Ice Palace

The next step was a big beer hall called Carrusel, owned by a Frenchman, in the Altamira building where the Teatro Altamira operates today. It had the space he wanted. He bought it, had it stripped out entirely and set about building his discotheque.

The name came from New York

In those years a club called Ice Palace had opened in New York, and Antoine traveled to see it. It operated in a basement — and his was going to be in a basement too. The name fit him perfectly and he brought it back with him.

The New York original was the Ice Palace 57, at 57 West 57th Street, which operated between 1977 and 1985 and was one of the busiest gay clubs in Manhattan. It is the club the name came from; everything else —the venue, the sound and the story that follows— is from Caracas.

The deal that made the sound possible

Antoine wanted a big system, made to measure for the venue, and he had no way of paying for it. He put it to Carlos Delgado, director of the Sound Power store, in just those words: “I need to put in a sound system, but I don't have the money to pay you for it the way I want it.” Delgado's answer decided the rest: “I like the place you are preparing very much. I offer to install the sound for you, but you have to let me build the one I want. When you open and start working, you pay me as you go.”

Delgado had already won Antoine over before. Sound Power had brought the Cerwin Vega system and the country's first subwoofers to Venezuela, and word got around. A salesman named Dante Tulipano —the same name that is on record as the founder of the miniteca Explosión in this Archive— put them in touch with Rafael López, choreographer at Canal 2 and owner of the Crazy discotheque in the Bello Campo shopping center, whose equipment had burned out within days. López heard the demonstration and asked for the system to be installed that same afternoon. The next day, the Crazy's discjockey (now DJ) took them to the venue across the way: Le 7, Antoine's, which was burning out speakers every week. Delgado installed a reinforced set of columns there and Antoine gave him the ultimatum: “if this burns out this weekend, I am going to the United States to bring back a technician.” It did not burn out. “I won him over right away,” Delgado recalls.

December 22, 1980: opening night

Antoine spent a year fitting out the venue. On the night of December 22, 1980, at eight o'clock, they were still laying the carpet and people were already queuing outside. There was an open bar from eight in the evening until one in the morning, and at midnight the Ice Palace opened.

When they switched on the system, minutes before twelve, the discjockey played “Lay All Your Love On Me”, by ABBA. “I got goosebumps,” Antoine says. “We went from zero to a hundred in a single night: from being unknown to being the most… in one night.” The venue was in the newspapers and on the radio. People came from Curaçao, from Aruba, from Argentina and even from New York to hear it.

Note of discrepancy: Antoine dates the opening to December 22; the discjockey Frank Escalona, in the same episode, places it on the 23rd. Both are placed on record.

How it sounded: the equipment, piece by piece

The original installation was conceived for high fidelity but with more power and an aggressive character. The amplification was Audire Crescendo, equipment that was not sold in stores: it was made to order. They were wide-band amplifiers —in theory up to two megahertz, an absurdity for a sound system, the point of which was that if they reproduce two million cycles per second, the twenty thousand the ear hears are child's play—, with an aluminum structure, MIL-SPEC military specification, 96,000 microfarads per channel of power supply, two transformers and gold-plated transistors. “It was made to last,” Delgado sums up.

In the four corners went the Cerwin Vega Strokers; there were L36 cabinets, mids in double cabinets with a double low-mid driver, twelve-inch woofers in the towers, two-inch and one-inch horns, and the wide-mouth Gauss units.

The sound brought its own problem: on the tenth floor of the building lived the caretaker, who could not sleep because of the vibration of the bass and reported it. To resolve it, Delgado removed the Strokers and replaced them with eighteen-inch bass units. And since the same building had a movie theater with screenings until eleven, the music could not start before then: if they began at ten, the dry thud of the kick drum could be heard against the party wall.

1987: the soundproofing and the biggest system

In 1987 the venue was remodeled. The engineers who had done the soundproofing of the Metro de Caracas convinced the house that acoustic work would put an end to the problem with the neighborhood. Everything was dismantled and, over the piping, ten centimeters were laid in alternating layers of fiberglass and lead fiber, and above them wood and carpet. “It ended up like a recording studio; the acoustics were incredible, a dry room where you could hardly hear anything,” the technician Ernesto Padrón recalls.

With the room deadened, Antoine asked Delgado for what was missing: “I want the biggest sound system in Latin America right here.” When the technician went to bring him the quote, the answer was “don't give me a quote, I already told you I want better equipment.” Carte blanche.

The result was 78 speakers —bass, low-mid, high-mid and treble— and 28 amplifiers, with an electronic crossover and full equalization: 22,500 watts RMS all told. They were never used: the system was calibrated for a cruising speed of eight to ten thousand watts, so that it could work at half capacity twenty-four hours a day without straining a single component. With the discjockey at zero decibels on the console, the system ran comfortably six or ten below. “It sounded tremendously loud and it did not distort,” Delgado says; “it was like a car capable of three hundred kilometers an hour, going at a hundred and fifty.”

• · 18 eighteen-inch subwoofers: 6 in L36 cabinets divided between two towers at the entrance and 12 in the tower at the back, in a cabinet that Carlos Delgado designed and christened FHDS.
• · 8 twelve-inch low-mids in the tower at the back and four fifteen-inch ones in the entrance towers.
• · 2-inch Gauss horns and 1-inch Renkus-Heinz horns.
• · 8 Gauss tweeters at the back and another 8 in the entrance towers.

Sound Power, the house behind the sound

The Sound Power store, of Carlos and José Delgado, was the one that brought to Venezuela a good part of the equipment that defined the sound of the Caracas night: Cerwin Vega, Audire, DOD, Renkus-Heinz, Gauss, Soundtracs, D&R, RANE and Audiologic, among other brands.

Its technician Ernesto Padrón tells how he got in: they hired him as a salesman and, a week later, while he was explaining to a customer what a crossover was, Carlos Delgado overheard him and gave him an examination on the spot —equalizer, third-octave bands, drill, pliers, soldering, electricity, a car of his own, willingness to travel—. The next day he was a technician. Under the supervision of Ricardo Herrera he made the rounds of the venues Sound Power looked after: Zig Zag, the Palace itself, Pigmalión in Las Mercedes, Gran Señor in El Paraíso, Le Fortín near Puente Hierro and A Mi Manera in Las Mercedes.

A clarification so as not to confuse two records of this Archive: this Sound Power is the professional audio store of the Delgado brothers; the miniteca Sound Power that appears in the Minitecas portfolio is another thing. They are not merged without confirmation.

The booth: Frank Escalona and those who followed

Frank Escalona came from knocking about the Caracas night: six months at Beautiful Night —formerly Leopardo, where Johnny Ferreira worked—, another six at Le Barón and then Studio 84, right across from Le 7. In January, with the Ice Palace just opened, Bernardo —Antoine's public relations man— called him in for a trial. He had already been to the venue in those first days: “when I walked into the Ice Palace, that sound floored me; honestly, nobody in this country had a sound that powerful.”

That night there were several colleagues waiting their turn, among them Oscar Hernández —who has his own entry in this Archive—. Escalona was sent to the booth around eleven. He came out at six in the morning. Antoine was waiting for him at the door: “so when do you come to work? You are the discjockey here now.” “I got where I wanted to get,” he says: “the place with the best sound and the best music.”

His method was constant renewal: he bought between thirty and seventy records a month —from Armando “Culebra” and from Oscar Hernández above all, and also at La Media Nota and Total Music, of Marco and Tony Palmieri—, listened to them all in one go and doled them out in fortnightly batches. “When I put on the first record, people already knew I had new music.”

Around 1987 Escalona left Antoine's company and the club closed for the remodeling. When it reopened, César Ortega passed through the booth, and after his departure came Edward Varela —a musician since childhood, trained at El Bosque, Reflection and Sunshine, who considered Escalona his mentor—, who worked there for almost all of 1988 and continued afterwards at Tiffany's.

The door, the crowd and the visitors

The Ice Palace was a members-only club, and its filter was the door. Antonio Ugas, the doorman, explains it without beating about the bush: he was the one in charge of making the venue work, meeting the parameters Antoine had set him regarding the kind of clientele. When a member wanted to come in with someone who was not one, he was warned that he was left responsible: if the guest caused trouble, the member's membership was suspended. With eight hundred or a thousand people inside, security was never needed. The busy days were Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The atmosphere was mixed and open-minded. “Although the Ice Palace was not entirely gay,” Escalona specifies, “it was a place for open-minded people”; at the bar any celebrity might end up beside you and everyone respected their own space. “It was like a family.”

Next door was the restaurant El Padrino, of the owners of Venevisión: the foreign artists who came through the channel dined there and went straight on to the discotheque. Through the club passed Freddie Mercury, Olivia Newton-John, Richard Clayderman, Miguel Bosé, Celia Cruz, Sarita Montiel, Bibi Andersen, Locomía —after their visit people would turn up dressed like them—, the Spanish singer Rebeca, who presented “Duro de Pelar” there, and Marita Capote and Tatiana. The carnivals, with their costume contest, are remembered as the best in Caracas: people from theater and television arrived in impossible outfits.

Of the volume one anecdote survives that sums it all up: near the speakers, people's watch crystals would crack.

1996: Tiffany's

The Ice Palace closed in 1996 to make way for a new club in the same venue: Tiffany's Club, with different decor and different furniture. The sound also changed its skin: the Gauss tweeters were replaced by Beyma CP 22 and the eighteen-inch Cerwin Vega woofers by Beyma 18G40, and the subwoofers were relocated. The lights of the nineties arrived, taking over from the mechanical ones of the eighties, along with a console with a CD player. Several mixers passed through the booth —Audioarts, Gemini, one from D&R— and a Biamp 7200 that its discjockey remembers as the best he ever had.

Antoine closes his account by sharing out the merit: “the real credit for the origin of the Ice Palace belongs to Carlos Delgado.” And Delgado gives back the definition of the place: “it was high fidelity, but aggressive; the idea was that people should feel the impact and that the body should react, because it was not a place to go and talk: it was a place to go and dance.”

Social media

• · Social media and contact: being sought — do you have information? Write to us through the contact form

Credits and sources

• · Testimonies of Juan “Antoine” Clemente (owner), Carlos Delgado (director of Sound Power), Francisco “Frank” Escalona (discjockey), Ernesto Padrón (technician at Sound Power), Edward Varela (discjockey at Ice Palace and Tiffany's), Omer Bretón and Antonio Ugas (doorman), gathered in the episode “Discoteca Ice Palace y su sistema de sonido” from the channel La Historia del Refuerzo Sonoro en Venezuela (@lahistoriadelrefuerzosonor1061), verified by oEmbed. José Delgado, Tomy Hormin, Benigno Pascual and Gilberto Montani also collaborated. Transcription of the episode translated into Spanish for this article; the quoted passages are its own.
• · The Ice Palace 57 of New York —57 West 57th Street, active between 1977 and 1985, founded by the Joffe brothers— from which Antoine Clemente took the name: reviews of the LGBTQ history of New York nightlife. Accessed August 1, 2026.
• · Photographs from the club's archive contributed to the CMTK Archive: the booth, Frank Escalona, Rebeca's performance, Carlos and José Delgado, and the atmosphere of the room.
• · Internal cross-references of this Archive: Dante Tulipano (founder of the miniteca Explosión), Oscar Hernández (collection “One Mixshow, One Name”), Antonio Ugas (collection “Hidden Figures”) and the entries for Studio 84, Le Barón, El Bosque, Reflection, Sunshine and City Hall.
• · Documented discrepancy: the date of the opening —December 22, 1980 according to the owner, December 23 according to the discjockey Frank Escalona—. It is not unified.
• · Under documentary verification: the exact address of the venue, the capacity, Omer Bretón's years at the club and the relationship —if there was one— between the Sound Power store and the miniteca of the same name.