Take a Walk with Richard Boch to “You Should Be Dancing”

Take a Walk, or in this case you may want to Uber, take a taxi or hop on the nearby C Local Train subway at Canal Street Station and visit You Should Be Dancing: New York 1976 and Beyond at The New York Historical. Located at 170 Central Park West, NYC, it is the oldest museum in the city and to its curatorial credit, the spectrum of programming casts a remarkably wide net.

You Should Be Dancing offers a visual and sonically inspired tour of New York City in the 1970s into the early 1980s. It was a time when Punk, Disco and Hip Hop rose up from the clubs and the streets and began to take hold—looking at one another with caution and skepticism—before exploding onto and into the cultural fabric of every corner of New York. The city itself was on the financial brink, and crime, if you believed everything you read, was out of control. I was still a very young New Yorker at the time and by 1976 I was deep in that very explosion of musical and artistic creativity while somehow sidestepping the crime waves and financial ruin.

The CBGB ground-zero Bowery radicalism of Ramones and Patti Smith, the Pop-punk of Blondie and the art-school drumbeat and neo-intellectual charm of Talking Heads was holding the Downtown scene in its thrall with no sign of letting up. Then in spring 1977 Studio 54 opened in Midtown, bringing the straight and gay mash-up of urban and sub-urban outer-borough clubs and dance parties—percolating since the early Seventies—into the mix. When Mudd Club opened in late 1978, on the fringes of what was to be Tribeca, it became the yin to the yang of Studio 54 and by then all bets were off. Whether it was glitz and glam or down-and-dirty, the dance floors were not only packed, they were literally vibrating.

It was then only a matter of time before the kids from way uptown Harlem and the Bronx showed up with boomboxes, high-tops and what twenty-year-old rapper Kurtis Blow called “The Breaks.” Graffiti and breaking, B-boys and B-girls, improvisation and the next wave of sound—Rap and Hip Hop—rolled in and headed straight for the dance floor. It was what the musician, writer and music historian Lenny Kaye calls Lightning Striking—and it was striking New York City for the third time in less than a decade. 

You Should Be Dancing shows us why it didn’t seem to matter if you were packed tight in front of the stage at CBGB, losing your mind under the Disco ball at Studio 54 or getting blasted by a boombox while finding your groove on the handball courts of the Lower East Side. This was New York 1976 and Beyond—a golden time that re-ignites and comes to life through sound, vision and the beautifully curated exhibition at The New York Historical Museum. It speaks to the chaos, the creativity and above all the resilience of New York City’s cultural impact on the lives we live. 

All you should do is check out the show—then turn up the music and dance.

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You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond

The New York Historical

170 Central Park West at 77th Street, NYC

Now through April 4, 2027 

Tuesday–Sunday, 11 am–5 pm; Friday until 8 pm

By subway, take the C Local Train from Canal Street to 81st Street.

Exit the station at 79th Street. 

The museum is a 2-minute walk.

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Feature image: Patrick Pagnano (1947–2018), Empire Roller Disco, 1980. © Patrick Pagnano

Richard Boch is the author of The Mudd Club. He is a regular contributor to both GrandLife by Soho Grand and Made in New York by Roxy Hotel.