The Gaslight Cafe

The story

The Gaslight Cafe began as a basket house, where unpaid performers passed a literal basket through the crowd and hoped for coins. John Mitchell opened it in Greenwich Village in 1958, first as a stage for beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, then as a folk-music club. Bob Dylan hung out between sets at the Kettle of Fish, the bar next door and up the stairs. By its final years the club was run by Betty Smyth, mother of Scandal's Patty Smyth. It closed in 1971, thirteen years after that first basket made the rounds.