"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee.com is back for another round! The whole month of February, we're serving up intoxicatingly fun bars and club articles -- including guides, bartender profiles, drink recipes and even a little Brew City bar history. Cheers!

Crafting a story about Park Avenue, a popular Milwaukee nightclub in the 1980s, presents a unique set of obstacles. The first is pretty obvious:

Park Avenue, located at 500 N. Water St. -- a building that later housed Bermudas, Brett Favre's Steakhouse and current tenant Joey Buona's -- closed nearly 20 years ago.

Memories naturally fade over time. In this era of e-mail and multi-tasking, it's hard to remember things that happened last month, much less in 1984. Mix in throbbing music, pulsating lights, gigantic video screens, fog machines, a dance floor packed with gyrating dancers, cheap prices on gigantic beers, a barber chair for consuming upside-down shots ... well, suffice to say it doesn't get easier.

But, this is OnMilwaukee.com, a Web site produced for and perused by thousands of intelligent people with a passion for Milwaukee -- past and present. Before sitting down to write, we asked readers to contribute their memories of Park Avenue and dozens did just that.

Jim Lombardo, who was in charge of marketing Park Avenue before finding further fame as the executive vice president of Bell Ambulance and as "America's Guest" on the "Dave and Carole" morning show on WKLH (96.5 FM), remembers more about Park Avenue than most.

"It was an amazing place," Lombardo said. "The big thing was always Ladies' Night. We started out doing it on Tuesday, but then we moved it to Friday and that was crazy. From Tuesday through Thursday, we had "Mad Hatter Night" and those were big.

"On Saturday, we'd switch off every two weeks. We'd have either "Sudden Saturday" and we'd open at 6 o'clock and do 50-cent cocktails for two hours or we'd have "Champagne Saturday," and we'd serve rotgut champagne. There were nights when we would literally have hundreds of people standing in line, waiting to get in."

One of the people in line was author Paul McComas, a Milwaukee native whose semi-autobiographical new novel "Planet of the Dates," published by The Permanent Press, includes a chapter about the club. An excerpt from Chapter 4:

"The Park Avenue was everything I'd hoped for: swanky and sumptuous, a grand, glimmering, bi-level disco palace. The translucent dance floor was laid out in a multi-colored grid and illumined from below by thousands of bulbs that flashed, rapid-fire, to the rhythm. Suspended above, a rotating mirror ball the size of a satellite sent a spectral web of light cascading across everything in sight. On the upper level couples stood, drinks in hand, elbows on the rail, gazing down at the dancers-who merited the attention: dodging and swirling, twisting and twirling, hard-eyed young men and haughty young women, black and brown and white together, united by the beat, by the heat, by their predilection for garish inorganic fabrics and, at this moment, by the powerhouse falsetto of Sylvester:

"You make me feel . . . mi-ighty real."

"Ooo! You make me feel . . . mi-ighty real.

Of course, the Park Avenue may have been many things, but "real" wasn't one of them. Then again, people didn't go there seeking reality; they went to escape it. As for me, standing open-mouthed and agog in the midst of it all, my own desire was to find, within and through this utmost unreality, one absolutely authentic woman . . . someone who, if I played my cards right, just might make me feel real. Mighty real. . ."

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