The Tunnel might be famous for its hip hop club nights, but hip hop nights were strictly restricted to Sunday nights. Sunday nights were not a huge money maker, so club managers decided to have the hip hop nights then. Hip hop nights were normally at smaller venues, so the Tunnel management had no idea how successful a hip hop night would be at such a big club.
The Tunnel officially had no dress code. Still though, the many front door security guards would reject hundreds of party goers a night just because they wanted to.
2Pac showed up to The Tunnel one night with a gun on him. The club security told 2Pac to drop off his gun in his car and then try and enter again. Most of the time, if someone tried getting in with a gun, they were turned away and not allowed to re-enter.
The Tunnel was famous for being the first club in NYC with coed bathrooms. Urinals and bathroom stalls were side by side. The coed bathrooms can be seen in the “Doin It” video with LL Cool J. Today, NYC would never allow for unisex bathroom to be permitted.
The cover charge for the Tunnel was $20 a person, with ladies getting in free before 11pm. That means the club generated $350,000 just in door receipts alone on busy weekends.
Of all the famous rap performances to happen between 1992 and when it shut down for good, one of, if not the most famous and most talked about was DMX’s “Get At Me Dog”. According to X, everyone was so amped by that song that he performed that song 12 times in a row. He said it was the only time he performed one song so many times in a row.
Puffy had debuted “Its All About The Benjamin’s” at The Tunnel in 1997. Two things to note about that performance: Puffy lost his diamond and gold Rolex worth $80,000 during that performance and it was never returned. The second is that the crowd was so hype from that song that Funkmaster Flex had the song on repeat for an hour straight.
The main bar at The Tunnel used to get so filled and so rowdy that there was separate security of 50+ bouncers just to only watch the bar.
One of the most famous battles to happen at the club was a non-battle between Puffy and Jermaine Dupri. Puffy and Jermaine Dupri used to battle whose crew would be buying and emptying more champagne bottles. The tunnel used to stock the empty bottles on the shelf for the crowd to see how many champagne bottles were emptied.
The Tunnel had no separate VIP section. Celebrities and famous patrons would be mingling next to regular party goers, gangsters and college partiers. The famous had no where separate in the club to escape to as is normal today.
Picasso Baby 