The Brief

A place to discover Latin artists and dance salsa or bachata all night, the Conga Room, founded by entrepreneur Brad Gluckstein, became a Los Angeles institution, backed with some major star power.

Jennifer Lopez, Sheila E., Jimmy Smits, and Paul Rodriguez were among the initial investors and at least two of them occasionally performed in the space.

Conga Room founder Brad Gluckstein stands between early investors in the nightclub, actor Jimmy Smits and comedian Paul Rodriguez

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Eddie Sakaki

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Conga Room

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The backstory

Other Latin music clubs existed in L.A., but the vibe of the Conga Room was new to the city in the late 90s. The L.A. Times described it as having “two things most [salsa clubs] didn’t: money and taste.”

It first opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1998 with Celia Cruz headlining the intimate venue with the hit “Que Le Den Candela.”

Celia Cruz performs at the Conga Room

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Courtesy of the Conga Room

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Attendees over the years could catch acts ranging from Tito Puente to Ivy Queen to Bad Bunny, and performers of other genres also came across the stage. The venue shifted from salsa club to pan-Latin and world music.

In the 90s, you might have seen South African trumpeter Hugh Masekala, as well as Prince play the Conga Room. Private events included the post-Grammy win party for Carlos Santana, where a dinner of 125 attendees sang “Las Mañanitas” to Edward James Olmos for his birthday.

The space was “old Havana for the new millennium,” Gluckstein says.

By 2008, the Conga Room had outgrown its Miracle Mile location and moved to a larger space, downtown, at LA Live. More artists, including Black Eyed Peas rapper and producer will.i.am were brought on as investors. The new venue was nearly three times as large, with a VIP area, and a lot more parking. Food was “nueva Latina” cuisine and the “pan-Latin” interior was designed in collaboration with artists Jorge Pardo and Sergio Arau.

The venue was all the rage.

“You get 1100 people in a room listening to some beautiful Latin sounds…It's going to be more than lively,” says actor and Conga Room investor Jimmy Smits with a laugh.

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#257: Today, we’re saying goodbye to a space with a storied legacy in this city — the Conga Room. The Latin nightclub opened in 1998, and brought in artists ranging from Celia Cruz and Tito Puente to Maluma and Bad Bunny.  The club’s star studded list of investors included Jennifer Lopez, Sheila E., comedian Paul Rodriguez, and actor Jimmy Smits.  This week, the Conga Room is closing its doors. 

Jimmy Smits Says Goodbye To LA's Conga Room

#257: Today, we’re saying goodbye to a space with a storied legacy in this city — the Conga Room. The Latin nightclub opened in 1998, and brought in artists ranging from Celia Cruz and Tito Puente to Maluma and Bad Bunny.  The club’s star studded list of investors included Jennifer Lopez, Sheila E., comedian Paul Rodriguez, and actor Jimmy Smits.  This week, the Conga Room is closing its doors. 

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The Conga Room was a place to be in L.A. LAist’s Cynthia Covarrubias, senior human resources generalist, says she would go to the Wilshire location as “a young, professional Latina trying to find [her] place in the club world.”

Besides, her roommate at the time “really wanted to meet Jennifer Lopez.”

Why it's closing

The reasons this beloved venue are closing are two-fold.

As Gluckstein puts it, some of the reasons behind the venue’s closure are obvious — the effects of the pandemic and the economy. Rising rents at LA Live coupled with changes in music booking trends also meant the Conga Room wasn’t seeing the numbers it was used to.

“A staple of our venue was being able to attract international artists in a small venue,” says Gluckstein. But post pandemic, Gluckstein says, “royalties and other means of survival for the artists were tougher.” Artists who would normally stop by the Conga Room couldn’t afford a smaller stop on a tour, and there weren’t enough private events coming through the space to make it profitable.

The venue will be closing up in style, however, with a friends and family celebration on March 27th, hosted by Smits and Paul Rodriguez. The music-filled event will include performances by Salsa legend Gilberto Santa Rosa, and a jam session led by Jerry Rivera, Andy Vargas, and Reggaetón sensation BLESSD.

“I opened the Conga Room because I was a salsa aficionado, you know, I lived and died for it,” says Gluckstein.

Tito Puente performs on stage at the Conga Room

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Courtesy of the Conga Room

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Despite the sadness and nostalgia conjured up around the closure, Gluckstein is still finding joy in salsa, and in bringing music to classrooms around Southern California.

There’s a passing of the torch with the non profit Conga Kids, also founded by Gluckstein in 2016.

“We're into this thing called the Conga Kids, which is serving many Los Angeles schools with bringing music and culture to young people,” Smits says. “So it's like another generation passing down to another generation.”

LA students that are part of the Conga Kids program

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Eddie Sakaki

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Courtesy of the Conga Room

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What's next

Conga Kids brings music and dance from the African diaspora, where Latin music has roots, to 18 school districts across Southern California. That includes dances and genres like merengue, cumbia, salsa, and hip-hop. It’s got programs specific to 4th and 5th grades but includes school assemblies and family workshops for students in both elementary and middle school. Schools can request the Conga Kids program online through its website.

Working with the dancers, musicians, and artists in the Conga Kids program means “it's hard to be sad,” says Gluckstein.

And Smits adds that the Conga Room will "live on because music lives on, and music transcends everything.”

The Trump administration says it’s planning to freeze about $10 billion in federal support for needy families in California and four other Democrat-run states, as the president announced an investigation into unspecified fraud in California.

The plans come on the heels of the Trump administration announcing a freeze on all federal payments for child care in Minnesota, citing fraud allegations against daycare centers in the state.

The state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz — who ran for vice president against Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024 — announced Monday he was dropping out of running for reelection. He pointed to fraud against the state, saying it’s a real issue while alleging Trump and his allies were “seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”

On Monday, the New York Post reported that the administration was expanding the funding freeze to include California and three other Democrat-led states, in addition to Minnesota. Unnamed federal officials cited “concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens,” The Post reported.

Early Tuesday, President Trump alleged that corruption in California is worse than Minnesota and announced an investigation.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

He did not specify what alleged fraud was being examined in the Golden State.

LAist has reached out to the White House to ask what the president’s fraud concerns are in California and to request an interview with the president.

“For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said an emailed statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal childcare funds.

“Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office disputed Trump’s claim on social media, arguing that since taking office, the governor has blocked $125 billion in fraud and arrested “criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers.”

Criminal fraud cases in CA appear to be rare for this program

Defrauding federally funded programs is a crime — and one LAist has investigated, leading to one of the largest such criminal cases in recent years against a California elected official, which surrounded meal funds.

When it comes to the federal childcare funds that are being frozen, the dollar amount of fraud alleged in criminal cases appears to be a tiny fraction of the overall program’s spending in California.

A search of thousands of news releases by all four federal prosecutor offices in California, going back more than a decade, found a total of one criminal case where the press releases referenced childcare benefits.

That case, brought in 2023, alleged four men stole $3.7 million in federal childcare benefits through fraudulent requests to a San Diego organization that distributed the funds. All four pleaded guilty, with one defendant sentenced to 27 months in prison and others sentenced to other terms, according to authorities.

It appears to be equivalent to one one-hundredth of 1% of all the childcare funding California has received over the past decade-plus covered by the prosecution press release search.

Potential impact on California families

The plans call for California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Colorado to lose about $7 billion in cash assistance for households with children, almost $2.4 billion to care for children of working parents, and about $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, according to unnamed federal officials speaking to the New York Times and New York Post.

In the largest category of funding, California receives $3.7 billion per year. The program is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

 ”It's very clear that a freeze of those funds would be very damaging to the children, families, and providers of California,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives "at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

 ”It is a significant portion of our funds and will impact families and children and providers across the whole state,” she added. “It would be devastating, in no uncertain terms.”

About 270,000 people are served by the TANF program in L.A. County — about 200,000 of whom are children, according to the county Department of Public Social Services.

“Any pause in funding for their cash benefits – which average $1000/month - would be devastating to these families,” said DPSS chief of staff Nick Ippolito.

Ippolito said the department has a robust fraud prevention and 170-person investigations team, and takes allegations “very seriously.”

It remains to be seen whether the funding freeze will end up in court. The state, as well as major cities and counties in California, has sued to ask judges to halt funding freezes or new requirements placed by the Trump administration. L.A. city officials say they’ve had success with that, including shielding more than $600 million in federal grant funding to the city last year.

A union representing California childcare workers said the funding freeze would harm low-income families.

“These threats need to be called out for what they are: direct threats on working families of all backgrounds who rely on access to quality, affordable child care in their communities to go to work every day supporting, and growing our economy,” said Max Arias, chairperson for the Child Care Providers United, which says it represents more than 70,000 child care workers across the state who care for kids in their homes.

“Funding freezes, even when intended to be temporary, will be devastating — resulting in families losing access to care and working parents facing the devastating choice of keeping their children safe or paying their bills.”

Federal officials planned to send letters to the affected states Monday about the planned funding pauses, the New York Post reported. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, state officials said they haven’t gotten any official notification of the funding freeze plans.

“The California Department of Social Services administers child care programs that help working families afford safe, reliable care for their children — so parents can go to work, support their families, and contribute to their communities,” said a statement from California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel.

“These funds are critical for working families across California. We take fraud seriously, and CDSS has received no information from the federal government indicating any freeze, pause, or suspension of federal child care funding.”

Housing officials in the city of Los Angeles say a pandemic-era voucher program is set to run out of money later this year, putting thousands of renters at risk of homelessness.

The federal Emergency Housing Voucher program was launched in 2021 as a way to get vulnerable people off the streets and into housing during the COVID-19 crisis. The city of L.A. received more than 3,300 of the vouchers.

With federal funding now running out, the city is preparing to wind down the program. On Monday the city’s housing authority said it had told 2,760 tenant households and 1,700 landlords that unless new funding is found, vouchers will expire by November or December of this year.

“We are providing this notice nearly a year in advance because our families deserve the respect of time to prepare, but this is not a notice of resignation,” said L.A. Housing Authority President Lourdes Castro Ramírez said in a news release. “We are exhausting every avenue — at the local, state and federal levels — to bridge this funding gap.”

The Housing Authority said each household using a voucher had an average of 1.58 members. That puts more than 4,000 Angelenos at risk of losing their housing later this year.

Homelessness progress could be reversed

Congress originally intended the program to continue through 2030, but last year, the Trump administration announced funding would end sooner. The program’s demise risks reversing L.A.’s reported progress at stemming the rise of homelessness.

After years of steady increases, the city has registered slight reductions in the number of people experiencing homelessness for the past two years. In 2023, the region’s homeless services authority reported 46,260 people experiencing homelessness in the city of L.A. By 2025, that number had fallen to 43,695.

The accuracy of those official counts has been questioned by local researchers, but elected officials have cheered the numbers as a sign that the tide is turning in addressing one of L.A.’s most vexing problems.

With thousands of renters now at risk of losing a key resource helping them afford the city’s high rents, sharp increases in homelessness could be on the horizon, said Mike Feuer, a senior policy advisor with the Inner City Law Center.

“They're going to fall into homelessness, and they're going to increase L.A.'s homeless population by almost 10%,” Feuer said. “Those are the implications of what the Trump administration is doing.”

Voucher holders have low incomes; many have kids

According to L.A.’s Housing Authority, about 1-in-4 voucher holders has children and 1-in-5 is elderly. And about 40% are disabled. These households have an average income of less than $14,000 per year, and they receive an average of $1,789 per month in rental subsidy while paying about $350 out of their own pockets.

The loss of federal funding for Emergency Housing Vouchers is distinct from the issues facing renters using Housing Choice Vouchers, another federally funded program often referred to as Section 8. Existing vouchers in the Section 8 program have continued to be funded, but federal funding reductions have caused city officials to cut the amount of rent new vouchers in that program can cover by 10%.

L.A. Housing Authority officials said they have dedicated staff reaching out to tenants to explore other housing resources that might keep them housed after the vouchers expire.

Manuel Villagomez, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles specializing in subsidized housing, said with city and state budgets strapped, tenant advocates are not counting on California to find alternative funding sources to continue the program.

“It seems like it's a tragedy in the making,” Villagomez said. “We're preparing for the worst.”