Fez

The story

Jeff Buckley played here, and so did Carly Simon — which tells you something about the range of a room. The Fez lived beneath the Time Cafe on Lafayette and Great Jones Streets in NoHo, a nightclub and restaurant that somehow held comedians like Jonathan Ames and Stella alongside singers like Rufus Wainwright, Nona Hendryx, and Jill Sobule. It became cultural shorthand enough to earn a mention in How I Met Your Mother. The club closed in February 2005, leaving behind a list of names that reads like a lost downtown syllabus.