The city just got its first “night mayor” and repealed the dread anti-dancing Cabaret Law, so nightclubs can bust out the sparklers and magnums of champagne, right? Well, not quite, as the story of Club Cumming goes to show. And what’s with these “STOP DISCOS IN SOHO!” flyers spotted around the Soho-Nolita area? They complain about “excruciatingly loud music… assaulting the psyches of nearby artists.” The flyer proposes a rezoning that would stomp out discos and “juice bars” in the neighborhood, and a moratorium on new discos and the “fighting, bottle throwing, vandalism” and “illegal drug traffic” they bring.

One of the flyers appeared underneath a current-day posting notifying neighbors of a community board hearing regarding a licensing change at the San Remo Cafe.

Soho is no stranger to these sorts of NIMBY fights (remember when the Bowie-backed burlesque club Forty Deuce got scuttled by neighborhood activists?). But something is a little fishy about the three clubs mentioned in the flyer: The Loft at 99 Prince, Frankenstein at 45 Greene, and Falmingo Enterprises at 599 Broadway. The Loft, you’ll recall, was David Mancuso’s pioneering underground club that reopened on Prince Street with a “wall of sound” after it was evicted from its original Village location. It closed long ago, as did Frankenstein and the city’s first exclusively gay nightclub, Flamingo.

There, at the bottom of the page, is the giveaway: The April 22 meeting advertised on the flyer actually took place in 1975. The postings that have appeared around Soho (we spotted three of them in the proximity of Broome Street and Lafayette) seem to be reproductions of a flyer that appeared in a 1976 book, Map Square Soho.

If you know anything about who put them up 43 years later, shoot us an email.