Gaslight Cafe

The Gaslight Cafe at 116 MacDougal Street was the most important folk music venue in America during the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early 1960s. Open from 1958, it operated in a basement below street level and presented folk and beat poetry to packed audiences in a room that held perhaps a hundred people. Bob Dylan began playing here in 1961, shortly after arriving in New York, and the basement stage at the Gaslight is where he developed the performing persona and the repertoire of traditional songs that would launch his career. Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, and Tom Paxton were also regular performers.

The club had a particular atmosphere that shaped what was played there. The basement location, the exposed brick walls, and the dense cigarette smoke created a sense of underground urgency that suited the music and the political moment. Dylan recorded an unofficial live set at the Gaslight in 1962 -- known as the Live at the Gaslight bootleg -- that documents him in his first full flowering, performing traditional songs and his own earliest compositions with a directness and assurance that belie his youth. The recording circulated for decades before being officially released.

The Gaslight closed in 1971 and the space went through various incarnations over the following decades. The address at 116 MacDougal Street is still a basement bar, operating under different names and with little visible acknowledgement of its history. MacDougal Street itself has changed greatly since the early 1960s -- more tourist-oriented, more upscale -- but the street's geography remains, and the basement door that folk singers descended through sixty years ago is still recognisable.