World's Largest Disco

The so called World's Largest Disco was once again happening in Buffalo. This annual fund raising event happens annually on the Saturday night following Thanksgiving at the Buffalo Convention Center. 

We were downtown for dinner last night and on our way back to our car we saw many people dressed for the disco party. The event wasn't held last year in 2020 because of covid restrictions on crowds but it was apparently back in full swing Saturday night but with a reduced capacity of 5,000 party goers dressed in 1970's attire.

The first World's Largest Disco party in Buffalo was in 1979 and a few months after Becky and I moved here. I remember it very well and was shocked and surprised that Buffalo would host such an event. That year was at the height of the anti-disco backlash around the middle of the country with disco record bonfires and such. A lot of it was very racists and homophobic. Disco was very urban and had been popular in cities for many years. I went to some discos in Europe during my Navy years and went to a few in Philadelphia in 1974 and 1975. They were just clubs with a dance music scene and then there was the punk, reggae and new wave scenes in the later  70's. In the meantime Hollywood made disco comfortable for middle America with Saturday Night Fever and suddenly disco music and clubs were OK across the country. 

When we started living in Buffalo I was amazed at how hard rock the city was and Canada too. Then they started promoting this world's largest disco party in downtown Buffalo. The really funny thing was that there was a special train coming from New York City bringing partygoers because they certainly could not have some kind of world's largest disco from just Buffalo folks. Thus the party train.

Well, with the help of that train they did set the Guinness World Record for the largest disco in history with 13,000 people attending so I guess it was a success. However, that was the last disco party until 1994 when it started up again as the annual World's Largest Disco benefiting a local charity. It has been happening every year since then although last year it was a streaming event.

Tickets sell out for the event in minutes every year and have been limited to 7,000 because of the convention center capacity. I can't say I've ever been to one of those parties which are billed "the greatest people watching event on Earth". Really?