Cornelia Street Café | |
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Restaurant information | |
Established | July 1977 |
Closed | January 1, 2019 |
Owner(s) | Robin Hirsch |
Previous owner(s) | Charles McKenna, Raphaela Pivetta, Robin Hirsch |
Dress code | Casual |
Street address | 29 Cornelia St. |
City | Manhattan |
County | New York City |
State | New York State |
Country | United States of America |
Coordinates | 40°43′53″N74°00′09″W / 40.731348°N 74.002391°W |
Website | corneliastreetcafe |
The Cornelia Street Cafe, was a restaurant & bar at 29 Cornelia Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, opened in July 1977. The cafe closed at the end of 2018, due to rising rents from the gentrification of the West Village; ending on its holiday closed day of New Years 2019. [1] [2] The cafe had been voted one of the best places to listen to jazz music in the world. [2]
In the 21st century, the Cornelia Street Cafe was a restaurant and nightclub, showcasing musicians, poets, writers, and artists. In 1998, the Cafe was one of the restaurants recognized by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation with a Village Award presented to "Cornelia Street Restaurants". [3]
In December 1977, the then-fledgling cafe hosted the first meeting of the Songwriters Exchange, a weekly gathering in which the Village's songwriters could present their new songs--and only new songs--to their peers. Two years later the cafe sponsored "Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange," an LP of eight Village singer-songwriters; released by Stash Records, the LP was named "Album Of The Month" by Stereo Review in December 1979, and was later re-released as a cd. It has the first known recordings of several prominent Village artists, including Cliff Eberhardt, David Massengill, Rod MacDonald, Martha Hogan, Michael Fracasso, Brian Rose, Eliot Simon and Lucy Kaplansky (as Simon & Kaplansky), and was Tom Intondi's second recorded work. [4]
Greenwich Village, or simply the Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village also contains several subsections, including the West Village west of Seventh Avenue and the Meatpacking District in the northwest corner of Greenwich Village.
Hugh Blumenfeld is an American folk musician and singer-songwriter from Connecticut. He was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, graduated with degrees in Biology and Humanities from M.I.T. in 1980, and got a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 1981. He was active in the Greenwich Village music scene in the 1980s, attending the Cornelia Street Songwriters Exchange and performing at Folk City and Speak Easy while working on a PhD in Poetics from New York University. He also helped to edit the Fast Folk Musical Magazine and recorded songs for a dozen issues. After earning his PhD in 1991, he worked as an English professor until 1994, when he began writing and performing full-time. Over the next 10 years he toured mainly in the Northeast and Midwest, with several short tours in Europe and one in Israel. In 1999 he was appointed Connecticut State Troubadour.
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