‘The Walls of the Building Were Missing, But I Just Saw a Club’: The Oral History of Miami’s Club Space

25 years ago this month, Miami’s Club Space first opened its doors. In the decades since, it’s become not just a citywide institution, but a national and international destination that’s risen, then risen again, in tandem with the explosion of underground electronic music.

Created by Miami native Luis Puig in 2000 and now operated by a trio of friends and business partners who’ve long been embedded in the city’s dance scene, Club Space now hosts roughly 600 annual events, drawing tens of thousands of party people for the both the music and the all-night into morning experience that the club, which possesses a 24 hour license, famously offers. Parties can, and do, go on for days.

This week is not only the Club Space’s anniversary, but its busiest week of the year, with thousands of dance industry folks and genre fans flocking to town for Miami Music Week, a confluence of parties, showcases and gatherings. Starting today (March 25), Club Space will feature a flurry of producers and party brands including Hugel’s Make the Girls Dance, Fisher’s Catch & Release, HARD, Cloonee, The Martinez Brothers and Loco Dice and many, many more.

In tandem with the revelry, here Puig, the current co-owners and other essential Club Space employees tell the story of the venue, in their own words.

I. Origins

Puig started bartending and DJing in Miami nightclubs as a teenager. Eventually, he operated clubs in South Beach, but the competitive market and a yearning for another type of venue later brought him to downtown Miami, a move that would affect the future of nightclubs in the city and ultimately reverberate throughout dance music culture.

Puig: The experience I got from DJing and bartending was watching people and what they liked. That was fused with my travels to all the big clubs in New York — Ice Palace 57, New York, New York, Paradise Garage. Then in 1981, I went to Ibiza. That just took it to another level. I was 21 years old [and going], “Wow, this is something else.” The clubs didn’t close, they just stayed open. From that experience and from all those years of clubbing and DJing and working at nightclubs, it gave me an idea what would make a great club.

I had my blueprints and architectural plans [with me in Ibiza] and one night I was invited to dinner at Roman Polanski’s house there. [Pacha Ibiza] founder Ricardo Urgell was there, and after dinner I spread the plans over the table and went through it like, “This is where DJ booth is. This is how big the dance floor will be. This where I’m putting the bar. Everybody’s doing VIP clubs on the Beach, but this is going to be for locals, and it’s going to have a patio.”

There were like, eight people sitting at the dinner table having drinks and looking at the plans. I remember Ricardo just passed his hand to the left, and said, “Esto va a ser un gran éxito.” This is going to be a great success. If I would have never built a club, I would have been happy just with his blessing. It was a pretty amazing night for me.

Years later, in 1999, Puig located a promising building in Miami’s Park West neighborhood, then an unsavory part of downtown.

Puig: The whole area was abandoned. The landlords had nobody to rent to. [The area I wanted] was basically three warehouses and a parking lot. I walked in and there were three homeless people living on the floor, s— everywhere. It was horrible. I mean, rats, everything.

Longtime Space bartender Sean Ospina: I mean, back in the dy downtown was scary. I’d be scared walking down the street.

Puig: The walls of the building were missing. There were pieces of roof missing. But I just saw a club. I was 39 at the time and said, “It’s now or never,” and I started building it. I paid $7 a square foot, for almost 20,000 square feet. I’d been paying $30 a square foot on the Beach. I started selling everything I had to raise money for the club. I sold my car. I had money put away. I borrowed money. I think we put together the original Space for about half a million dollars.

Knowing it’d be hard to compete with the South Beach clubs, Puig decided his venue would be an after hours, designed to draw the thousands of partiers forced to leave the city’s many clubs at closing time, but who didn’t want to go home. To make that happen, first a few laws had to be changed.

Puig: In Miami, there are areas where you can stay open until 3:00 or 5:00 a.m. Anyone can do those. That’s easy. The 24-hour thing was unheard of outside of Vegas. But I knew if I was going to make any money, I’d have to get all these people to come at 4 or 5 a.m., and the only way to do that was to sell liquor after hours.

The director of the Downtown Development Association got a hold of me through my lawyer and requested a meeting. She helped me so much, because she knew that first the club comes, then people get comfortable with the area — then the next thing you know, some guy opens a pizza shop and then something else opens up. Nightclubs are like the seed to start entertainment districts.

Current Space co-owner David Sinopoli: Louis paved the way for us. That guy bulldozed and changed the laws.

Puig: My lawyer and I came up with the 24-hour district thing. Convincing the city took some lobbying, because they didn’t understand why anybody would want to be drinking at seven in the morning. Like, what kind of animals are drinking and dancing at 7 a.m.? It took about three months of lobbying and talking to commissioners. Then it went to vote, and they all voted for making this two-by-two block segment dedicated as a 24-hour entertainment district where you could sell liquor for 24 hours. Game-changer.

After construction was completed, Space opened on March 24, 2000, during Miami Music Week.

Puig: My marketing director said, “Bro, just call it Club Space, because there’s all this space inside it.” The opening night was Danny Tenaglia, the king of clubs. He was the most respected DJ in the industry. Every DJ wanted to hear what Danny was playing, because he could play for hours and not repeat a record. That first party just kept going and going. Overnight, everybody started talking about this crazy club that didn’t shut down. All the DJs started calling, because if Danny was playing there, they all wanted to play there.

We were only open on Saturdays for the first two or three years. We’d start getting busy around three or four in the morning, enough to open up all the rooms. When we first opened, there was the Red Room and the Blue Room. The Blue Room would would play trance; Paul van Dyk, Tiësto, all the big trance DJs, then the Red Room would play house. Our resident was Oscar G, a legend. Then I opened the hip-hop room, and it became very popular, because the hip-hoppers didn’t have anywhere to go for after hours.

Longtime Space employee and current general manager Lisa Mion: When I started at Space I was a waitress in the hip-hop room. It was a tiny room with two tiny VIP tables on each side. That place was filled to the brim all the time.

Puig: The last room to open didn’t open until four months after everything else, and that was the patio.

II. The Patio!

Also referred to as The Terrace, this outdoor area is one of Club Space’s most popular and defining features, allowing guests to enjoy the music as the sun rises. Initially open air, this upper floor of the venue now has a transparent, retractable roof to protect people on the dancefloor from the elements while still letting the sunlight in.

Puig: In the early years, people would go peek out at the patio then run back inside. The question was, how do you get people who’ve been partying all night to come into the light and and keep partying, besides giving them sunglasses?

I knew everybody liked Ibiza, so we did an Ibiza party. Back then Ibiza was mostly farms, except for the clubs. So we went and got chickens, dogs, pigs and bunnies. We had a goat. We bought bales of hay. We all wore overalls with farmer hats and gave away popsicles and melons. [All the employees] went outside to the patio so no one could find us. If you wanted to hang out with us or get a free drink, you had to come see us. We gave away free sunglasses. That was the first patio party. Within two months, pictures started going around and people were preparing to be in the light, and it became the thing. [British DJ] Steve Lawler] became the king of the patio.

Ospina: Back in the early days, we didn’t have a roof on the terrace, so people were exposed to the elements. It could be cold, or super hot, or raining. People didn’t care — they were on the terrace for the music and the vibe.

Puig: It was open-air for the first two or three years. One of those years, during Miami Music Week, it was like, 10 in the morning and raining like it’s never rained before. There were about six inches of water on the terrace, and the awning started getting full of water and stretching. We thought the whole thing was going to fall on top of people and kill them. It was this huge balloon of water. We thought we were going to have to close.

We had bamboo trees on the patio back then, so my manager took a knife, tied it to a bamboo shaft that he broke from one of the trees and started poking holes in the belly of the beast. It became a shower, all these little waterfalls everywhere. Everybody’s just digging it and running around and playing in the water. Then out of nowhere, Sasha shows up and wants to play. So he gets on, and then Sharam from Deep Dish gets on. They weren’t hired to play, they just wanted to. People are going bananas. DJs are showing up. Everybody’s calling everybody. It doesn’t stop raining, people are jumping in the water like kids. That, to me, was epic.

III. Space Is the Place

Puig: I mean, look, I run a pretty tight ship. I would say we started turning a profit within the first six months. And once it really got going, it just just got bigger and bigger. Everybody on the Beach was trying to shut me down. My big competition would call bomb scares. They would tell their clients that it was an after hours for drug abuse people. Luckily, we hired police to work the front door and when the other police would get there, they would say, “There’s nothing going on.”

Longtime Space doorman Alan Tibaldeo: The perfect Space guest is done to the nines, giving a look — comfortable, but giving. They know who’s playing and what time to be there. They have their ticket and they’re ready to go dance.

Puig: A few years in, half a million people were going through the door of Space every year. But it started getting busy right away. The Music Conference [the year after we opened] was huge, because now everybody knew about Space, and everybody knew there was a room for them to play where they didn’t have to turn of the music at 5:00 in the morning.

Mion: Miami Music Week is what we all wait for. It’s like the hurrah, the big boom of the year for us.

Puig: Some of my worst nights were during Miami Music Week, because you had every club owner, every actor, every famous DJ in the world, and they all wanted to get in for free. They all wanted to drink for free. They all demanded to be in VIP or worse, the DJ booth. I mean, those are the nights that we would turn off our phones and hide. I would actually go to my office and lock myself in.

Ospina: How many drinks do I serve on a really busy night like that? I don’t know. It’s a lot of drinks.

IV. “The Boys”

Puig: By 2012, I had gotten married and my wife was pregnant with our second son. The phone was ringing at all times of the night with people trying to get into the club. I wanted to have a happy marriage and see my kids on Sundays. I thought, “You know what? I did everything I wanted to do here. What more am I going to do?” I decided to sell.

In late 2013, Puig sold Space to Roman Jones and Justin Levine of Opium Group, who operated the venue for three years before selling it to Coloma Kaboomsky, Davide Danese and David Sinopoli, three locals who’d been cutting their teeth in Miami’s club and festival scene for years. Sinopoli was co-founder of the city’s III Points Festival, while Danese and Kaboomsky had been throwing parties at local venues under their Link Miami Rebels brand. The trio took over Club Space in late 2016.

Puig: The [Opium Group] people I sold to didn’t really operate the club the way I would. They were trying to run Space like the clubs in South Beach, and that didn’t really work out for them. So the owners reached out to “the boys,” as I call them — Davide, Coloma and David. I couldn’t be more satisfied than to have them taking care of my baby. It’s like sending your kid off to college and knowing they’re in the right hands.

Sinopoli: Justin [Levine] was at a point in his career where he wanted to kind of be done with Miami nightlife, and for us it was simply right place, right time.

Danese: The three of us had a strong following in the Miami music scene, and many years of strong relationships with underground artists that were about to become major players in the international electronic music scene. So when it was offered to us, it was perfect. It was just plug-and=play.

Kaboomsky: We had been scouting Space for a while, and it was really at a low point. The bookings were all over the place. There were very few people going to the venue. We did a pop-up with Art Department in August of 2016, and it felt like the venue came alive again. Everyone was buzzing about how the place was so phenomenal, but the week before, nobody wanted to go there, so that first night was just such a strong proof of concept.

Danese: For me, the first four months were very difficult. It was our first Music Week [in 2017] that really made me feel like we had it, because every single night was phenomenal and all led into a 36-hour closing party with The Martinez Brothers, Jamie Jones and Joseph Capriati. It felt like we could finally welcome our crowd to a place that was fully ours — that looked like us, that felt like us, where we controlled everything from the door to the bars and, most importantly, the music direction. It felt like the community came together that [week] and from then on, it was almost easy.

Kaboomsky: A lot of these [international party brands] were previously doing these high-risk pop ups in random places [around town]. A lot of what we were doing was saying “Hey guys, you can trust us. This is going to be a turnkey thing for your brand, and we can focus on marketing and presenting it the way it should be presented, versus you trying to figure out where to put port-a-potties.”

Danese: The employees loved how we changed the security, we changed the bars, we changed the strong, heavy energy they used to have.

Kaboomsky: [When we came in] it was also really important for Space to be safe for women, because at the end of the day, guys are going to follow women. We can book great DJs, but if we want to build a culture, women need to be safe. A lot of the security changes were focused on making sure women feel safe holding a drink in their hand, making sure there’s no fighting.

I think the music programming also had a lot to do with it. Some of the first weeks in the club that weren’t big DJs were a cleansing. They were these very underground bookings, nothing that had ever been at Space before. It was this beautiful music, more feminine, more downtempo. A lot of the crowd that was coming before for the high, tribal energy came and were like, “Oh, we’re never coming back.”

Sinopoli: We were also kind of evangelistic about converting people to the after-hours. At the same time, Davide and Coloma were converting me to the after-hours, because I wasn’t from that world. Davide would basically force me to come. He’s like, “You need to see your f–king club in the morning, man. It’s an incredible thing.” I found that if you spend a couple mornings there, or do the night-into-the-morning thing, it becomes an itch. It’s unlike anything you can you can experience at any other nightclub.

In 2019, Club Space partnered with Insomniac Events, with the dance events company acquiring an ownership stake in the venue. Upon the announcement, Insomniac Events founder Pasquale Rotella said that Danese, Kaboomsky andSinopoli would still be “running the show and together we will set the bar for entertainment in Miami.” Since 2016, Danese, Kaboomsky, Sinopoli and their sprawling team have made changes to make the club more comfortable for early morning attendees, offering coffee at the bar, introducing a breakfast menu and allowing guests to order takeout right to the dancefloor.

Tibaldeo: People will arrive at 11:00 at night, and it’s like, go home, take a nap and come back, because you’re too early. The club is really to experience daybreak, if you want the whole enchilada. The best time to arrive is probably around 5:00 a.m.

Mion: The sunrise is the most magical moment we have here.

Kaboomsky: One of the biggest misses, and I see it all the time, is when somebody goes to the club and they don’t make it to sunrise. It’s tragic.

V. Sleep & Lack Thereof

The club’s possession of the 24-hour license that allows for these moments also means that parties can and do go on for days — making it so that considerations must be made for approaching a night, and day, at the Club Space properly.

Puig: Danny [Tenaglia] created the format. He would do these marathon sets, and it became the thing.

Tibaldeo: The big weekends go forever, it’s usually Sunday to Tuesday. There are nights that can go 24, 25, 26 hours.

Danese: People plan on being there for 12, 15 hours. They can spend an entire day with us.

Kaboomsky: People have outfit changes.

Tibaldeo: I have outfit changes, for sure.

Kaboomsky: I had a friend who was at the club, then took a meeting in New York and then came back to the same party.

Ospina: It takes me at least two days to decompress after a shift. After a weekend is done, I come home and I’m like a hermit. I’ll be in my room for two days. Back in the day, we would do marathon shifts. We could be behind the bar for 20 or 25 hours. We don’t do that now; they won’t let us. Now at the most it’s 15-hour shifts.

Mion: The the hours are probably the most challenging, because sometimes we don’t sleep much. For me, [working at] Space is like having a baby. The baby needs to eat. Like a new parent, you’re never going to sleep much. I don’t drink, I’m vegan, I don’t partake in anything; I don’t even drink caffeine. People ask me all the time, “How do you stay up 30 hours?” It’s because I love my job. I care for it like I would if it was my child.

Space employee and longtime colleague of “the boys” Lucas Zaglul: We always keep in touch to see, who’s coming in at what hour? It’s like, “I’m going in the morning,” and Coloma will be like, “Cool, I’ll go early in the night and take over.” I was once at the club for 20 hours, totally delirious. It’s hard to go past 12 hours when you’re in there working and having to deal with stuff. That’s when it’s like,
“Okay, I have to go home.”

VI: It’s Solomun!

The esteemed Bosnian-German producer first played Space during Art Basel 2017, becoming a favorite of the venue while also becoming known for sets that have lasted a full 24 hours.

Kaboomsky: The first Solomun marathon was super important. It was a moment of like, “Damn, we could actually do this,” where before [those long sets] were just something we wanted to do. No one had done marathons that long in the club before. There had been 12 hour marathons, but not 25.

Ospina: When Solomun plays, I don’t know what it is, but you feel the energy in the air. I usually don’t pay attention to the music — because I’m working and focused on what I’m doing — but with him I’ll always be like, “Wow, this is really good.”

Mion: Solomun, oh my goodness. When we have Solomun nights, those are the highlights. You know when you’re there and then you’re [dancing] and you don’t know why? He’s that kind of vibe. When we have Solomun we’re all very excited, The whole staff, management. I want to say that the whole building is on fire when we know Solomun is coming.

Zaglul: Most times when Solomun comes, I’m like, “I want to see how long I can hear Solomun play,” and then I can’t even stay for half his set. The guy’s just built differently than the rest of us. Midway through I’ll go home and take a disco nap and come back.

VII: The Portal

Along with all the music, Space has also become a community hub, hosting events like pet adoptions and a free weekly yoga class, evolutions as the club also welcomes new generations of dance fans.

Tibladeo: I mean, now I’m addressing people’s kids and grandkids at the door. I get phone calls from parents who are like, “Hey heads up, my daughter’s coming. She’s on her way to dental school and this is her last hurrah.”

Zaglul: With our community programming, we figure out how to get people from all walks of life to come to Space and see how magical this place is. Our biggest one to date is our 420 Space Yoga. It’s a yoga class we do for free every Saturday for everybody in Miami or anybody who comes to visit. At first people were like, “We’re not going to do yoga on the floor of the club.” We had to start sharing videos of us cleaning right after the party and bleaching the floors.

Sinopoli: When Davide is in Ibiza, he’ll [sometimes] text me at some crazy time, like, “This guy just said we have the best club in the world.” It still floors us to hear s–t like that, but we keep each other accountable in staying grounded and controlling the ego things that come from this job. You can’t get lost in the soft sauce, because the second you do that, you lose track of what’s actually important, and that’s the experience, the programming, the community, the operation, the staff.

Danese: We’re kind of scared of giving ourselves the importance that maybe other people can see from the outside, like when they tell you you’re running the best club in the world, for me it’s almost scary.

Sinopoli: The main thing we’re doing is maintaining a portal. This thing has been open since 2000 and there’s been different custodians maintaining it along the way. Like any portal, if you don’t take care of it, it can become a different type of energy. Clubs are very life-changing for people, so how we maintain this portal for them to be able to have those life-changing moments is a massive responsibility that the three of us understand more than we understand what club we are in the world. That responsibility alone is enough to fill up our plate.

Puig: I know the boys are going to keep it going. I think this thing has legs. I mean, listen, Space is as close to heaven as you’re ever gonna get.

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