![]() 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. Instead, we are moving on, hoping to find a new facility that will truly invest in my Dad and help him with this final chapter of his life no matter how difficult it might become, he deserves that, my Mother deserves that!!Gaslight Village has failed my Dad, my Mother, my family, and standing up for common decency is the right thing to do.The stairs that led down to the Gaslight (© Hannah Mattix) ![]() Why not learn from my Dad’s journey with this disease, what a resource he might have been to you. NEWS FLASH he has Alzheimer’s!!! They wander, they try to leave, they pack up their clothes, and to discard him and my Mother this way is just wrong and heartbreaking on so many levels. In fact we have been asked to leave after 3 short months, now scrambling to find Dad a new home being told, “Your Dad needs to leave, he wanders and tries to escape and we can’t have that here”. One would also believe that the staff and director would be trained to handle these types of behaviors and situations, but unfortunately that has not been the case with my Dad. One would naturally think that would or could include dealing with cognitive issues such as memory decline, delusion, aggression, restlessness, paranoia, and the long list of unmentionables that come with the disease. To those considering placing a parent or loved one at this facility, please heed my warning if your parent or loved one has succumb to the debilitating, life robbing disease known as Alzheimer’s.Gaslight Village claims to handle all stages of Alzheimer which is plainly noted on their website. ![]()
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