MJQ Dance Club’s New Home is a Familiar Hellscape

The move also gave co-owners Ryan Purcell and Ryan Murphy the chance to create the space that customers wanted, including multiple rooms for dancing and bars with affordable drinks and food, including a Buford Highway-inspired bodega with funky snacks like wasabi and yakitori-flavored chips, canned boba tea, and Pocky.

Patrons can still expect the familiar cheap beer and well drinks, and now the club has making boozy slushies and craft cocktails like a Mai Tai and the “WowBobWow,” (a Twin Peaks reference) a spicy concoction of habanero and jalapeño infused tequila with triple sec, lime, and orange juice brought over from the Bookhouse Pub.

“It was built for the staff and it was built for the people that have been coming there. We’ve got 30 years of experience of what people want from MJQ, not what they want from a nightclub, specifically, what they want from MJQ,” says Purcell.

Purcell was inspired by the restaurant space, implementing a futuristic sci-fi vibe with elements with nods to films like Blade Runner and Mad Max.

“It’s got this sea ship, sitting at a dock, surrounded by water and has crocodiles. Now we’ve gone from a sea ship to a spaceship, and instead of a pier or a dock, we are now at a docking bay where the ship is now sitting in these thunder, lightning clouds that surround the space. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I even had a crocodile head and put it in the clouds just to have some fun with it,” he says.

The crocodile is an Easter egg for those who remember its past. Dante’s Down the Hatch was located even further beneath the “streets” of Underground, styled like a pirate ship. The late owner Dante Stephensen, a former Aspen ski bum, even had a pet crocodile named Pinocchio, who lived in the subterranean space. The restaurant and bar attracted celebrities like Rod Stewart and hosted music residencies with the Paul Mitchell Trio.

Dante’s closed in 1981 when Underground shut entirely but reopened in time for the 1996 Olympics, just to shutter again a few years later, now with another location in Buckhead. It was in this exact condition, still with hundreds of bottles hanging from the ceiling covered in dust.

The original MJQ Concourse, named after the band Modern Jazz Quartet, opened in 1994 behind an unmarked door in the basement of the Ponce de Leon Hotel, now the Wylie Hotel, by George Chang. MJQ moved again in 1997 to a space previously occupied by Lou’s Blues Revue. It’s here that it gained the loyal following it has today.

But the neighborhood changed in the two-plus decades that followed as the Old Fourth Ward area exploded with development following the success of Ponce City Market. In late 2022, Murphy and Purcell announced that they would be closing its longtime Ponce de Leon home as the company that owned the property sought to redevelop the site, along with several of its neighbors.

Clubgoers worried that this was the end of the sweaty basement space they’d loved. But it was just the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

In 2020, Shaneel Lalani, CEO of Lalani Ventures, purchased Underground Atlanta, which had long been proposed for redevelopment. A member of Lalani’s team reached out to Murphy and Purcell after hearing MJQ’s announcement and proposed they tour one special site.

“She was like, ‘come down, take a look. Just tour the space. I think that this is a great place for you,’” says Purcell. “Seeing the space, being this obviously very iconic place that has been dormant for 25 years, it was really neat, and once I walked in there, I could start visualizing how I would lay things out and how to utilize the space that was already there.”

Purcell and Murphy didn’t want to make the old MJQ fit into the new one, but to keep its spirit alive.

“I think one of the iconic things of when you go to MJQ on Ponce is, your first time there you’re like, ‘What are we walking down into? What is this? How are these people fitting into this little green shed?’” he says. “You stumble into this parking lot and you walk down and it opens up into a nightclub. That’s a hard thing to replicate. There’s not a lot of places where you can do that. Dante’s was not only the closest thing, really the only thing.”

The crowd bid the green shed on Ponce a tearful goodbye on January 25 as the new space opened at Underground Atlanta on January 22. MJQ is poised to become the flagship of the entertainment district, stewarding Dante’s vision into another decade, still under the glow of the neon “No Requests, Y’all” sign.

“We want to tie into as much of that history as we can, because not only is it interesting, but it gives us more fun with the creativity of it.”