The Gaslight Cafe

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 he and his son Sam managed the club through the late 1960s. Ed Simon, the owner of another popular Village coffeehouse,The Four Winds, reopened the Gaslight in 1968. The club was run by Betty Smyth (mother of singer Patti Smyth) and blues guitartist/performer Susan Martin 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 Andersen, 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. An impressive array of musicians also performed at the Gaslight in the late 60s and early 70s, including Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bonnie Raitt, Reverend Gary Davis, Big Mama Thornton, Link Wray, Mimi Farina, jazz great Charles Mingus, Happy and Artie Traum, David Buskin, Janis Siegel (who later joined Manhattan Transfer), and others.

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."