The Downtown Pop Underground

Harry Koutoukas’s longtime home at 87 Christopher Street is also where Lisa Jane Persky grew up and Yoko Ono lived for a short time.

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Abbie and Anita Hoffman’s apartment was across the street from The Dom, and their apartment also served as the site of an infamous press conference in advance of the 1967 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

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One of the apartments that Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky shared was located in a fairly rough part of the Lower East Side.

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The American Place Theatre, located on West Forty-Sixth Street, was where Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s Cowboy Mouth opened and closed at the end of April 1971.

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• Cowboy Mouth’s Very Short Run

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The Anderson Theater—which hosted the disastrous New York City debut of the Cockettes—seated over three thousand people, and like many similar theaters on Second Avenue, it had been left to decay since the glory days of vaudeville.

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Andy Warhol’s longtime residence on East Seventy-Fifth Street, in the tonier Upper East Side, stood in sharp contrast to the decrepit downtown environs where he socialized.

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In 1965, Jonas Mekas rented space for the Filmmakers Cinematheque to produce multimedia shows and film screenings at the Astor Place Theatre, where the Fugs also regularly performed; it was also where the first production of Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars was staged in 1975.

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• Women Behind Bars

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The first production of the Jackie Curtis-penned Glamor, Glory and Gold, directed by Ron Link, was performed at Bastiano’s Cellar Studio in Greenwich Village.

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• Candy Darling Bends Gender and Warps Reality
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Bibbe Hansen lived in several places throughout her childhood, including deep in the heart of the Lower East Side on 6^th Street, between Avenues C and D, where dancer Freddie Herko and Factory custodian Billy Name lived nearby.

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Bigelow Drugs on Sixth Avenue, between West Eighth and Ninth Streets, was another community hub that sold everything from magazines and medicine to fountain soda drinks.

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• Robert Heide and Edward Albee Wander the Streets

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Billy Name’s Lower East Side apartment was the site of Warhol’s 1963 silent film series, Haircut, which features Billy giving poet John Daley a haircut as James Waring and Freddie Herko watched.

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• Billy Name on the Scene

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The Broadway version of Hair, directed by La MaMa’s Tom O’Horgan, debuted at the Biltmore Theatre on April 29, 1968, featuring Walter Michael Harris as the youngest cast member.

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A regular haunt of the Harris family, mother Ann Harris used to take her children (including the soon-to-be Hibiscus) to see Busby Berkeley films at Bleecker Street Cinema.

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• Poaching from Old Movies

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“The Blondie Loft,” as it was known on the scene, was a place for the band to rehearse and their friends to hang out before heading a block away to CBGB (it also served as the residence of Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Gary Valentine).

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• The Blondie Loft

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The Blue Hawaiian Discotheque was one of the many underground discos that sprouted up downtown in the first half of the 1970s, and was the site of a performance by Patti Smith as part of her “Rock and Rimbaud” series in 1974.

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Bobern Bar and Grill, on West Twenty-Eighth Street, was named after its owners, Bob and Ernie, and it was one of the small venues where the Stilettoes performed.

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This Off-Off-Broadway theater, where Cockette Pam Tent performed with others in The Palm Casino Revue, was located in a nineteenth century cast-iron building, a stone’s throw from CBGB.

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The Bridge Theatre was above the Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, which benefited from the abundant Greenwich Village foot traffic—especially when the Fugs performed there during their residency.

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The music industry was concentrated around the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, which was packed with songwriters who pitched their musical products to hit-seeking record labels.

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The Broadway Central Hotel (which housed Art Bar in its basement) was attached to the neighboring Mercer Art Center, which was condemned after the hotel collapsed on August 3, 1973.

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Patti Smith referred to Brownie’s vegetarian restaurant as part of downtown’s “Bermuda Triangle,” which also included the nearby Factory on Union Square and Max’s Kansas City.

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Midtown, part of Manhattan’s primary entertainment district, had several large movie palaces, such as the Bryant Theatre on Forty-Second Street.

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Café Bizarre was one of the first coffeehouses to cash in on the folk and beatnik boom, and in 1965 it was where Ed Sanders, Andy Warhol, and others discovered the Velvet Underground.

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Café La MaMa’s first location was in a basement on East Ninth Street, right next door to the Harris family’s longtime residence, and after it moved to Second Avenue, Ellen Stewart kept this space as a rehearsal studio.

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After the first Café La MaMa location was shut down by the city, Ellen Stewart moved it to a loft at 82 Second Avenue, which was quickly vacated after Ellen Stewart was tipped off that the police were going to raid it one night.

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Right after a performance of Paul Foster’s Balls at Café La MaMa’s second location, Ellen Stewart enlisted the audience to move the entire set, seats, and other items to a new location up the street, at 122 Second Avenue—just before the police raided the 82 Second Avenue location.

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Before Mickey Ruskin opened Max’s Kansas City, he ran Café Le Metro—a literary hotspot where Andy Warhol first met Ronald Tavel, who was enlisted to write scenarios for several of Warhol’s films.

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• The Factory Hires Ronald Tavel and Mario Montez

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In the heart of Greenwich Village, Café Rafio was surrounded by other neighborhood staples such as Café Au Bizarre, Circle in the Square, Village Gate, and the Gaslight, among many others.

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Opening its doors in 1959, Cafe Wha? was among the first wave of coffeehouses that populated MacDougal Street—hosting musicians and comedians such as Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, and Joan Rivers.

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• Lendon Sandler Travels to New York City

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Arguably the first Off-Off-Broadway theater venue, Caffe Cino was located on Cornelia—a quiet one-block-long street that terminates to the north at West Fourth Street that hosted many an experimental theater production and performance.

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This classy midtown venue sometimes hosted more experimental fare by the likes of Yoko Ono, Harry Koutoukas, and John Cage.

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A social justice newspaper founded by activist Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker building (which also housed a soup kitchen) was located near the future site of CBGB.

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– CBGB had been around since 1969 in an earlier incarnation, Hilly’s on the Bowery, which was named after owner Hilly Kristal; in late 1973, he changed the name to Country, BlueGrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers—which was shortened to CBGB-OMFUG.

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Known as “Black Rock,” the CBS Building was the quintessential example of top-down corporate management, from the programming that broadcast to America down to room temperature of the air conditioning that was centrally-controlled.

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The Cedar Tavern was a Village hangout where many Abstract-Expressionist painters and other bohemians frequented.

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Located at 1 Sheridan Square, the Charles Ludlam Theater’s namesake founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after splitting with Play-House of the Ridiculous founder John Vaccaro.

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Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg first met in 1962 outside the Charles Theatre on Avenue B, where Jonas Mekas screened underground films and Kupferberg was selling copies of his magazine Birth to the audience.

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A kind of downtown annex, this residential hotel housed many artists and bohemians through the years: poet Allen Ginsberg, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, singer Janis Joplin, couturier Charles James, and playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Sam Shepard, to name but a few of the dozens of prominent figures who lived there at one time.

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Off-Broadway shifted American theater from its midtown Manhattan roots after venues such as Cherry Lane Theatre drew audiences further downtown.

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Located at 10 West 13th Street, this vintage movie poster and bookstore Cinemabilia employed Television manager Terry Ork, as well as Richard Hell and Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps.

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The Circle in the Square, along with Cherry Lane Theatre, helped spearhead the Off-Broadway theater movement.

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During the early 1950s and 1960s, when it was known as the 82 Club, this Lower East Side venue had been one of the premier venues for drag queens, though by the early 1970s it had rechristened itself Club 82 and operated as afterhours disco and underground rock club.

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The Coda Gallery, a little gallery on 89 East Tenth Street, staged Ronald Tavel’s one-acts The Life of Juanita Castro and Shower after the playwright founded the Play-House of the Ridiculous with John Vaccaro.

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The Continental Baths, located on the Upper West Side, was a gay bathhouse where the New York Dolls once played and Bette Midler regularly performed with Barry Manilow (who sometimes blended in with the patrons by wearing nothing but a white towel).

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It was at Diane di Prima’s apartment at 229 East Fourth that she and her lover LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) published their influential mimeo zine, The Floating Bear.

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Along with Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, the East Side Bookstore on St. Mark’s Place was one of the key hubs of distribution for mimeo poetry zines.

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Ed Sanders lived in several places on the Lower East Side throughout the 1960s, including his residence on Avenue A, where he was attacked in a case of mistaken identity during a drug deal gone wrong.

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• Darkness Descends on the East Village

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The Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village was frequented by Ed Sanders, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth, and was where the young poet Andrei Codrescu worked when he moved downtown in 1967.

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Just off the Chelsea Hotel’s lobby was El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant and bar that served inexpensive lobster and was a popular hangout.

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The Electric Circus—located in the space on St. Mark’s Place that was formerly known as the Dom, where the Velvet Underground had a residency—featured acrobats, go-go dancer, and even John Cage onstage playing an experimental-acoustic game of chess.

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Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios, on West Eighth Street, was where Patti Smith recorded her debut DIY single and Horses, her debut album released by the major label, Arista.

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In late 1960s SoHo, one of the biggest draw was an old-fashioned bar that served inexpensive bean soup for lunch, named Fanelli’s, right beneath the Videofreex loft.

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Two blocks south of St. Mark’s Place, on Second Avenue and Sixth Street, was the Fillmore East—which for a brief period between 1968 and 1971 hosted the downtown sounds of the Fugs and Silver Apples, along with touring acts like the Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix.

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In the early 1960s, Jonas Mekas lived loft at 414 Park Avenue South, between Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Streets, where he began hosting Film-Makers’ Cooperative screenings, a space lined with shelves of films and an old Moviola film-editing machine that Jonas slept under to save space.

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The Five Spot Café, where many jazz legends performed, was frequented by Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and John Vaccaro of the Play-House of the Ridiculous.

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Fluxhouse Cooperative founder George Maciunas and his friends weren’t the first to occupy that former industrial area, but by renovating these old spaces (and fighting for the legal right to do so) they were the ones who established this practice on a wider scale.

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Early in their tenure at the Factory, the Velvet Underground performed at the Forty-First Street Cinema as part of a mixed-media show named Andy Warhol, Up-Tight.

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Located on MacDougal Street, the Gaslight was a coffeehouse that was a haven for Beat writers and which hosted the likes of Bob Dylan and the Holy Modal Rounders in the early 1960s.

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Gem Spa was a newsstand located on St. Mark’s Place that sold chocolate egg creams for a quarter and was a popular hangout frequented by everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Patti Smith.

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Gerde's Folk City was one of the many coffeehouses around MacDougal Street that hosted hootenannies.

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The Greenwich Village Peace Center was cofounded by poet and activist Grace Paley, who renovated an old storefront on West Third Street, between Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue, with the help of Ed Sanders and others.

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Ellen Stewart helped the Harris family find their longtime apartment, located next door to her first La MaMa location (which she later kept as a rehearsal space and let the family use).

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Ironically, given the reputation of the biker club the Hells Angels, their headquarters was often considered one of the safer parts of the surrounding neighborhood (which included CBGB, where its members frequented in the early days of the bar).

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• Eric Emerson Builds a Stage

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Hotel Diplomat was a midtown hotel with deteriorating ballrooms where downtown bands occasionally played, like the New York Dolls; the early disco Le Jardin was located in the hotel.

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Jack Smith lived in what would later become known as SoHo, back when the rents were low and the city had not yet been ruined by what Smith called “landlordism.”

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When not socializing in the White Horse Tavern, Jane Jacobs used the living room of her family apartment at 555 Hudson Street to organize against Robert Moses’s plans to build an expressway onramp through the middle of Washington Square Park.

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Located at 5 Cornelia Street, Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith's apartment was down the road from Caffe Cino and is most notable as the site where dancer Freddie Herko committed suicide by jumping out their window.

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In 1959, the Judson Gallery was founded in the church’s basement at 239 Thompson Street, which displayed work by Pop and conceptual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms—and was home to several Happenings.

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Judson Memorial Church, on the south side of Washington Square, mixed radical art, politics, and performance by hosting experimental music composer and theorist John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and so many others.

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After being run out of a variety of downtown locations by city authorities, Ellen Stewart opened the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club at 74A East Fourth—in a building that was the former site of a hotdog factory.

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As Ellen Stewart worked on setting up La MaMa’s permanent home at 74 East Fourth Street, her theater continued staging shows in a temporary space at 9 St. Mark’s Place from 1968 to early 1969.

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La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble at the composer’s loft deep in the heart of downtown, in a liminal zone between what would become known as SoHo and Tribeca.

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Lenny’s Hideaway, on West Tenth and Seventh Avenue, was one of the bars where Andy Warhol circulated among artists, poets, theater people, and gay crowds.

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Les Deux Mégots, run by future Max’s Kansas City proprietor Mickey Ruskin, was an East Village coffeehouse that was part of the underground poetry scene in the first half of the 1960s.

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Across Union Square Park from the second Factory location was a restaurant and bar named Max’s Kansas City, one of Andy Warhol’s regular haunts even before the move.

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Before the Mercer Arts Center collapsed in 1973, it was where underground theater, glam rock, video art, and performance art briefly intersected in the early 1970s—planting the seeds of what would become known as “punk.”

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Mona’s Royal Roost was a quintessentially quaint Greenwich Village cocktail bar run by two older women located across the street from Caffe Cino, where the Cino crowd would sometimes sneak away for a drink between shows.

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Early punk bands bounced back and forth between CBGB and Max’s, as well as lesser known venues like Mother’s—a gay bar near the Chelsea Hotel where Suicide, the Fast, Ramones, and Blondie played.

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The New School for Social Research was the site where Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and Al Hansen attended John Cage’s influential, consciousness-raising class in 1958, which laid the groundwork for Happenings and other experimental performance forms.

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• Families in the Village

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Early in their career the New York Dolls threw rent parties in their Lower Manhattan loft, before performing at the Mercer Arts Center; members of the band Dance, who often opened for the Dolls, also resided in the building.

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New York Poets Theatre was founded by dancers James Waring and Freddie Herko, along with poets LeRoi Jones, Diane di Prima, and her then-husband, Alan Marlowe—based in the Bowery Theatre on East Tenth Street, near Third Avenue.

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• Censoring Flaming Creatures

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After the New York Rocker began publishing in 1976, founder Alan Betrock began operating out of a tiny windowless office at 155 Fifth Avenue, near the Flatiron building.

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• New York Rocker and Punk Magazine

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Located at 62 East Fourth Street, the New York Theater Ensemble was the staging ground for many an outrageous production, including the Wayne County-penned play World: Birth of a Nation.

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Before opening Max’s Kansas City, Mickey Ruskin managed the Ninth Circle in Greenwich Village (which in the 1970s and 1980s transformed into a well-known gay hustler bar).

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Early SoHo gallery OK Harris was owned by Ivan Karp, who had earlier played a key role in promoting Pop Art; in 1970, Karp agreed to let Suicide play one of their first show as a group, which was promoted as “Punk Music by Suicide.”

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Norman Hartman’s Old Reliable Theatre Tavern was an old-school bar was located on Third Street between Avenues B and C, a volatile neighborhood (playwright Jeannine O’Reilly used to quip, “The way to get to the Old Reliable is to turn left at the burning car”).

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Another jewel in the downtown’s literary crown was the Paperbook Gallery, on Sixth Avenue around the corner from the Eighth Street Bookshop, which stayed open until midnight—a practice that encouraged people to socialize.

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• Jackie Curtis’s Lucky Wonderful

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Betsey Johnson began her career in fashion as a designer for Paraphernalia, a hip clothing store located on the corner of Sixty-Seventh Street and Madison, which featured go-go dancers in the window and blaring rock 'n' roll.

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In late 1968, Paula Cooper opened the first SoHo art gallery at 96 Prince Street, in the same building that housed the Videofreex loft; a decade later, seventy-seven galleries had been drawn to the neighborhood, where many artists lived and created their works.

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Peace Eye Bookstore—where proprietor Ed Sanders used to crank out printed matter on his mimeo machine and rehearse with his irreverent underground rock band the Fugs—was located between Avenues B and C, on East Tenth Street.

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Angela Boone ran Pennyfeathers, and she adopted Harry Koutoukas as the restaurant’s “house playwright,” who consumed many a roast beef sandwich, which Boone would provide for him gratis.

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Phebe’s—located on East Fourth and Bowery, halfway between CBGB and La MaMa—was known as the “Sardi’s of Off-Off-Broadway” (the Times Square hotspot Sardi’s drew an uptown Broadway crowd).

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Between the Play-House of the Ridiculous company’s debut at the Coda Gallery and landing a home at La MaMa, John Vaccaro’s troupe staged shows in this loft on West Seventeenth Street.

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Plaza Sound Studios, had previously been used as a radio studio for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was a midtown studio above Radio City Music Hall where the Ramones and Blondie recorded their debut albums.

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The Project of Living Artists, where Suicide’s Alan Vega worked in the late 1960s, was a collaborative space funded for a short time by the New York State Council on the Arts.

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Reno Sweeney was an intimate cabaret located at 126 West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, where Holly Woodlawn and many other downtown acts performed.

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The San Remo was another regular stop on the downtown circuit—a traditional village tavern on MacDougal Street and Bleecker with pressed-tin ceilings and wooden walls.

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Not only was Scepter Records ground zero for the girl-group explosion, the first album by The Velvet Underground was recorded in 1966 at the record company’s studio located in a midtown office building.

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Slugger Ann’s was a dimly lit Lower East Side corner bar on Second Avenue (by East Twelfth Street) that was run by Jackie Curtis’s grandmother, who the bar was named after; Jackie sometimes crashed in the apartment behind the bar.

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St. Augustine's Church, deep in the Lower East Side, where Hampton Clanton worked in a summer youth program, which led to him being cast as the lead in Shirley Clarke's The Cool World.

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Like Judson Memorial Church, St. Mark’s Church opened its doors to the artists who populated its surrounding neighborhoods—hosting the Poetry Project and Theatre Genesis, among many other artistic endeavors.

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This Greenwich Village hospital served the local community for over 160 years before permanently closing in 2010; Joe Cino spent his last hours there after stabbing himself to death in 1967, and three decades later it treated hundreds of HIV patients during the height of the AIDS crisis.

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A mafia-run gay bar near Christopher Street, Stonewall became the site of the first major rebellion against police harassment in 1969—which helped spark the gay liberation movement.

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The Cheetah was a Midtown discothèque that also hosted a production of Hair before it opened on Broadway in the spring of 1968.

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The Dom was a former Polish wedding and social hall on St. Mark’s Place that became a popular bar where bohemians congregated; it was at the Dom where Ed Sanders suggested to Tuli Kupferberg that they should form the Fugs, and the Velvet Underground performed as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

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Andy Warhol worked with his printing assistant Gerard Malanga in an uptown studio near his brownstone home until the artist needed a larger studio, leading to his acquisition of a space in a midtown industrial building that became the Factory—which Billy Name turned into a glittering, silver installation art piece.

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In 1967, Andy Warhol moved the Factory to 33 Union Square, between East Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets in Manhattan, across Union Square Park from Max’s Kansas City; one year later, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in its offices, putting an end to the Factory’s more freewheeling, open-door policy.

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The Living Theatre was housed in an old four-story department store building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; John Cage and Merce Cunningham rented a studio on the third floor of the Living Theatre, which accelerated the cross-fertilization of scenes.

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The Loft was founded in 1970 by an Italian man named David Mancuso, who ran it out of his living space (an actual loft) in order to circumvent city regulations, governing clubs, and bars; originally located at 647 Broadway in Greenwich Village, it was a short walk from Mercer Arts Center and CBGB.

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Joseph Papp’s Public Theater hosted the first production of Hair in 1967, one of many adventurous shows presented by the theater over the years.

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The office of Paul Krassner’s The Realist was located in the same office building as Mad magazine, whose art director John Francis Putnam wrote a regular column for The Realist titled “Modest Proposals.”

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Theater for the New City was founded in 1971 by Crystal Field, George Bartenieff, Theo Barnes, and Lawrence Kornfeld (who had previously worked with the Judson Poets’ Theatre); by the mid-1970s, it had become a second home for Hibiscus and the Angels of Light.

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Tony Conrad opened his apartment on 56 Ludlow Street to fellow Theater of Eternal Music musician John Cale, who was eventually joined by another roommate, Lou Reed; several early Velvet Underground demos were recorded at this apartment.

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The Truck and Warehouse Theater, located across Fourth Street from La MaMa and Club 82, hosted the second production of Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars.

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Joshua Light Show founder Joshua White designed lighting at Trude Heller’s and other discothèques in the mid-1960s, where he began to develop techniques that he refined at the Fillmore East.

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After CBS hired the Videofreex to produce a pilot for an experimental television show, Subject to Change, they rented a SoHo loft above Fanelli’s and the Paula Cooper Gallery where they built a video production studio.

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The Village Gate, a popular venue where jazz artists like Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Cannonball Adderley played, also employed Theatre Genesis’s Ralph Cook and Sam Shepard.

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Village Oldies, which sold vintage 45 rpm records, was opened in 1967 by two men known as Broadway Al and Bleecker Bob (who later opened Bleecker Bob’s record store); Patti Smith met record store clerk Lenny Kaye at Village Oldies, which began a fruitful musical collaboration that lasted five decades.

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Future CBGB owner Hilly Kristal was the manager of the famed jazz club the Village Vanguard in the 1950s before opening Hilly’s on East Thirteenth Street, where he booked folk and blues acts throughout the 1960s.

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The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, and its offices were located at 22 Greenwich Avenue until moving to Sheridan Square in 1960—where it stayed throughout that decade.

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The Village Voice spent the 1960s at 61 Christopher Street, in triangular corner building adjoining Sheridan Square that also housed the Stonewall Inn.

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Washington Square Park was a central gathering spot for New York’s folk and Beat scenes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the area surrounding the park was filled with coffeehouses, particularly on MacDougal Street.

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An early example of “adaptive reuse,” the old Bell Laboratories Buildings were converted in the late-1960s into Westbeth Artists Housing—where Ed Sanders moved after fleeing the increasingly grim East Village in 1970.

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Located on Hudson Street and West Eleventh, the White Horse was primarily a workingman’s tavern until Dylan Thomas and other writers began going there in the 1950s.

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The Why Not Café, located across the street from the more famous Café Wha?, was a typical tourist trap coffeehouse of that era—where future Max’s Kansas City booker Peter Crowley worked in the 1960s, luring in customers off the street.

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Housing New York’s first Y.M.C.A. in the 1880s, by the 1970s it was occupied by writers William Burroughs and John Giorno when it was known as “the Bunker.”

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New York’s Women’s House of Detention was located in Greenwich Village, where people on the street could hear inmates calling out from the prison’s windows.

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Between 1971 and 1976, the WPA Theatre (Workshop of the Players Art) presented Off-Off-Broadway shows at its at 333 Bowery location—where Jackie Curtis’s Vain Victory moved after its wildly successful run at La MaMa.

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Downtown Manhattan’s first loft events were presented by Yoko Ono at her Chambers Street Loft Series, in what is now called TriBeCa (the triangle below Canal Street).

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The radical Young Lords Organization announced itself to the world on July 26, 1969 at Tompkins Square Park, though its headquarters were located further south on East Third Street, very close to Slugs’ and the Old Reliable.

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This single screen movie palace opened in 1969 and was named in honor of the original Ziegfeld, a Broadway theater also located on Fifty-Fourth Street.

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