The Downtown Pop Underground

Bleecker Street Cinema

144 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012

40.728080

-73.999340

0
Bryant Theatre

138 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036

40.755370

-73.985990

1
Charles Theater

193 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009

40.728050

-73.978990

2
Film-Makers’ Cooperative

414 Park Ave S, New York, NY 10016

40.743760

-73.984100

3
Forty-First Street Cinema

125 W 41st St, New York, NY 10036

40.754580

-73.985530

4
Mercer Arts Center

240 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012

40.727900

-73.995490

5
Ziegfeld Theatre

141 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019

40.763170

-73.979810

6

Bleecker Street Cinema

144 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012

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.

Bryant Theatre

138 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036

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

Charles Theater

193 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009

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.

Film-Makers’ Cooperative

414 Park Ave S, New York, NY 10016

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.

Forty-First Street Cinema

125 W 41st St, New York, NY 10036

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.

Mercer Arts Center

240 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012

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.”

Ziegfeld Theatre

141 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019

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.