56 Ludlow Street — Velvet Underground rehearsal apartment

The apartment at 56 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side was shared by experimental musician Tony Conrad and John Cale from early 1965, and became the rehearsal space where the Velvet Underground's foundational material was developed. Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise joined Cale there to work out the songs and sonic ideas that would eventually become The Velvet Underground & Nico. The apartment had no heating, no bathroom in the conventional sense, and rent of approximately fifteen dollars a month — conditions that were not unusual for the Lower East Side of 1965, a neighbourhood of tenements, Puerto Rican families, Jewish merchants, and the first wave of artists priced out of Greenwich Village.

The musical ideas being worked out at 56 Ludlow were unlike anything being developed in American popular music at the time. Cale had come from the classical avant-garde — he had studied with La Monte Young and played in the Theatre of Eternal Music, where sustained drones and extreme duration were the compositional materials — and he brought that sensibility into collision with Reed's interest in street-level lyrical realism and Morrison's guitar playing. MacLise was a poet and percussionist who would leave before the first recording, replaced by Moe Tucker. The apartment was the laboratory.

The Lower East Side of the early 1960s that produced the Velvet Underground has changed almost beyond recognition: the rents that allowed artists and musicians to live in unheated tenements for fifteen dollars a month are long gone, and the neighbourhood's character has shifted through gentrification that the Velvet Underground's own cultural influence helped set in motion. The building at 56 Ludlow still stands, its role in music history unmarked.