Cornelia Street Cafe

The story

Someone once staged the entire Iliad as an experiment in Breakfast Theatre here. The Cornelia Street Cafe opened in July 1977 at 29 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village and spent 41 years producing some 700 shows a year — Shakespeare at Midnight, Afro-American poetry, Latin jazz, members of Monty Python reading to local children. The City of New York named it a cultural as well as a culinary landmark, and it was voted one of the best places in the world to hear jazz. Rising rents ended it on New Year's Day 2019.