts with battered Doc Martens, a downtown New York punk look of the 80’s that is now very Berlin. At least the boots are. “Berlin hasn’t gone the way of Paris, London and specifically New York,” he said. “From a New York perspective, $2,000 could easily pay one full year of rent here!”

Mr. Désert’s present apartment, which also serves as his studio, has a coal-burning oven as its main source of heating. “Many people have this in the neighborhood,” Mr. Désert said. “I figure, you know what? If a bunch of people, after this town was bombed left and right, could survive this shit, why couldn’t I? I am not 80 years old, I am not 60, I’m not even 50. So, just do it for now. I used to live on Chrystie Street in a big loft.”

One of Mr. Désert’s art projects involved dressing up in traditional Bavarian lederhosen and walking or standing around in various public locations, an act which drew quite a bit of attention, since Mr. Désert is black.

In Berlin, unemployment is as high as joie de vivre. Drinks are cheap and with no clocks to punch in the morning, people go out late and keep late hours. Many bars do not close.

“I don’t think that people think of Berlin as a romantic destination, like France,” said Loren Marsh, 36, a filmmaker who came to Berlin from Chicago, via grad school at Stanford and a few years working in Manhattan. “It still has these World War II overtones here, and that history is still very present in people’s minds and sometimes in the landscape. Like here.” He gestured toward a crumbling building. Its ground floor housed a bar where funky types sat drinking beer to the sounds of trance music. “It’s a part of life here. And I don’t think Americans are, like, romanticizing it.”

Mr. Marsh’s move to Berlin was a return, in a way. His family has roots in the city. They fled Nazi Germany for the Midwest. Mr. Marsh’s communist intellectual great-aunt’s writings can still be found in bookstores; she was one of the last people to see Walter Benjamin alive. A cousin who is a native Berliner was Mr. Marsh’s guide and constant companion during his first months in the city, almost three years ago. Before he left New York, he was making a fine living and had even completed a film starring Amanda Peet. “I had a lot of knowledge about Berlin before I came here. But I also didn’t really know what I would find there, because I knew it changed completely since my relatives had really been there.”

Others come for an all-alien cityscape.

“My introduction to Berlin was in the late 80’s,” said the visual artist D-L Alvarez. “I’d lived first in Paris, then moved to Berlin for a little while.” The Wall hadn’t even fallen yet. He wanted to stay on longer, but was concerned that his parents would be distraught by the distance. This was before the Internet, German reunification, the European Union and discount airlines.

Mr. Alvarez, now 41, spent nearly a decade residing in Park Slope and Williamsburg, but Berlin was never far from his mind. In 1999, both his parents died within a week of each other. “I spent New Year’s Eve here, the big millennium,” he said. “That year turned into six.”

While London might be more comfortable in terms of communication, English—or half a dozen other languages—go a long way in Berlin. “The lingua franca of the art community is basically English at this point,” said Mr. Elmes.

“After six years, my German is still pretty horrible,” said Mr. Alvarez. “I can’t remember the gender of any of my words. Just so many people speak English here—and don’t mind speaking English—that it’s not really a problem.” For him, the bigger challenge (and any foreign worker in the United States who’s had to deal with U.S. labor regulations can sympathize) was “the paperwork—getting the visa, getting the artist’s insurance.” The German government is not as tight-fisted when it comes to issuing working papers to Americans; it’s just a hassle. “I recently had my visa renewed, and I’m looking to invest in a studio space—I found a really good deal,” Mr. Alvarez said.

On a recent Sunday night, Mr. Elmes met a group of friends at a bar in the Friedrichshain district. The bar itself looked like someone’s converted apartment. There was a kitchen in the back. Beer was selling at two euros a bottle. Mr. Elmes got into an involved conversation with a young German woman, a radio journalist, who had lived in New York, uptown on 145th Street, near City College. They talked about Günter Grass, the German writer, and whether he ought to have recently come out about his past as a teenage member of the Waffen-SS. They touched on media, German identity, Americana. The word “monoculture” was debated. It started to rain. The bar shut off its lights, and the guy who’d been tending it came to give Mr. Elmes and his companion a last call. “No, grazie,” Mr. Elmes said. He melded his English and Italian. He doesn’t speak German yet.