At five minutes before 10 on Saturday night, the Roxy’s manager, Jason McCarthy, lined up the folks who staff the discothèque’s massive front bar. “O.K., everybody, remember what I told you,” he said. “Smile a lot. Hug people a lot. Tell them how important the gay community has been to this place. O.K.?”

The Roxy, on 18th Street near the West Side Highway, was about to open for its last night. Since 1990, this warhorse of a club, which operates during the week as a roller-skating rink, has made its name as a gay dance hall on Saturday nights. But last month, the word went out that the Roxy would be shutting its doors for good after a final bash on March 10. The building’s owner has plans to sell it to developers.

“The end of an era,” read the copy on a stack of promotional cards that sat on a column near the Roxy’s 6,000-square-foot dance floor. The card listed a few employment statistics — “53 disc jockeys”; “781 go-go boys” — in addition to the four “live music icons” (Madonna, Cher, Bette Midler and Beyoncé) who were known to turn up nominally unannounced every now and then and perform a short set.

But the Roxy’s significance, said people from both sides of the velvet rope, has less to do with such performances than with the droves of gay men who cycled through its gates weekend after weekend.