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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