Thousands of dancers in bell-bottoms and jumpsuits packed The Rooftop at Pier 17 at South Street Seaport for the annual Gimme Gimme Disco party, spinning under a mirrored disco ball to Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Kool & the Gang, ABBA and Blondie as the Empire State Building and Freedom Tower glowed in the background. Attendees sang along to Kool & the Gang's “Celebration,” ABBA's “Waterloo” and Anita Ward's “Ring My Bell,” while a DJ led a conga line through the crowd and a retro arcade cabinet of Space Invaders sat nearby alongside nostalgic footage from 1970s and 1980s American Bandstand broadcasts.
The scene, first detailed by the New York Post, drew a mix of regulars and first-timers, including Ky Marengo, a 25-year-old banker from Amityville who said the event is his favorite and that he tries to attend every Gimme Gimme he can find, having had fun at his very first one. Craig Cetrullo, of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, celebrated his birthday at the party with his wife and two pre-teen daughters, marking his second time at the event, and said he enjoys the dancing and the outfits. The Post's reporting also captured Kiki Edwards describing a strong sense of community at the party, and Curissa Jones, a 29-year-old nanny and house manager from Indianapolis, who said she came to have a good time and hear the music she grew up on during her annual trip to New York.
From a Williamsburg Basement to a Global Disco Circuit
Gimme Gimme Disco launched in New York City in 2018 and has since expanded to nearly every major market in the United States and Canada, plus London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore, with a stop in Tokyo reportedly on the calendar for next month, per the Post's account. The party is organized by Alex Badanes and Ethan Maccoby, who founded parent company Burwoodland after throwing a packed, 100-capacity basement party called Emo Night Brooklyn across from their Williamsburg apartment, according to Dallas Innovates. That single basement night has grown into a company that now runs multiple branded party concepts, including Emo Night Brooklyn, Broadway Rave and All Your Friends.
Burwoodland's scale is considerable: the company produces more than 1,200 shows a year, roughly 23 per week, and has sold upward of 1.5 million tickets across 500- to 4,000-capacity venues while pulling in eight-figure annual revenue at an average post-fee ticket price of $20, according to Music Business Worldwide. A more recent job listing on ROSTR indicates the company now coordinates more than 100 DJ-led shows every month worldwide, handling DJ recruitment, travel and venue partnerships out of its New York headquarters. Gimme Gimme Disco parties themselves happen as often as ten times in a single weekend, per the Post's reporting, with tickets running between $30 and $65.
Mark Cuban Bets on Disco as an “AI-Proof” Business
Billionaire Mark Cuban became Burwoodland's third owner earlier this year, acquiring a minority stake through a seven-figure investment. Cuban has publicly framed live, in-person music gatherings as an “AI-proof” experience, arguing that physical attendance matters in a way no digital prompt can replicate, as reported by Inc. Before Cuban came aboard, Burwoodland had already drawn backing from established music-industry figures, including Brooklyn Bowl founder Peter Shapiro, Split Second's Izzy Zivkovic and Downtown founder Justin Kalifowitz's Klaf Companies, the outlet's reporting notes.
The party's home venue helps explain the crowd size. The Rooftop at Pier 17 is a 3,500-capacity open-air stage that Pollstar named Best New Concert Venue after its 2018 debut season, sitting atop a 300,000-square-foot waterfront complex overlooking the East River and Lower Manhattan skyline, according to SEC filings from parent company Howard Hughes Holdings. During its 2023 summer season alone, the rooftop hosted 63 shows and sold roughly 204,000 tickets, a 93 percent sell-through rate, per those filings and Broadway World. Operational control of Pier 17 spun off from Howard Hughes Holdings in August 2024 into Seaport Entertainment Group, an independent publicly traded company now running the South Street Seaport's entertainment offerings, as reported by the Commercial Observer.
Regulars Say the Draw Is Community, Not Just Nostalgia
Several attendees told the Post they treat Gimme Gimme as a recurring ritual rather than a one-off outing. Sophia Pacheco and Kiki Edwards said they've attended nearly a dozen Gimme Gimme Disco parties across New York State, while Kimberly Payne, a 61-year-old lifelong Inwood resident who regularly attends vinyl nights at Pier i Café on West 70th Street, came out with family and friends. Rachel Mia Ackerman, a 29-year-old Astoria resident and program coordinator at the American Ballet Theatre who also frequents retro dance nights at Hotel Chantelle on Ludlow Street, was among the crowd, as was Rebecca Maciag, a 27-year-old accountant from central New Jersey who danced alongside her parents elsewhere in the crowd. The event skewed family-friendly, the Post noted, fitting a broader nightlife shift documented by the Eventbrite Blog, which found sober-curious, retro-themed gatherings up 92 percent as younger attendees favor structured music themes and social connection over traditional late-night drinking clubs.
The current Pier 17 itself has its own comeback story. The site's original 1984 shopping pavilion was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and a multi-year redevelopment produced the glass-paneled waterfront venue that reopened in June 2018, according to Secret NYC. Nearly a decade later, that same rooftop is where thousands packed in polyester and platform shoes for a night built entirely around songs most of them never heard on the radio the first time around.
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