She had heard the Donna Summer songs, she had watched John Travolta ooze across a dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever” and she had amassed an impressive collection of 12-inch dance mixes. But in the late 1970s, Laura Poggi, of Valley Stream, was too young to get into a bona fide disco. So it didn’t take her long after turning 18 in 1980 to put on a pair of Capezios and head down to Escapes, a nightclub on Sunrise Highway in Merrick.
Poggi recalls being awed by the dance floors on two stories and the swimming pool in the basement. “There would be a bar, and you could see the pool through the glass at the bar,” says Poggi, now 62 and living in Long Beach. Back then the drinking age was 18, so Poggi would knock back an Alabama slammer and boogie until 3 a.
m. “You can’t beat that stuff,” she says of the classic disco tracks that she still enjoys today. “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.
” The dance floor at Uncle Sam's in Levittown. in 1978. Credit: Newsday/Gerald S.
Williams Nearly 50 years after its late-'70s heyday, disco will be memorialized in a three-part PBS documentary, “Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution,” which begins June 18. Featuring interviews with many disco icons — from singer Anita Ward ( “Ring My Bell” ) to pioneering drummer Earl Young of The Trammps (“Disco Inferno” ) — the series traces the history of a rhythm-driven genre that empowered Black, Latino and queer communities even while enduring a sometimes viciou.