BY KAREN KRAMER | We knew this place in New York City, in Greenwich Village. The food in the art-filled restaurant upstairs was good, but it was what went on in the cabaret downstairs that made the magic.
More than 2,000 people performed there every year. And although there are a lot of venues in New York with music or spoken word, here was a place that was so varied that several nights each month would be poetry in Greek or Romanian or Portuguese (“not at the same time,” the owner liked to joke).
And of course there was music…tango and classical and jazz and an African-American group singing in Yiddish. The monologists told their stories and composers (of varied levels of experience) debuted new work.
You could be a legend like David Amram who performs all over the world but made sure to make it back to the Village every month to play here. Or an unknown songwriter trying out edgy, groundbreaking material before an audience that welcomed it.
Upstairs the waitstaff was composed of artists, and you knew their names and they knew yours. (Not something that often happened in New York City.) You could hang out at the bar and easily talk to the person next to you, who more likely than not turned out to be interesting…a photographer who had documented Philippe Petit tightrope walking between the two World Trade Center towers or a visiting harpsichordist from Montreal.
It is no small feat to keep a place running for 41 years in New York City. When the owner was forced to close down due to greedy real estate run amok, he decided to “go out with a bang not a whimper.” For two days, over this past New Year’s holiday, artists who had performed there during the last four decades came in to perform one last time, accompanied by others who just wanted to be there.
People flew in from England, from Australia. They came from Brooklyn and the Upper West Side, and Boston, and Bleecker St. And in between the music and the spoken word and the last storytellings were testaments to the importance of having a safe space in which to create, a physical space to form a community.
Goodbye, and thanks, Cornelia Street Cafe. Thanks, Robin. There will never again be anything like it.
