Great, underground places: Prague's Cross Club

Quite a few weeks ago my friend Dan [Odysseus] wrote a corker of a post about Sir Toby's, a homey hostel around the corner from our dorm. He described our experience of going to weekly pub trivia in order to meet European travelers, but just as Taylor [tperkins] foretold in a comment, we had too great a time a few weeks in a row and word got out. Now the  lounge/bar at Sir Tobys plays host to roughly a third of the dorm on trivia nights. Though the atmosphere has changed substantially, it is still a certifiable "good great place." But that is only half the story.

The full Tuesday Toby's experience often includes a corollary at Cross Club, my favorite nearby  club and something of a misnomer. It too is a ‘GGP’ and we still advise the occasional European traveller who had not yet paid a visit to check it out, especially since it's just a few blocks away. Frequently this develops into an invitation for them to join us when we walk over from the hostel.  One particularly stand-out night that attracted so many fellow students to our Tuesday evening outings was when a group of no less than 140 Danish gymnasium students (who knew American culture better than we did and promptly schooled us at trivia) proceeded to drink Sir Toby’s Kozel kegs dry, and then threatened to do the same when they overran the formidable bars of Cross Club.

To say that Cross Club is somewhat well disguised would be an understatement. With a gate constructed of car mechanisms and other stray metal, it looks like a junkyard’s fence and not altogether out of place in our post-industrial neighborhood of Prague. I was fooled into thinking it was an auto shop the first time I passed it on the tram, but the store on the ground floor does appear to advertise a Czech auto repair school. (Almost the reverse of 826 in the States.) The aesthetic of the exterior is maintained throughout: walking through the gate into a courtyard with soldered iron trellises is like taking the first few steps into an alternate reality of cyberpunk and indsutrial dystopianism.

Car engines fashioned into chandeliers slowly revolve from the ceiling, motorized LED lights are arranged into patterns on the walls, and everywhere is repurposed metal with just hints of brick behind. A host of other ornaments and lowly lit areas make the descent down from chamber to chamber disorienting and suitably Hadean. Unlike many of the other more glitzy clubs in the area, the focus of Cross Club is not its more removed dance floors, but lounge areas and bars both at its best-lit top floor as well as within its darker levels. Be it weekends or weeknights, compared to the other major clubs, warehouse-scale and ultra-sleek SaSaZu, or five-floored Karlovy Lázně (eager to remind you that it’s the largest in Central Europe!), the feeling underground is that those on these smaller dance floors are more like Prague’s outcasts rather than transient cross-European partiers.  It’s a somewhat comforting feeling, being an individual among individuals, rather than the Adorno-like exasperation that I find evoked in me by the monolithic SaSaZu floor, with its pulsating masses worshipping ‘DJ Brian’ up at the turntables to a far greater degree than he deserves, all blinded by the bright flashy screens that surround his noisy rostrum.  Even if a place like SaSaZu is more your cup of nightlife tea, no visit to Prague is complete without a time in Cross Club’s mechanical cellars. More importantly, no visit to Cross Club is a complete experience of it: months after first arriving, we are still finding new corners of the labyrinth within its depths.

(Top photo, of the gate, is my own. The one of the interior was by one of our new Danish best friends.)