The Velvet Underground at the Factory — New York City

Andy Warhol's Factory — in its original incarnation at 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the Silver Factory, from 1963 to 1968 — was where the Velvet Underground were incubated, managed, and presented to the world. Warhol took the band under his wing in late 1965, added German chanteuse Nico as a vocalist, and produced their debut album "The Velvet Underground & Nico" (1967) — one of the most radical and influential recordings in rock history. He also staged the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia performance event combining the band's music with film projections, light shows, and dancers that was conceptually decades ahead of its time.

Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker made music at the Factory that virtually no one bought at the time but that virtually everyone of significance in rock music subsequently acknowledged as foundational. Brian Eno's famous observation — that only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band — captures the record's outsized influence precisely. Songs like "Heroin," "Venus in Furs," "I'm Waiting for the Man," and "Sunday Morning" addressed subjects — drug use, sadomasochism, street life — that pop music had never touched.

The original Silver Factory at 231 East 47th Street was demolished. Warhol moved the Factory to Union Square and then to Broadway; none of the original spaces survive in recognisable form. The address on East 47th Street is now a commercial building. The Factory's cultural significance is commemorated in the permanent collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and in the extensive scholarship and mythology surrounding both Warhol and the Velvet Underground.