Cornelia Street Cafe

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Updated 5 years ago

Cornelia Street Café has been a living and breathing cultural landmark located in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village for 41 years.

Is Cornelia Street Café a café, a jazz club, a theater, a speakeasy, or a restaurant?

One can say that Cornelia Street Café has been the quintessential mom and pop artist’s café, a very unique place where everyday people and artists can meet to talk about Village life, dine on wonderful food, listen to LIVE jazz and poetry readings, or share a cup of cappuccino at a lovely sidewalk cafe.

This wonderful highly intimate mixed use space has embodied the historic nature of the Village art scene, spawning famous musicians, artists, poets, Nobel Laureates, and comedians.

Now due to astronomical rent increases from the effects of gentrification (as depicted by the film "The Lost Village”), Cornelia Street Café’s future is on life support.

Sadly, unless a recent commercial tenant legislation bill gets passed soon (or there is some other major miracle) Cornelia Street Café will be destined to become another wonderful vanishing memory of Greenwich Village’s past, an artist’s gem seized by the winds of gentrification.

Cornelia Street Cafe: Early Days to NOW

In May 1977 three artists stumbled across a tiny storefront in the heart of Greenwich Village and thought it the perfect place to open a café.

For two months they scraped and sanded, plumbed and plastered, and did the intricate dance one does with the authorities who live beyond the Village, and on the weekend of July 4, 1977, perpetually 201 years behind the US, they opened the Cornelia Street Café.

Over the last forty-one years it has quintupled in size, it has won numerous awards both for its food and for its performances, but it has remained at heart an artists’ café.

Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega started out here, as did Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Senator & presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy & attorney-activist William Kunstler have read their poetry here.

David Amram, who wrote the score for the original "The Manchurian Candidate" (also the subject of my earlier article "Greenwich Vilage Portraits") still regularly performs here at Cornelia Street.

Mr. Amram was Leornard Bernstein's first composer for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Dr. Oliver Sacks continues to read his prose. Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann presents a monthly Science Series; members of Monty Python & the Royal Shakespeare Company intermittently perform.

In 1980 Stash Records released the award-winning album, “Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange”, a collection of songs born at the café.

In the early days there was a toaster-oven, a cappuccino machine and a refrigerator display case. Now there are two full kitchens and two full bars which serve more than thirty wines by the glass. There are three dining rooms, one with a working fireplace.

Cornelia Street now offers 700 shows a year, two a night, ranging from science to songwriting, from Russian poetry to Latin jazz, from theatre to cabaret.

And in the summer there is one of the Village's loveliest sidewalk cafes.

Now when you visit, you can still see Great Quotes and Memorabilia hanging on its “Wall of Fame” downstairs.

With a sad and heavy heart, it is heartbreaking to see this beautiful and historic artists’ haven standing on the brink of oblivion.

Only Time Will Tell

So now we will have to wait and see.

Only time will tell.

Over the next few months we will know whether this amazing cultural landmark and artist’s café will continue to survive.

Until its final days, I predict we will be visiting this iconic Village landmark more frequently to have a delicious meal, share a glass of red wine, or to see a unique artist perform on its stage.

Whether it be Lithuanian poetry, acid jazz, science, or theater cabaret.

Or an indoor screening of “The Lost Village”.