Cafe Wha?

Cafe Wha? at 115 MacDougal Street opened in 1959 and became one of the founding venues of the Greenwich Village folk and comedy scene. Bob Dylan played here on his very first night in New York City, in January 1961, after hitching a ride north from Minneapolis and walking into the Village looking for work. He walked into Cafe Wha?, got up on the stage, and played for tips. He was 19. Within weeks he had graduated to the Gaslight down the street and was on his way to being the most important songwriter of the century.

Cafe Wha? was a more open venue than the Gaslight -- it functioned as a tourist-friendly introduction to the Village, a place where new acts could play for tips and develop their stage presence before finding more discerning rooms. Jimi Hendrix also played here early in his New York career, as did Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and a remarkable number of other performers who went on to considerably larger things. The club presented a kind of meritocracy of the stage: if you could hold the room, you could keep playing.

Cafe Wha? is still open and still presenting live music, making it one of the few Greenwich Village music venues from the early 1960s that has survived in some form to the present. The current programming focuses on covers bands and the broader rock canon rather than the folk music that gave the room its history, but the address -- the basement space on MacDougal Street where Dylan walked in off the street one January night -- remains.