He was one of the poets recorded on May 15, 1960, when the well-known broadcast journalist Mike Wallace came to the café to do a TV special on the Beats. Soon enough Romney became a regular performer at the Gaslight, eventually taking up the role of entertainment director. “It was Beat mecca the premier spot to read poetry,” he said in a telephone interview. I thought, shit, I know musicians, I can write poems and, so, we did it!” When he moved to New York in 1958, he “gravitated to the Gaslight,” where he found a stage for his performances. Hugh Romney, who later took up the clown persona Wavy Gravy, had come to know about West Coast jazz poetry and brought it to Boston, where he was studying theater. Hugh Romney would acquire fame as the MC of Woodstock ’69, where he promised “breakfast in bed for 400,000” (© Wavy Gravy). The idea of poetry as a wild art form came about from the Beat Generation, but also jazz poetry, the combination of jazz and poetry.” “Poets were used to reading, but in sedate circumstances, such as university libraries. ![]() Part of the popularity of the Gaslight and the Beats had to do with how they revitalized poetry, Sanders said. But the Gaslight was among the first to bring the hype to Greenwich Village, instigating what newspapers at the time called “the coffee house fad.” There had been earlier poetry readings in the avant-garde 10th Street Galleries and on the West Coast as part of the San Francisco Renaissance, most notably the so-called “ Six Gallery Reading” in 1955, where Ginsberg performed Howl for the first time. Among the performers were Ray Bremser, “who was in and out of jail in those days,” and Kerouac, who stood upon his barstool to engage the crowd and managed to bump his head on the low metal ceiling. “It was very, very packed, because the Beat generation was ‘hot,’ so to speak,” Sanders said in a phone interview. The now 77-year-old poet and singer Edward Sanders remembers attending his first Gaslight reading in 1958 as a young NYU student. Officially, 110 people were allowed, but Mitchell often crammed in way more. ![]() Not only Ginsberg and Kerouac, but also LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Hugh Romney and Diane di Prima were among those who read for an often packed house. A year earlier, Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl had reached national recognition as the result of a widely publicized obscenity trial and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road had finally made it into print. The Gaslight in the late 50s, with Liz’s 65-cent hamburgers advertised in the window of Caricature (© Photo-File Service)Īt the Gaslight, Beat poets would showcase their radiating works of non-conformity, sex, spirituality and drugs. It followed earlier Greenwich Village artist hubs like Pfaff’s, frequented by Walt Whitman, and Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hung out. Initially dubbed the Gaslight Poetry Café, the basement between 3rd Street and Bleecker in one of New York’s most eccentric neighborhoods, soon became a fixture of Manhattan’s bohemian life. ![]() Liz would serve many a hungry performer her 65-cent hamburgers even when they were flat broke and was, understandably, widely loved.Īfter finally opening up, Mitchell invited poets to entertain his coffee-sipping crowd. He kept alcohol off the menu, allowing the Gaslight to stay open throughout the night. “Mitchell was the world’s foremost maniac,” blues and folk singer Dave Van Ronk writes in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, supporting his friend Liz, who ran the small restaurant above the Gaslight called Caricature. His do-it-yourself approach had made a mess of his neighbor’s plumbing, however, and resulted in the first of many confrontations. After a year he finally got permission to open up, but this troublesome relationship with the authorities would continue to pester the coffee house throughout its existence.Īccording to legend, Mitchell had dug out the accumulated dirt himself in an attempt to make the seven-foot basement a bit more accessible. Since then, an antique store, a plumbing warehouse and several different workshops quickly succeeded one another, as Mitchell argued in a letter that was intended to convince the municipality of the fact that the venue had been used for non-residential purposes before. Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, the cellar had served as a speakeasy for a mostly gay and literary clientele, frequented by the notorious Jazz Age poet Maxwell Bodenheim, among others. Back in 1957 he had found a shallow basement on MacDougal Street in an 1883 landmark building and saw its potential. ![]() That owner was a man named John Mitchell. The stairs that led down to the Gaslight (© Hannah Mattix)
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