New York City (Party after fashion show at 79th Street Rotunda, Riverside Park)

By the time this photograph was taken in 1976, many styles of music and dancing were emerging in New York City.

In the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc, who has been called the father of hip-hop, began collecting obscure records and blending them with local hits of the day. Noticing that the young dancers would wait until the instrumental sections of songs to dance, Herc started to connect three instrumental “breaks” in a technique he called the “merry-go-round,” and the dancers began to be known as break dancers.

Also in the South Bronx, as a reaction to many years of dancing the twist solo, people began “touch dancing,” which evolved into the Spanish hustle and the hustle.

Queens saw more interest in rock, with the advent of the glam group Kiss and the punk band the Ramones. While some bands such as Blondie oscillated between musical genres including disco, punk, reggae, and rap, others focused on one genre, disco. By the time of Studio 54, disco had been a popular dance form for several years, and everyone felt that America was dancing again—though not all to the same beat.