PI Update: What Happened To Our Dance Floor?

One of the great mysteries surrounding the conversion of this Pleasure Island building from being Mannequins Dance Palace to becoming Morimoto Asia restaurant is what became of the massive revolving dance floor that took up nearly all the space in the venue. We were reminded of the large overhead door that existed on The Waterfront side of the building and the UP & DOWN buttons that controlled the door movement.

During early 2010 or more than a year after Mannequins closed, Blog reader PI Fan reported finding that overhead door open during his/her PI visit and provided Save Pleasure Island Blog with these two pictures. Even this soon after the club closed, there were some insisting that the floor had already been removed. These pics proved that as of 2010, the revolving dance floor was still in there. While it's difficult to see the floor specifically, one can see that all the metal barriers that wrapped around the dance floor were all still in place so it would have been impossible for the floor to have been removed.

In 2013 the door was open again as the construction of Disney Springs had commenced. It's a distant view but Mannequins as we knew it with all those girders and trusses and barriers were still in place. So that big old revolving dance floor had to still be in there as well.

The conversion from Mannequins to Morimoto began in 2014 and in this early 2015 photo, we see a backhoe doing some digging in the area where that garage door once stood. The building opening to the outdoors at this point was as large as the opening ever got during construction which of course was too small to have taken the massive revolving dance floor out. Some speculate that the floor was broken into pieces and removed that way but if you recall that floor's composition, there would have been no way to break it up.

So where is the dance floor today? We continue to believe that it's still there but beneath Morimoto where unusual concrete panels make up the restaurant's floor.