Sniffen Court, Murray Hill — The Doors Debut Album Cover

The cover and promotional photographs for The Doors' 1967 self-titled debut album were shot by photographer Joel Brodsky at Sniffen Court, a private alley of converted 1850s carriage houses running off East 36th Street in the Murray Hill neighbourhood of Manhattan. Brodsky photographed Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore against the rough brick walls of the alley in a session that also produced the famous "Young Lion" portraits of Morrison — the shirtless, curly-haired images that became the defining visual of Morrison as rock icon and sex symbol. The choice of a gritty, nineteenth-century New York alley to introduce a band from Los Angeles was deliberate: it grounded their brooding, literary rock in an atmosphere of historical weight and urban darkness that suited their sound perfectly.

The Doors was released in January 1967 and reached number two on the US album charts, driven largely by the edited single version of Light My Fire. The album announced one of the most distinctive bands of the psychedelic era: Manzarek's Vox Continental keyboard filling the bass register alongside Densmore's precise drumming and Krieger's flamenco-influenced guitar, with Morrison's voice and lyrics operating in a territory between blues, poetry, and theatre. The album contained both Light My Fire and The End — an extraordinary pair of songs on any debut. Morrison's literary ambitions and his stage persona, which veered between magnetic and genuinely frightening, made The Doors an uncomfortable fit with the optimism of 1967's Summer of Love.

Sniffen Court is one of Manhattan's rarest survivals: a complete Victorian carriage house alley that has remained largely intact and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is gated and private, not generally open to the public, but the entrance on East 36th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues is visible from the street and the cobblestoned court and brick facades can be observed through the gate. The atmosphere of the alley is substantially unchanged from the Brodsky photographs, and Doors enthusiasts visit the gate to photograph the setting that produced some of the most reproduced rock imagery of the 1960s.