In 1999, when the rest of the world was worrying about the Y2K bug, a young Ketan Kadam had a slightly different problem on his mind – where to party. At that time, clubbing in South Mumbai consisted of 1900s at the Taj, Copa Cabana at Chowpatty, Rasna Pub in Churchgate and a handful of others. “They’d be so crowded that you’d get in only to get pushed around,” Kadam recalled. “One night at VT’s Fashion Bistro, there were so many people that I couldn’t move. I just left.”

What Kadam wanted to dance in were clubs he’d seen in London – huge warehouses that played to a crowd and played it loud. So he and his friends decided to set up one themselves. “We wanted something between Cuffe Parade and Worli,” he said. “Lower Parel wasn’t on our radar. It was so downmarket that people wouldn’t pass through it to go to Bandra. Eunuchs lived there.” But after looking at plots on Wodehouse Road and near Jai Hind College, the gang checked out a “ramshackle standalone structure” inside the defunct Phoenix Mills. “The rent was R3 lakh a month with a R40 lakh deposit,” Kadam said. “Atul [Ruia] even asked us if we’d like to buy the property off him for R3,500 per square foot. We said no.”

The boys weren’t to know that renting the same square feet of floor space on the site on which they established their legendary nightclub Fire and Ice –and which would run for six years – a decade later would cost up to one crore per month. Or that Lower Parel and the area around it would have designer malls, five-star hotels, swish restaurants and multinational banks. Back then, it was where shuttered textile mills fell slowly to ruin along Tulsi Pipe Road, where the railway station was eerily empty and where the only luxury living was if your chawl had double-kholis. “Even as we set up the place, my friends would tell me that they were not going to drive to Lower Parel with their girlfriends,” Kadam recalled. “They said we wouldn’t possibly be able to fill a 5,000-square-foot disco.” It took only one sound test for Kadam to realise that he’d chosen right. “We realised we could go as loud as we wanted because there were no neighbours to complain,” he said. “We’d created a club where everyone could party in one place. It was away from the main road so you could walk out drunk and not give a damn. There were plenty of places to make out in the mill buildings and it was like a secret party – a place no one could find you. It gave us all goosebumps.”

Kadam likes to say that it was Fire and Ice that first brought people to Lower Parel, and with the club’s Chandni Bar nights and visiting DJs like Paul Van Dyk, it certainly helped. Some years later, Provogue Lounge, with its ceiling of white-draped sheets, opened in Phoenix. Suhani Mendonsa, a Cuffe Parade resident who would drive 13km to party Fire and Ice three times a week, said she’d never been to Lower Parel before the club opened. “I didn’t even know the way – my driver did,” she said. “My friends and I would wait for those nights, especially for Chandni Bar. It was the place everybody wanted to be seen in.” That she was boogieing on land where workers were losing their livelihoods was not on her mind then. “No one talked about the mill issue,” Mendonsa said. “It’s only when I look back that I realise what an unfair situation it was.”

Inside Shree Ram Mills, at what was planned as an entertainment and shopping complex called Landmarc Citi, another ruin was being fashioned into a nightclub. Mikanos, promoted by industrialists Parvez Damania and Vikas Kasliwal, featured an Arzaan Khambatta sculpture in the centre of an 8,500-square-foot, 40-feet-high warehouse. It could accommodate 2,500 people, but Damania recalls, that was inadequate for its opening night in 2003. “It was the best-attended launch party of the time,” he claimed. Mikanos made DJ Megha Kawale and Shiva Sound System famous and was the stage for Rehaan Engineer’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. When Mikanos renovated and re-launched two years later, it also featured a lounge bar and shiny beds.

The clubbers didn’t lounge for long. Mikanos shut in 2004 and Fire and Ice followed suit in 2005. Two other clubs, Lush and later Ra, came up in Phoenix trying to capture its success but eventually closed down. Kadam now runs the Two-One-Two Bar and Grill in Worli. Nightclubs have opened and shut at High Street Phoenix with alarming regularity but none of them have been able to attract a following for long. “I used to be at Fire every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday,” Mendonsa said. “Now, I don’t even visit Phoenix Mills.”