The San Remo Cafe

William S. Burroughs (left) and poet Alan Ansen outside of the Bleecker Street and MacDougal Street entrance.

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a crucible of post-WWII bohemia, where painters, writers, and poets collided in bars and cafes scattered through what was then part of Little Italy. MacDougal Street was the center of that universe, and the San Remo Café was its most electric node. Located at 93 MacDougal Street, the restaurant occupied two storefronts, with the café and bar portion anchoring the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal — the space that’s now a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

The “Remo,” as regulars called it, was part of a trifecta of essential Village bars that included the Kettle of Fish and Minetta Tavern down the street. Where the White Horse Tavern drew the radicals of the 1930s and 40s, the San Remo catered to a new disaffected generation reacting against the sterile conformity of Eisenhower-era America. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, and Gore Vidal made it their headquarters. It was here that Ginsberg first met Dylan Thomas. In the early 1950s, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre met and partied at the Remo regularly while the troupe was housed nearby at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

The bar earned its literary immortality in two books of the era: Go by John Clellon Holmes, and Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, where it appeared as the Black Mask — a crowd described as “hip without being slick, intelligent without being corny.” Kerouac’s visits weren’t always elegant; on one occasion he was badly beaten outside by three men, the consequence of a drunken habit of saying the wrong things at the wrong times.

The mob-owned bar’s golden age ran from the end of World War II through the early 1960s. By then it had shifted toward a primarily gay clientele and became a hunting ground for Andy Warhol, who recruited many early Factory characters from its barstools. Today, 93 MacDougal Street houses a pasta restaurant and carries a plaque from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation — placed at a ceremony attended by a handful of surviving regulars.

Location: 93 MacDougal Street at Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012