The Gaslight Cafe

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The Gaslight Cafe was a coffee house located in the basement of 116 Macdougal Street, Greenwich Village, New York City

The Gaslight was originally a "basket house" where unpaid performers would pass around a basket at the end of each set. Opened in 1958 by John Mitchell, the dark, steamy, subterranean Gaslight had showcased beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso but later became a folk club. Clarence Hood bought the club in 1961, and it was his son, Sam Hood, who managed the club through the heyday of the revival until its closing in 1971. Among those who performed at the Gaslight were Bob Dylan; Luke Faust, a five-string banjo player and singer who sang Appalachian ballads; Len Chandler, Hal Waters; John Wynn, who played gut-string guitar and sang folk songs in an operatic voice; Paul Clayton, Luke Askew, Wavy Gravy, and in 1972, Bruce Springsteen. 1964-1966 saw many early performances by Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson, and Dave Van Ronk. The first public "electric" appearance of The Blues Project (with Danny Kalb) took place on the stage of the Gaslight. Mississippi John Hurt played there. Jimi Hendrix sat in one night at the Gaslight with John Hammond, Jr.

The Gaslight was right next door to The Kettle of Fish, a bar where many performers hung out between sets. Some nights the bar was "locked" down to the public because a young "reclusive" singer and poet was in attendance...Bob Dylan. Also next door was the Folklore Center, a bookstore/record store owned by Izzy Young and notable for being a musicians' gathering place and center of the New York folk music scene.

In The Folk Music Encyclopedia, Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton write "The Gaslight was weird then because there were air shafts up to the apartments and the windows of the Gaslight would open into the air shafts, so when people would applaud, the neighbors would get disturbed and call the police. So then the audience couldn't applaud; they had to snap their fingers instead."