The Downtown Pop Underground

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

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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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