Famous Artists of Manhattan Private Exploration Game

Itinerary

Stop at: Lucille Lortel Theatre

The Lucille Lortel Theatre is an off-Broadway playhouse at 121 Christopher Street in Manhattan's West Village. It was built in 1926 as a 590-seat movie theater called the New Hudson, later known as Hudson Playhouse. 

The interior is largely unchanged to this day. In the early 1950s, the site was converted to an off-Broadway theater as Theatre de Lys, opening on June 9, 1953, with a production of Maya, a play by Simon Gantillon starring Kay Medford, Vivian Matalon, and Susan Strasberg.

Stop at: 1 Sheridan Square

Suze Rotolo lived in the penthouse of One Sheridan Square with her mother. Miki Isaacson, the ‘folk den mother’, occupied the tiny studio apartment on the floor below the Rotolo’s.

Stop at: Electric Lady Studios

Electric Lady Studios is a recording studio in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was commissioned by rock musician Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and designed by architect John Storyk and audio engineer Eddie Kramer by 1970.

Stop at: 40 W 8th St

The Bon Soir, owned by Ernie Sgroi Sr., was a small night club in New York's Greenwich Village. Comedians and singers like Phyllis Diller, Kaye Ballard, and Ethel Waters performed there. “Much of the Bon Soir's appeal came from its remote, forbidden feeling,” James Gavin wrote in Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. “A walk down thirty-one steps led to a square black room ...”

Stop at: Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park is a public park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. One of the best known of New York City's public parks, it is an icon as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity.

Stop at: 85 W 3rd St

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story.

Stop at: Cafe Wha?

It was at the Cafe Wha? that young performers like Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor got early chances to hone their talents. Folk singers, artists, poets, beatniks and anarchists came to the club, and so did far greater numbers of tourists, eager to observe those exotic breeds. (The club’s odd name was a shortening of the word “what,” intended to convey incredulity.)

Stop at: 158 Bleecker St

The Village Gate was a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, New York. Art D'Lugoff opened the club in 1958, on the ground floor and basement of 160 Bleecker Street. The large 1896 Chicago School structure by architect Ernest Flagg was known at the time as Mills House No. 1 and served as a flophouse for transient men. In its heyday, the Village Gate also included an upper-story performance space, known as the Top of the Gate.