A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2

 

[My biography of Leonardo Shapiro, avant-garde theater director and auteur, continues below with the teenager’s transfer from schools in Miami Beach and Dade County, Florida, in his sophomore year of high school to a private, progressive prep school in Massachusetts, the Windsor Mountain School.

[You’ll hear about the immense influence the school and its people had on the incipient artist, and where it led him both in the short term and in the long term.  Part 2 of the bio will also cover Shapiro’s exposure to the theater of Greenwich Village’s Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, his introduction to Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and the General Strike for Peace, his first stops along the college road that ultimately led him to New York University and his meeting with Jerzy Grotowski, one of his two main theater models (covered in the upcoming Part 3).

[I admonish readers just coming upon this multi-part post to go back to Part 1 (posted on 16 April) first.  I will be identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

After years of struggling and hopping from one school to another, Shapiro’s parents transferred him in September 1960 to the Windsor Mountain School, a progressive private school in Lenox, Massachusetts, that, in the words of one former student, specialized in educating “kids who were the black sheeps of their family” in an atmosphere free of rules and administrative repression. 

Shapiro’s Windsor Mountain classmate, Jeffrey Horowitz (b. 1946), who’s the founder of New York’s Theater for a New City, observed that the student body included “a number” of “misfits” and that the school encouraged and supported them. 

Here, Shapiro came under the sway of Gertrud Bondy (1889-1977), the director, and her son Heinz (1924-2014), the headmaster.  It was to be a big change for the young man.  (For the story of the Bondys and Windsor Mountain, see “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” 12 October 2011.)

The young rebel, as unsettled from his unstable home life as he was resistant to his previous educational environments, fell “immediately in love with Lenox”—the cultured “Old New England” resort town; the woods, where, he remarked, jazz musician Charlie Mingus used to stay and where the new student took long walks; the old lighthouse tower; the Music Inn, Jacob’s Pillow, and the nearby Tanglewood Music Center; and especially the town’s old library with its “big wing chairs, lots of books, old books, old smells.”

Indeed, after his disheartening experiences under the tutelage of the Miami-Dade public school system and the Admiral Farragut Academy, Shapiro felt free and at home at Windsor Mountain.  To the teen activist, starting at Windsor Mountain “was like entering the United States of America, that mythical participatory land I had read about in civics textbooks at Biscayne Elementary School, at Nautilus Junior High School” but which he felt was as unreal as the Ozzie and Harriet world of 1950s television. 

He arrived in Lenox at the end of the 1960 presidential campaign and watched on 8 November as “the young and dynamic Jack Kennedy” defeated Richard M. Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74), the would-be successor to “the old general,” Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61).  The old regime “was on [its] way out” and “it was time for a New Frontier”—and so was young Shapiro, “fourteen and ready for a new life.” 

(The New Frontier was the name given to the brief administration of John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63].  He was immensely popular with young people in the U.S. and abroad.)

Windsor Mountain offered a great deal in this vein: students as young as 13 or 14 were already reading Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek; 1883-1957) and William Golding (British; 1911-93)—Shapiro gained some renown on the campus for his essay on The Lord of the Flies—the school theater program was staging European drama like Max Frisch’s (Swiss; 1911-1991) Biedermann and the Firebugs, Jean Giraudoux’s (French; 1882-1944) The Enchanted, and others; and many of the 200 Windsor Mountain students “seemed already to be professional artists” in poetry, painting, and theater.  Classmate Horowitz believed it was probably at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro first encountered serious theater. 

Indeed, Shapiro called Windsor Mountain “the key to everything, any education I ever got,” both from the college-level texts the school used and from his extramural adventures, for it was at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro began hitchhiking to New York City to participate in political demonstrations, see theater, and meet some of the people he would later claim as influences and inspirations. 

At school, the newly-minted student artist took to calling himself “Leonardo da Vinci Shapiro” because he saw himself as a great artist—a practice he gave up when he came to New York because he realized the braggadocio raised expectations he wouldn’t be able to satisfy.   

In his second year at Windsor Mountain (his junior year), before he got involved in campus theater himself, Shapiro lived in a basement room near a staircase in the garage building, a room which shared a wall with the theater’s green room, a backstage room used as a meeting space or common room by members of the company. 

He could hear the actors rehearsing and he said he could tell when they were just talking and when they were saying lines “by the tone, pitch and rhythm of their words, even though I couldn’t make out the words themselves, I never forgot the difference in the sound.”  The latter, he declared, was the more “interesting” and “meaningful”: “It was, in many ways, better than real.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” 

Indeed, he didn’t: Shapiro recorded that when he came to direct Jean Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (November 1964; Leo directed and played Creon), and concentrated on the “light and music and rhythm and timing” and other aspects of the staging, “it just came so easy, it was so natural.” 

(Readers may well recognize the similarity between this anecdote about Shapiro’s introduction to theater, and one I related earlier about Shapiro’s year at the Farragut Academy four years before.  I don’t know if there were two similar incidents or if Shapiro’s memory was faulty, erroneously placing the same incident in two different places. 

(I knew about the Farragut anecdote earlier, but didn’t learn of the Windsor Mountain story until Rosalía Triana sent me the uncompleted memoir on which Shapiro’d been working at his death.  It was too late to ask him about the apparent coincidence.)

The Windsor Mountain theater group, under the “ambitious” direction of drama teacher Frances Benn (“Franny”) Hall (1918-2014), was always busy, with plays constantly in rehearsal, and soon Shapiro became involved as an actor.  He remembered auditioning first for the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s (French; 1868-1918) classic, which he recalled the school troupe ultimately didn’t stage.

Then Shapiro remembered doing a reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and being impressed with the play’s “notion of far off America” and the way Ibsen (Norwegian; 1828-1906) delved into the characters’ pasts so that, just as in Ghosts, which Shapiro would direct for Shaliko some 14 years later, they saw their “long buried secrets coming to life.”  It was “[m]y first taste of Ibsen!” Shapiro exclaimed, speaking of a playwright who came to mean a great deal to the nascent theater artist.

The young actor’s first full-fledged production was Maurice Maeterlinck’s (Belgian; 1862-1949) Pélléas and Mélisande in the school’s outdoor amphitheater—a performance for graduation in June 1962.  He began listening to the recordings of plays and poetry—Dylan Thomas (Welsh; 1914-53), whose “Lament” he used to recite in the school’s smoking room; William Butler Yeats (Irish; 1865-1939) reading “The Second Coming”; and Samuel Becket’s (Irish; 1906-89) Endgame. 

Shapiro would stage a street-musical adaptation of Yeats’s poem in 1969 (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009) and he’d direct the Beckett play in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1993. 

Poetry, an important focus of English teacher E. James (“Jim”) Hall (d. 1982), was still “really the thing” for Shapiro; he wanted to be a poet, not an actor, “but somehow they seemed similar to me,” and he went on to other roles in Edward Albee’s (1928-2016) The Sandbox, Frisch’s Biedermann, Giraudoux’s Enchanted, and Yeats’s Purgatory. 

Shapiro recorded that he liked Purgatory for its poetry, of course, and “because it was dark and tragic in that wind-swept gothic way, all that!”—qualities that presaged many of his later focuses.  It’s probably no coincidence, however, that Purgatory recounts the story of an Old Man (the role Shapiro played) who returns with his son to the burnt-out remains of the house where he had been born and which is haunted by the spirit of his mother, who died giving him birth. 

On the night that his drunken father, who neglected the Old Man’s mother while squandering and gambling away her possessions, had set the fire, the Old Man had stabbed him and fled, and he there stabs his son, in whom the Old Man sees the reflection of his own feckless father, to stop the cycle and put his mother’s soul at rest.  

Yeats intended the 1938 play as an allegory of modern Ireland, but Shapiro certainly saw a macabre reflection of his own autobiography in it.  The very macabre character of the echo is certainly part of the equation, especially if we note that Shapiro was about 16 at the time, not only a teenager—to whom such a vision might naturally appeal anyway—but the exact age of the Boy in Purgatory and the age the Old Man had been when he stabbed his father.

A remarkable number of the plays and playwrights whom Shapiro would later admire, produce, and emulate were introduced to him at the Windsor Mountain School, either in his classes, such as Jean Anouilh (French; 1910-87), or in the school theater, like Ibsen, Yeats, and Beckett.  Others, of course, he experienced on his visits to New York City—which he might well have seen as an adjunct to his Windsor Mountain education in a way. 

Shapiro frequently left Windsor Mountain’s campus to attend political rallies and protests, including the General Strike for Peace in New York City in January and February 1962 and a March 1962 anti-nuclear rally in Times Square. 

There were, in fact, two peace marches in 1962 sponsored by the General Strike and organized by Julian Beck (1925-85) and Judith Malina (1926-2015), founders of the Living Theatre.  One took place on Monday, 29 January, at the end of which Beck called for a “non-violent work stoppage” which never materialized.  This is the one Shapiro spoke of often.

When Shapiro arrived in New York City to participate in this General Strike, the 16-year-old was unfamiliar with the Living Theatre.  It was the political activism of the Becks and their friends, the principal organizers of the strike, that drew the young would-be poet and he didn’t discover the Becks’ other life until they offhandedly remarked, “You know, by the way, we have this theater downstairs.” 

In fact, Shapiro’s arrival in New York City in January 1962 for the General Strike for Peace began his involvement with the Becks and the Living Theatre at the same time that they were rehearsing their production of Man Is Man by Bertolt Brecht (German; 1898-1956), which premièred the following September and which Shapiro recorded that he saw in his early, heady days exploring New York’s Greenwich Village theater scene.

The 16-year-old aspiring poet had previously kept art and political activism separate: “I kept thinking it was sort of one or the other: One was either . . . in the movement and trying to work to change things, or one was an artist.”  The Becks showed Shapiro that art and political action not only were not mutually exclusive endeavors, but were integrally linked.

Working on the strike every day with the Becks and others in the movement and the theater, the teenager saw them “break new artistic ground and work out political concerns” and discovered he “loved that world a lot.”

When Shapiro began to make theater on his own, he used the Becks and the Living Theatre as models for much of his work and principles.  To be sure, of a list of personalities, movements, and works of art that Shapiro said had influenced him, at least a third have a substantial Living Theatre connection as well. 

The second strike occurred on Monday, 5 November, and launched a week of demonstrations and protests.  Performances of the Living Theatre’s Man Is Man were suspended from 4 to 13 November to free its cast and crew to participate in the “general strike for peace week.”  Though he never mentioned it, it’s certainly possible, even likely, that Shapiro hitchhiked to New York again to participate in the second strike as well.

The anti-nuke protest occurred on Saturday, 3 March 1962.  It was in opposition to the United States’ resumption of atmospheric testing and Shapiro had a vivid memory of the demonstration:

It was a peaceful demonstration in Times Square—where the TKTS booth is now. . . . .  There were 500 of us demonstrating, and the riot squad came in on horseback and mowed us down.  It was just like that scene in Doctor Zhivago—it was out of nowhere, for no reason.  Times Square was red with blood.  I had never seen anything like this: I got hit on the head by a billy club; Judith Malina was pregnant—I saw her trampled by a horse; I saw Julian Beck get his skull cracked.  I was hit twice—they rode over me and hit me and . . . the cop turned around and rode back over me.  I mean, fucking Times Square was red with blood. . . . . 

It was just like the story that my family told me about the Cossacks.  It was exactly the same as the pogroms—or it felt that way when you were under the horses.  And it was not acknowledged.  It could happen right there in Times Square in broad daylight, and not be acknowledged.  I was just shocked.  I’ve never gotten over that; I’m still shocked.

(The TKTS booth, opened by the Theatre Development Fund in 1973, sells half-price tickets for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows on the day of performance.  It’s in Duffy Square, a small triangle of land at the northernmost end of Times Square. 

(Beck was seriously hurt and was briefly hospitalized with injured ribs and a punctured lung.  An account of this incident, from Beck’s perspective, is in John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage [New York: Grove Press, 1995], 170-74, or in Beck’s own “Report from Times Square,” Evergreen Review 6.24 [May-June 1962]: 121-25.)

Far from suppressing such political engagement by its students, Windsor Mountain encouraged it, but Shapiro was a standout.  Sporting “an Afro, but before Afros” and customarily dressed all in black with colorful Mexican vests, “Leo was out there” even among the many at the school who exhibited, even flaunted, an individualism both of intellect and of temperament.  As Horowitz characterized him:

Leo was not afraid of being very, very different from everyone else.  He was genuinely different.  He was seeing the inadequacy of the social structure for him at a very early age.  He wasn’t just angry with it or rebelling, he could understand that . . . .

Gertrud and Heinz Bondy had established an atmosphere in Lenox where adolescents were encouraged to “find their own voice” and engage in “radical political thought” as well as “self-motivated artistic endeavors.”  It wasn’t long before Shapiro was reveling in that political thought, as his account of a “one man demonstration” he conducted shows: 

I remember walking the streets of Lenox, Massachusetts with a homemade sign and leaflets on this day [i.e., 6 August, Hiroshima Day—the day on which the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945] in 1961, age 15.  I had a letter from the A.C.L.U. explaining in detail, with citations, my constitutional right to free expression, and being told (as the cops dragged me away to the two cell station upstairs . . .) that the town of Lenox was founded some 12 or 20 years before the adoption of the United States Constitution, and that therefore their laws took precedence.  And they had a law against RED signs, against signs on Sunday, against handing out leaflets and against me.  I think it was my first jail time up north—a surprise that it was as bad as the South—the ignorance and Zombie slavish hostile stupidity hurt me and shook me as it still does.

(The town of Lenox, Massachusetts, was settled in 1750 and incorporated in 1767.  The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and took effect in 1789.)

While in New York for those rallies and protests, Shapiro further indulged his growing curiosity about theater.  As I briefly noted earlier, one of the most significant experiences of his nascent theatrical education was seeing the Living’s Man Is Man in the fall of 1962.  (Directed and designed by Julian Beck, the production starred Judith Malina and Joseph Chaikin [1935-2003], who won an Obie Award for his performance.)  The anti-war and anti-military play, first written in 1925, but revised many times over the rest of Brecht’s lifetime, came to mean a great deal to Shapiro.

There were, in fact, two simultaneous productions of Brecht’s Mann ist Mann on the New York stage then; the other one, billed as A Man’s a Man, was produced by the New Repertory Theatre Company.  There was considerable debate in the New York press over these dueling Brechts (see my two-part post, 24 and 27 January 2014). 

As a mark of the influence of this theater experience, Shapiro’s first non-student production in New York, the 1967 anti-war street musical he co-authored, Brother, You’re Next, was an adaptation of Man Is Man set during the Vietnam war.  Shapiro considered Man Is Man as one of his main influences and “basically stole” Brother, You’re Next from the Brecht play (see my post on 26 January 2010). 

Beside the Living’s Man Is Man and its productions of Jack Gelber’s (1932-2003) The Connection and Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities, the young student saw Jean Genet’s (French; 1910-86) The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel (1919-2005) at the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue; a double bill of Becket’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Edward Albee’s Zoo Story at the Provincetown Playhouse off Washington Square; William Snyder’s (1929-2008) popular Off-Broadway drama Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker directed by Ulu Grosbard (Belgian-born American; 1929-2012) at the Sheridan Square Theatre, Eugène Ionesco’s (Romanian-French; 1909-94) Bald Soprano at the Gate Theatre at Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place; and the month-long Theater of the Absurd series at the Cherry Lane where he saw Kenneth Koch’s (1925-2002) Bertha and Jack Richardson’s (1934-2012) Gallows Humor.

All these productions were part of the incipient Greenwich Village/East Village Off-Off-Broadway movement (see my posts, “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018). 

Later, he “hung around” Ralph Cook’s (1928-2013) Theatre Genesis, a playwrights’ theater that focused on new American writers, and discovered Joe Cino’s (1931-67) Caffe Cino, to which he’d been drawn by the poetry—he heard readings of Dylan Thomas there, he recalled—and the politics.  He also saw folksingers Bob Dylan (b. 1941), who was Shapiro’s cousin, and Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) and a performance of William Saroyan’s (1908-81) Hello Out There—a production to which he would refer again later. 

(Theatre Genesis, founded by Cook in 1964, produced, among others, the early plays of Sam Shepard [1943-2017]; Charles L. Mee, Jr. [b. 1938]; Leonard Melfi [1935-2001]; and Adrienne Kennedy [b. 1931].  Shapiro first saw Charles Dizenzo’s (b. 1938) The Drapes Come, which he directed at Antioch College in May 1965, at Theatre Genesis, where it had premièred on 12 February 1965.  The theater was located in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery at East 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, one block north of the East Village apartment where Shapiro later established the office of the Shaliko Company.

(Joe Cino’s coffeehouse, the progenitor of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, opened at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958 and closed soon after Cino’s suicide in 1967.  By the early 1960s, playwrights began reading their scripts there, and eventually staging them. 

(This performance of Hello Out There occurred in March or April 1963—some chronologies put it in 1962—and starred Al Pacino [b. 1940] as the Young Man, his début before a paying audience, according to several Pacino biographies. 

(Pacino also spent time at the Living Theatre in the early 1960s, working as an occasional stagehand—on, among other productions, The Connection.  These were some of the same years that Shapiro was spending time there.  It is speculation, of course, but it may very well be that Shapiro went to see that particular show at the Caffe Cino because a young actor he’d met at the Living was in it.

(Irving Shapiro and Beatrice “Beatty” Zimmerman [1915-2000], Bob Dylan’s mother, were first cousins; the Zimmermans and the Shapiros lived in Hibbing, Minnesota, at the same time, though the boys only saw each other at occasional family events. 

(Shapiro, of course, left Minnesota as a very young child when he, his mother, and his elder brother moved to Florida in 1951.  Dylan, who was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and moved to Hibbing in 1947, was also closer in age to Shapiro’s brother, Gary, than he was to the stage director. 

(Shapiro tried to enlist Dylan’s support for Shaliko in the early days of the company, but the most Dylan did was respond to one of Shapiro’s letters.  If there was any resentment over the singer’s lack of support, however, Shapiro still considered Dylan one of his inspirations and influences.)

Upon graduating from Windsor Mountain in 1963, Shapiro joined the Pen Players, a summer theater group at Miami-Dade Junior College (since 2003, the four-year Miami-Dade College), where he continued to act in productions such as Eugene O’Neill’s (1888-1953) Desire Under the Elms and Man on the Rocks, an original play by the troupe’s director, Richard Paul Janaro (1927-2017), and to direct Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

In Man, Shapiro played a “doomed intellectual,” his friend Jeffrey Horowitz reported.  Horowitz, whom Shapiro brought into the group, said the play was “terrible,” but Shapiro reveled in his role because, Horowitz observed, “it gave Leo the license to be depressed, intense and smart”—a description that sounds a great deal like the characteristics Shapiro said appealed to him in Yeats’s Purgatory.

Shapiro first “started to identify myself with theater” at MDJC and Janaro may have been his first acting instructor.  Shapiro said he enrolled at MDJC, where he stayed for only one semester in 1964, because his father had disowned him. 

When Irving Shapiro “re-owned” his son, Shapiro recorded, the nascent director transferred to Antioch College (1964-65), a small, progressive school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, dedicated to the kind of cooperative education that Shapiro had seen at the Windsor Mountain School; he left without graduating, however.  

While he was enrolled there, though, Shapiro took a job as actor-in-residence at Lake Erie College, a women’s school in Painesville, Ohio, 225 miles northeast of Antioch.  There he appeared in productions of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and O’Neill’s Hughie and Marco Millions.  Despite this work, it was at Antioch that Shapiro lost interest in acting. 

In November 1965, Shapiro directed Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch, a play he’d selected for himself perhaps because of echoes of his own family situation (Medea takes revenge on Jason for leaving her and their children and marrying a younger woman) and it makes a socio-political statement which he supported (Medea, despite her horrific acts, is the heroine of the play because she’s true to her nature, however violent and destructive; Jason remains the man of compromise, the sell-out).

Medea was probably Shapiro’s first directing undertaking after the introduction of the idea that art and politics could be combined.  At Antioch, he turned to directing full time. 

[The biographical sketch of Leonardo Shapiro continues with Part 3 on Saturday, 22 April.  I hope readers will come back then to pick up Shapiro’s story when he enters NYU’s School of the Arts and studies with Jerzy Grotowski, the world-renowned Polish theater theorist and experimenter.  ROTters will see how that experience turns out to be the start of one of Shapiro’s most transformative periods.] 

 

Caffe Cino, Part 2

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second and final part of  “Caffe Cino,” my brief history of the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway and its founder.  If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to the post on 11 September to read about the beginnings of Joe Cino’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse before picking up here with the café’s growth and final curtain.  (To read about  the milieu out of which the Caffe Cino was born, see my two-part article “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” posted on 12 and 15 December 2011.)]  

When Joe Cino arrived in New York City in the midst of a blizzard on 7 February 1948, he “didn’t have a dime,” he told Michael Smith of the Village Voice in 1965, “and I still don’t.”  In November 1958, he used the $400 in savings he’d accumulated after arriving in New York as the opening capital for the coffeehouse.  Until 1960, he continued to work at his day job at a laundry to support the café.  Cino needed little on which to subsist, and when he really needed cash, he’d move out of his apartment and sleep on a mattress in the back of the café.

Cino and the café’s staff took no salaries and he kept the costs low.  John Torrey, the Cino’s electrical genius, tapped into the city’s power system to supply the café with electricity—the lights in the café went on when the street lights did—and that helped keep overhead down immensely.  (When he opened the coffeehouse, Cino had neglected to hire a waiter.  When customers on that first night, mostly fiends of Joe’s, simply began to serve one another, it began a practice at the Cino of friends waiting on friends; there really never was a wait staff at the Cino--it was all volunteer.)  Unlike its competition, however, the Cino was a commercial enterprise, not a non-profit experimental theater, so it wasn’t eligible for the government grants and subsidies which sustained other OOB theaters.

Customers at the Cino were required to spend a dollar for coffee or pastries from the menu as the café’s minimum, but admission for the performances was virtually nil as the performers passed the hat (a basket, actually) after each show.  The artists could make maybe $15 each by the end of a week of performing (that’s about $125 today).  The productions had zero budgets (usually covered by the playwright or director; the most opulent show cost a little over $300 to mount)—Cino didn’t charge for the use of the room, but he also didn’t supply anything but the lights and electricity; there were, of course, no royalty payments to the writers.  Directors and designers relied on ingenuity and donated labor and goods—but no one complained.  It was, if you will, DIY theater, and playwright Robert Heide recalled, “For Joe, the doors were always open: do your own thing, do what you have to do, do what you want to do.”

The reigning spirit of the café was Joe Cino.  The coffeehouse reflected his personality, both for good and for ill.  Soon after the place opened, Ed Franzen, who’d really been looking for a studio for his own work, split—though one rumor is that Cino dumped him and assumed the storefront’s lease.  (Off-Off-Broadway’s first impresario soon took mad, volatile John Torrey as his on-and-off lover.)  Caffe Cino has been glorified as a place where theater artists could work without pressure, pretensions, or career-damaging consequences, “an island where our souls can play,” as Cino playwright Claris Nelson declared.  Adventurous theatergoers saw the Cino as a place to go to see the exciting edge of new theater, the kind of plays, both from writers and directors, that the commercially-minded producers of Broadway and Off-Broadway wouldn’t dare touch, the work of playwrights, directors, designers, and actors they didn’t know now, but who might be the Tennessee Williamses, Lillian Hellmans, George Abbotts, Harold Clurmans, Jo Mielziners, Donald Oenslagers, Laurence Oliviers, or Helen Hayeses of the new generation.  

Despite the assertions by some, as Crespy reports, “that the Cino was a place of great innocence and fervor, where passionate, idiosyncratic artists—gay or straight—were nurtured in an aesthetic environment that gave them total freedom to create,” he warned that that wasn’t the whole picture.  “For others, it was a dangerous place, a bacchanalia where drugs, sex, and death flowed freely, engendering a thrilling, yet terrifying, visceral theater.”  This, too, was a manifestation of Joe Cino’s character, though many Cino habitués contend that Andy Warhol’s circle was responsible for bringing drugs to the Cino.  (The artist himself began frequenting the coffeehouse in 1965.)  

Cino playwright Robert Heide recalled, “The Cino also sometimes operated as a kind of way-station for wild-eyed painters, actors who doubled as hustlers, and drug addicts who slept on the floor when they had no place else to go.”  He quipped, “Antonin Artaud [conceiver of the Theatre of Cruelty] would have felt right at home in this strange room, as would Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, [English occultist] Alistair Crowley, and certainly, Oscar Wilde.”   

Cino himself had something of a mercurial personality.  (I have no credentials for making such a diagnosis, but descriptions of Cino’s behavior sound as if he might have been bipolar: sometimes giddy, even delirious, and then alternatively depressed and morose.)  It largely depended on which side of him you were on, whether you had his approval or his dismissal.  Joe Cino didn’t suffer those he thought were phonies or posers—and he let them know it.  Crespy describes the OOB impresario variously as “generous to a fault and sometimes petty and difficult” or “wild, dangerous, passionate.”  Cino’s supporters saw him as a kind of saint or a “nurturing angel” on a “holy artistic mission.”  On a tear, however, such as when he and his cohorts allegedly went out in drag to attract homophobic punks and then turned and beat them up, he looked “dark, wild-eyed, volatile.” Declared Crespy, “There was always an aura of craziness and danger about Joe.”  

Already addicted to amphetamines and taking LSD, over time Cino became obsessed with his increasing weight, which he blamed for his failure to achieve a career as a dancer, and his advancing age (he turned 30 in 1961); despondent over his up-and-down love life; discouraged by  the feeling he was forfeiting control of the Cino because of its growing popularity and fame; fearful of losing the coffeehouse due to increased costs, intensified scrutiny by city authorities, competition from other OOB outlets such as Café La MaMa, and changes in the theater environment, some of which were generated by the presence of Caffe Cino and its like.  Heide lamented that the “dark elements won out in the end.”  

Though it started with classic European scripts, the Cino’s reputation and significance to American theater was as a place for new works to be tried out, along with new staging and performing notions (although a lot of those were born more out of necessity than artistic innovation).  Despite the participation of so many neophyte actors, directors, and designers, the Cino developed into a playwrights’ theater, and OOB followed in that direction as it formed.  By 1963, almost every performance was a new American play.   

Many new and gifted playwrights, experimenting with radical forms of dramaturgy that clashed with contemporary commercial tastes, were discovered by way of Caffe Cino, not to forget Joe Cino’s imitators in the Village café-theater dodge.  (Many artists worked at both the Cino and La MaMa, as well as the other OOB theaters of the time.)  As it happens, the very time that Off-Off-Broadway was being born at Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa  (opened in 1961), the Judson Poets’ Theatre (1961), and the Theatre Genesis (1964)—the four founding theaters of OOB—Off-Broadway was changing from an inexpensive and innovative arena of informal atmosphere and small audiences into a commercial sphere with high costs, restrictive union rules, and demanding economics—a smaller version of Broadway.  The average cost of an Off-Broadway drama in the early 1960s had reached $20,000 (about $165,000 today).

One theater-besotted 19-year-old college student, in a dialogue he wrote in 1965 for a student magazine, asked “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino”: “Where do I go to see the NEW theatre—the people writing NOW?”  The young man was “looking for something fresh, something alive.  A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation.”  He’s transported magically to “off-off-Broadway” and “the Cino Café” where “[s]omething’s always new” and the as-yet-unknown playwrights are “trying to say something.”  As a consequence, Off-Off-Broadway simply took off because it was needed, both by theatergoers and by artists.  Caffe Cino was the vanguard.  New York Herald Tribune cultural critic (and Village resident) John Gruen described the theater scene at the Cino in an obituary for the OOB impresario:

Twice each night, and sometimes three times, the Caffe Cino presented the outrageous, the blasphemous, the zany, the wildly poetic, the embarrassingly trite, the childish, and frequently, the moving and the beautiful.

The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s anti-war satire about the arms race, Flyspray, presented in the summer of 1960.  This was followed by plays from Lanford Wilson (often credited with bringing “professional theater” to the Cino, till then a den of amateurism), Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick, and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors such as Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63), Harvey Keitel, and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse.  

The Cino made another important contribution to New York life, American theater, and the nation’s culture.  In a way, it happened almost by accident—or, more precisely, circumstances.  Before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, it was illegal in New York State to depict homosexuality on stage.  (The law, the Wales Padlock Act, was passed in 1927 and remained on the books until 1967.)  But many of the artists, especially the playwrights, who patronized and worked in Caffe Cino were gay so the coffeehouse became a congenial and safe hangout for gay men, especially, to meet.  Almost surreptitiously, the Cino became a pioneer in gay theater as many of the new plays featured gay themes, subjects, and characters.  (Along with Stonewall, Caffe Cino is considered a landmark of U.S. LGBTQ history.  The Stonewall’s still here; the Cino’s not.)  

Of course, the Cino was already breaking another law the moment it started presenting performances of any kind: New York City’s cabaret law.  Businesses that wanted to put on a show had to have a liquor license (even though Caffe Cino didn’t serve booze) and a cabaret license.  (The same was true of places that wanted to allow patrons to dance.)  Joe Cino had neither for his coffeehouse.  (This is why Ellen Stewart eventually called her house the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.  Patrons didn’t pay an admission fee, but bought memberships in the private club—which didn’t need a  license to present a performance.)  To help deter the police—who might fail to enforce Wales but would close a joint for putting on an unlicensed play—from interfering, Cino plastered the front widows with posters to obscure the view from the sidewalk.  

The posters themselves, designed by Cino artist Kenneth Burgess, were lettered in what Crespy labeled “a purposely indecipherable art nouveau style—later known as psychedelic,” which the New York City authorities like cops and site inspectors couldn’t read but Cino regulars could, all to disguise the goings-on inside the coffeehouse.  To the uninitiated, the posters looked like abstract art.  (It was like a visual version of the sound frequency only people under 25 can hear.  If you were hip, you got the message; if you were square, you didn’t.)

The Cino  was a magnet, drawing wanderers, seekers, hippies, theater enthusiasts, gays, and all kinds of counterculture Americans (and foreign visitors).  Early on the morning of 3 March 1965, however, disaster nearly struck as a fire, believed to have started from a gas leak (though Joe Cino was convinced that it was started by his estranged and volatile lover John Torrey) gutted the first-floor storefront.  Ironically, the fire occurred on Ash Wednesday.  For 2½ months, Joe Cino’s café operated out of Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa in the East Village (located at 122 2nd Avenue, between 7th and 8th Streets, at the time) on Sunday and Monday nights; other downtown theater people hosted or participated in fundraisers and benefits for Cino and his coffeehouse.  (Edward Albee, already an established playwright so he never wrote for the Cino, was nevertheless an enthusiastic booster of the café theater and donated the space for the largest event in benefit for Caffe Cino.)  

A newly-installed fireproof ceiling at the Cino, put in when a lighting grid was added, prevented the fire from spreading beyond the commercial space, saving the building from damage and confining the destruction to the interior of the Cino.  On Tuesday, 18 May 1965, the coffeehouse reopened with a production of With Creatures Make My Way by H. M. (Haralimbus Medea, known as Harry) Koutoukas, whose plays, wrote Crespy, “personify the Cino and are emblematic of the curious mix of highbrow avant-garde and lowdown pop culture that became its signature style.”  A new drop ceiling was installed, along with expanded space for dressing rooms; even a compact lighting booth was built during the reconstruction.  The famous memorabilia-covered walls had to be re-decorated from scratch, but they quickly regained their familiar look.  That same year, Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa were jointly awarded a Village Voice OBIE Award “for creating opportunities for new playwrights to confront audiences and gain experience of the real theatre” during the 1964-65 season.

The next year, on 19 May 1966, the Cino’s most successful production opened, helping to change OOB forever after.  Dames at Sea or Golddiggers Afloat—known afterward simply as Dames at Sea—with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise and directed by Cino regular Robert Dahdah ran at the café theater for 148 performances.  Then it moved to Off-Broadway’s  Bouwerie Lane Theatre in the East Village on 20 December 1968 and transferred to the larger Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in the West Village on 22 April 1969 and closed on 10 May 1970 after a total of 575 performances.  (There was a television version which aired on NBC on 15 November 1971 and a later Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theatre from 22 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running 85 regular performances and 32 previews.  There was also a London run in 1969 and a cast recording of the Off-Broadway staging released that same year.)  

The central role of Ruby in Dames was played, both at Caffe Cino and in the  OB première, by future Broadway star Bernadette Peters; her 1968 OB performance brought her her first Drama Desk Award.  (Peters also reprised her role in regional productions at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in 1973 and at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1973.  Many other regional productions have been staged since the play’s début; Dames at Sea’s been very popular in schools and community theaters.)

As momentous an achievement as Dames at Sea was for Caffe Cino, it also marked the beginning of the end.  While working on a stock production in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, John (sometimes written “Jon” in the press) Torrey (sometimes spelled “Torre”), Joe Cino’s on-again-off-again lover, was electrocuted on 5 January 1967 and died.  Some suspected it was a suicide, but many others believe the sometime Cino lighting expert had been performing his signature gag of “eating” electricity and it went horribly wrong.  To demonstrate that electricity isn’t to be feared, he’d lick his fingers  and grab the end of an electric line, causing the cable to throw sparks. When the electricity arced off his fingers, he made as if he was eating it.  Cino was devastated by Torrey’s death and descended into despondency.  

Torrey’s death sent Cino into an emotional spiral.  Late on 30 March 1967, he returned alone to the coffeehouse, took a kitchen knife, and hacked at his body, stabbing himself in the stomach, enacting a bizarre sort of harakiri dance.  He managed to call Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith’s apartment at 5 Cornela Street (likely before he inflicted the mortal wound) and got Smith, the Voice journalist, on the phone.  Cino sounded so desperate that Smith rushed to the café and found Cino, still alive in a pool of blood.  Smith ran for help and Cino was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in the Village, where Al Carmines of Judson Poets and Ellen Stewart of La MaMa kept vigil.  He died on 2 April—Torrey’s birthday.  Bernadette Peters, the  sensation of Dames at Sea, sang a song from the play at his memorial service on 10 April at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the home of Al Carmines’s Judson Poets’ Theatre, along with other downtown performers and artists performing scenes, readings, and more songs from Cino plays.  (Joe Cino had been buried in Buffalo, his birthplace and home of his mother, on 7 April.)

Caffe Cino reopened in May under the management of Michael Smith and others, and it lasted another year.  But Joe Cino had been the living spirit of Caffe Cino and without him at the helm, or the espresso machine, “Magic Time” was never the same.  The coffeehouse closed for good on 17 March 1968; the last play at the Cino was Monuments by Diane Di Prima.  In 1985, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (then known as the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts) mounted Caffe Cino and its Legacy: An American Cultural Landmark, an exhibition of memorabilia and ephemera, and playwright Robert Patrick had a plaque mounted on the front of the commercial space at 31 Cornelia Street on 28 April 2008, just under 50 years after Joe Cino opened his coffeehouse: “On this site, in the Caffe Cino (1958-68), artists brought theatre into the modern era, creating Off-Off Broadway and forever altering the performing arts worldwide.”  (Sometime in May 2017, the plaque was anonymously removed.)

Joe Cino’s café theater, the first OOB theater, had lasted for just under 10 years, but its impact on New York and American theater has been everlasting.  During its decade of operation, the Cino presented somewhere around 250 plays.  Cino had a dark side and came to a tragic end, and all wasn’t all beer and skittles at the coffeehouse, but the café-owner isn’t remembered for that.  He’s enshrined in New York and theater history for his contributions as a wizard for working with artists, providing an atmosphere of complete artistic freedom to experiment, innovate, challenge established standards—even fail—and generating a new theater forum for work that would otherwise never see a stage or an audience.  In 1985, Ellen Stewart insisted, “It was Joseph Cino who started Off-Off-Broadway.  I would like to ask everybody to remember that.” 

Joe Cino was the first of the founders of OOB to depart: Ralph Cook (b. 1928), founder of Theatre Genesis, died in 1985; Al Camines (b. 1936) passed on in 2005; and La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (b. 1919), was the last survivor, dying in 2011.  Off-Off-Broadway thrives in New York City—including La MaMa E.T.C., the only one of the four founding OOB theaters still in operation.  Similar small spaces live in cities across the country, and American playwriting still feels the ripples of what Joe Cino and his followers started 60 years ago in a little corner of New York.  On 11 November 2017, 31 Cornelia Street, the Cino’s home, was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Caffe Cino, Part 1

[Almost seven years ago, I posted a two-part article on Rick On Theater called “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” (12 and 15 December 2011).  It was principally about the genesis of Off-Off-Broadway, the non-commercial, non-union theater that began as an alternative to the commercially-oriented, union-regulated productions of Broadway and Off-Broadway.  I reported in “Greenwich Village Theater” that the sipapu, the place of emergence, of Off-Off-Broadway was Greenwich Village and what, after 1964, was dubbed the East Village, and specifically, 31 Cornelia Street—the home after 1958 of the Caffe Cino.  Joe Cino, the coffeehouse’s proprietor, opened his café theater 60 years ago this December.  Until recently, there’d never been an extensive history of the Cino—there are few records or documents on the café’s history; it’s all in the memories of those who were there, and that's a fading population—so I thought this would be an opportune time to post a little compilation on the historic  venue.  I’m posting it in two parts, so come back to ROT on 14 September for the continuation of “Caffe Cino.”]

Off-Off-Broadway, the theater arena in which new artists like actors, directors, and playwrights, often get their starts in the business of show, is a New York City phenomenon.  (Some cities have a vague equivalent, especially after the Off-Off-Broadway theater here made itself known in the 1960s and ’70s.)  There’s no real money on the Off-Off-Broadway stage, and the working conditions are as minimal as you can imagine, but there’s a lot of experience, some exposure (agents, managers, and producers have been known to check out what are often called “showcases”—because that’s often what they are—to see if there’s some new talent or new property to interest them.  It could happen . . . .).

Since the 1980s or so, Off-Off-Broadway has spread out across the city, not only to all quarters of Manhattan, but all across the city.  But when the movement got started in the late 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, it was centered in Greenwich Village and what was becoming known as the East Village.  The exact spot where Off-Off-Broadway began was a coffeehouse on a tree lined-block of a typical West Village lane, Cornelia Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets—number 31, the home of Caffe Cino.

The building that housed Caffe Cino, a four-story red brick walk-up with apartments above the ground floor was built in 1877 as a tenement.  (There have been numerous renovations and up-grades since then to conform to changing requirements and codes for New York City buildings.  Though the interior of 31 Cornelia Street, as well as the building’s utilities and safety features, have been modernized, its exterior is basically unchanged—somewhat cleaner, perhaps—from its appearance in the days of Caffe Cino.)  The entrance to the ground-floor commercial space, where the coffeehouse was located, is flanked by two cast-iron pilasters.  Like the street on which it stands, it’s pretty typical of the neighborhood.  Nothing about it stands out—except that what went on there changed the face of New York theater forever and had a profound impact on American theater as a whole.  

Joe Cino started the Caffe Cino Art Gallery, as it was first called, in December 1958 and issued a call for artist friends to hang their art on the walls of the new coffeehouse.  In 1965, he told the Village Voice (in his one and only interview), “My idea was always to start with a beautiful, intimate, warm, non-commercial, friendly atmosphere where people could come and not feel pressured or harassed.”  The art displays soon led to poetry readings (how Greenwich Village coffeehouse!), and that led directly to reading plays.  From there it was just a short step to putting the plays on.  And remember, Greenwich Village was the very center of all things avant-garde: the bohemians congregated there in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s; the Beats, who really started the “coffeehouse scene,” in the ’50s; and the hippies and Yippies in the ’60s.  

(By the way, the Caffe Cino is often misnamed in the press and other sources.  First of all, Joe Cino, a proud Sicilian-American, chose the Italian designation for his establishment to be different from all the other Village coffeehouses—though some reports say it was an accident from a misprint in an ad that just stuck—so it’s not “Café Cino”—and he also never used the accent mark in the coffeehouse’s name [caffè].  Unfortunately, if you want to look the place up, especially on line, you have to misspell the name to be sure to catch all the potential hits since even the New York Times called the place “Cafe Cino.”  Go know, right?)

Joseph Cino (1931-67) was born in Buffalo into a traditional Italian-American family.  He was attracted to dance and opera from a young age, which didn’t sit well with his three brothers and his schoolmates because they felt that an Italian boy shouldn’t be interested in dancing.  It was also becoming increasingly obvious that young Joe was gay, something else that wasn’t in line with his community.  As a result, though Joe and his mother were close, the frictions with his family increased and in 1948, when he was 16, Joe ran away to New York City to become a dancer.  

He began a string of meaningless jobs such as waiter, clerk, receptionist, and soda-jerk—the kind of thing many performing artists do when they’re starting out—and studied dance at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side; he also studied acting, speech, and make-up.  Despite a scholarship to Jacob’s Pillow, the dance center and school in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and a few gigs with dance troupes, the dance career didn’t happen, probably because Cino didn’t look much like a dancer: just five-foot-nine, he was “sometimes described as ‘roundish.’”  In his 2003 history of the Off-Off-Broadway theater, David Crespy drew this picture of Joe Cino:

He had a head of thick, curly hair and dark brown eyes.  His standard uniform was a sweatshirt worn inside out, jeans, and yellow boots.  His cherubic face, rimmed by a scruffy, half-grown beard, was filled with a delightful warmth—his smile dazzled and according to those who knew him, he exuded love, nurturing, and an irrepressible charm.  He was pudgy and at the same time graceful . . . .  

After 10 years of trying and closing in on 27, he was ready to move on to something else.

One of those bread-and-butter jobs Cino had was as a waiter at the Playhouse Café at 131 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, a four-minute walk east from 31 Cornelia.  Cino learned about working in a coffeehouse and, especially, how to run an espresso machine at the Playhouse Café, so named because it was just a couple of doors down from the historic Provincetown Playhouse (115 MacDougal).  It was while working at the Playhouse, where occasional plays were read, that Cino saved the money from his pay, stashed in a drawer in his apartment, that he would eventually use to open his own coffeehouse, something he considered during his stint at the Playhouse.  When the café closed, Cino made his move.

Cino’d been thinking about opening a café on and off since as early as 1954, he said.  Among his friends were many artists, and he thought he’d hang their paintings in his fantasy joint.  One of his friends (and current lover) was painter Ed Franzen, who worked at New York University in the Village.  Franzen was looking for a studio where he could work and show his paintings and he knew that Cino wanted a place, too.  One day in November 1958, Franzen called his friend and told him he’d stumbled on a storefront in the West Village and when Cino met the painter at 31 Cornelia Street, the incipient OOB impresario found Franzen in conversation with the landlady, who was leaning out an upstairs window.  The painter introduced his future partner: “This is Mrs. Lemma.”  “Oh, you’re Italian,” said Cino.  “Yes,” said Josie Lemma, “what are you?”  Cino answered, “Sicilian.”  And a connection was made.  The rest, as the cliché goes, is (theater) history.

Mrs. Lemma threw the keys to the storefront down to them and the painter and the ex-dancer went in to look the place over.  Here’s how Cino recounts the rest of the historic moment:

The first thing you saw when you looked down the room was the toilet at the back.  I thought, “There’s a toilet, and there’s a sink, and there’s a fireplace.  This will be a counter, a coffee machine here, a little private area.”  I turned around and looked and said, “This is the room, I have no idea what to do with it.”

The room was small, narrow, open, and plain.  It had wood floors, exposed-brick walls, and a pressed-metal ceiling.  The metal ceiling would be covered by a plaster drop ceiling when Cino installed a lighting system and Cino soon decorated his “room” with

twinkling fairy lights, strung liberally across the ceiling, and then the sprinkling of glitter dust on the floor for show nights.  Festoons of hanging decorations followed—cutouts, mobiles, baubles, glitter angels, miniature Chinese lanterns, and ever more fairy lights.

In his New York Times review of Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player in 1967, Dan Sullivan observed that Cino had hung “enough twinkling lights to decorate a forest of psychedelic Christmas trees.”  

When “the Cino,” as it became known, started presenting plays, the generally nondescript character of the room would change depending on the plays being produced as the participants brought in new scenery each week.  The most emblematic element of the space, however, were the walls.  They were soon bedecked with “glossy photos of stars and unknowns, opera posters, Christmas decorations, and crunched foil, often interspersed with paintings by Kenneth Burgess, Cino’s resident artist,” and other ephemera the patrons brought in.  These became the most memorable element in the café and Joe Cino’s special domain.  Memorabilia Cino felt was special, such as the résumé a young Bette Midler (who never got to work at the Cino) gave him, was stapled to the wall behind the coffee bar.  If the wall décor had to be rearranged for a play or for cleaning and repainting, afterwards its original appearance would have to be reconstructed.  Only Cino himself could add or subtract from the display.  

Franzen and Cino opened Caffe Cino on a Friday night in early December with about 30 customers, all friends.  The music Cino chose for his café, in contrast with the prevailing taste of the Greenwich Village coffeehouses for folk music—for which Cino had little regard—was opera and classical.  Veteran Cino dramatist Robert Patrick (who’d eventually earn the rep as the most prolific Off-Off-Broadway playwright) recalled, “There was a jukebox, which was full of opera records.”  As for the rest of the activities in the café, Joe Cino reminisced:

I was thinking of a cafe with poetry readings, with lectures, maybe with dance concerts.  The one thing I never thought of was fully staged productions of plays.  I thought of doing readings, but I never thought any of the technical things would be important.

The café started presenting poetry readings immediately, just as Cino had planned.  Then after about five months of operation, Caffe Cino began offering play readings around “a long pine table.”  The first reading was “a condensed version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest” on 7 February 1959 and the coffeehouse was packed.  It was supposed to be a one-off event: “I didn’t even think of doing it again,” affirmed Cino.  He didn’t want “to disturb the rhythm of the room.”  But Caffe Cino immediately scheduled a Monday night reading, then soon, Tuesday, and so on, one performance a night.  

They read works by Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thornton Wilder, J. D. Salinger, Noel Coward, André Gide, Anton Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, and other established American and European writers.  Cino resisted giving readings on the weekends and he recalled that it was almost two years before the coffeehouse was having readings all week long.  He said the performers “went to staging right away.”  Not precisely: Robert Dahdah, the Cino’s most frequent director, staged Sartre’s No Exit in February 1960, the first play to be fully mounted there.

There was no actual stage at the Cino—an 8-by-8-foot piece of wood was put down to mark the acting area and it was portable so it could be set down anywhere in the café.  Props, set, lighting, and costumes were minimal, no more than was absolutely necessary to perform the play (and, of course, pretty much everything was scrounged, borrowed, or, occasionally, swiped.  Lighting, even with the café’s limited technical resources, was the chief artistic means of creating an atmosphere for the plays.  Crespy described it as “dazzling and inventive” and recounts, “Many remember the lighting as one of the most magical aspects of the Cino.”  Cino introduced each performance, always—and famously—announcing as he left the performance area: “It’s magic time!”  

The “room,” as Cino apparently called his coffeehouse, was reconfigured to suit each play, with the performance space being set up in a different spot on the floor and the tables rearranged accordingly.  From short scenes to one-act plays to full-lengths, the performances expanded in response to both the demand of the audiences and the avidity of the artists.  (One thing about actors and playwrights: they love to work—an actor friend of mine used to like to quip: “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”)   Pretty soon, says Crespy, the Cino “began to look more like a stage with a café on it.”

The café accommodated about 40 customers in its 18-by-30-foot space—the legal maximum capacity was 90, according to Robert Patrick, who often manned the door,  but when there was a performance, many more than that squeezed in anywhere they could, even sitting atop the cigarette machine.  The coffeehouse’s patrons, with their food and drinks at the 20 tiny café tables inches from the stage, were constantly in danger of spilling their coffee on the actors if one or the other wasn’t careful, but the closeness of the spectators and the performers turned the performance into an event they all shared.  There was no separation, no distance.  As Joe Cino himself put it, “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here.  But this is a theatre, a mirror of all the madness of everything else that is happening.”

Soon, one performance a night grew into two by January 1961, with an 11 o’clock show.  There wasn’t always an audience, but the casts performed anyway.  Cino would insist that the actors “do it for the room.”  That first two-fer was a 32-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which Cino called “one of the most beautiful things we had at the Cino.”  The lighting, another first at the Cino, as designed by resident lighting wizard, Johnny Dodd, “was very tight, just for the actors in the performing areas.  The rest of the room was dark.”  

The development of the Cino as a theatrical venue was never really planned out but grew rather like Topsy.  The performers, writers, directors, and production artists who put on the plays were at first friends of Cino’s, but theater folk are always on the look-out for places to ply their art, so the pool of artists widened quickly.  Cino himself never performed in the plays, but after the last show, Jerome Robbins, already a star in the dance world, occasionally came by so he and Cino could dance on the small stage.  The OOB impresario didn’t see himself as a producer, either; he was a café-owner who provided a place for others to work.  He seldom read scripts—a habit he shared with his friend and colleague Ellen Stewart of La MaMa—and determined the performance schedule according to the playwrights’ zodiac signs!  

Joe Cino insisted, in fact, that his coffeehouse wasn’t a theater, but a café.  “We’re not off-off-Broadway,” he proclaimed, “we’re in-cafe.”  According to Crespy’s OOB history, the Village Voice “never listed” productions at Caffe Cino in its theater section, but, until the coffeehouse’s demise, always with the cafés.  Once the Cino started doing play readings, momentum took over, and the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway, as dramaturg and reviewer Cynthia Jenner dubbed it in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, pretty much created itself.  

[As I noted in my introduction above, “Caffe Cino” is a two-part post,  so I encourage all ROTters to return on Friday to read the final installment of the article.  So far, you’ve read about the start of the coffeehouse and the inauguration of Off-Off-Broadway; in the conclusion, you’ll learn about the café’s rise and its demise.  I hope you’ll also get an impression of the Caffe Cino’s importance at the time and its influence down to the present.]

High Line Park

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

There’s a park in New York City that runs from Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan’s old Meatpacking District north to 34th Street. It’s a long, thin strip of park, unlike the famous Central Park, a big rectangle, or the less-famous, amoeba-shaped Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but it doesn’t run along a riverbank like Hudson River Park that meanders along the western shore of the lower half of Manhattan Island. It has no playing fields, dog runs, great lawns, outdoor theaters, or band shells. It’s an entirely artificial park, with no natural terrain or groves of trees, no outcroppings of rock, no little ponds or rivulets running through it. In fact, it really has no geology at all—at least none that nature assembled.

Okay, so if you haven’t guessed yet—and the title of this article didn’t give it away before you started reading—I’m talking about High Line Park that’s been built (is being built—there’s still a chunk below the northern terminus that hasn’t opened to the public yet) in the rail bed of the old elevated freight line that serviced the factories and warehouses of the Lower West Side of Manhattan when it was still an industrial neighborhood. “A park in the sky,” New York City parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, called it; Justin Davidson of New York magazine described it as “levitating parkland.” Aside from anything else, the High Line is a remarkable example of urban renewal and the repurposing of derelict infrastructure: taking a rusting, unused railroad trestle, which had been stretching overhead more or less along 10th Avenue for decades doing nothing but creating a shadow and gloom and threatening to fall onto cars and the heads of anyone foolish enough to walk along below its route, and converting the eyesore into something not only attractive but popular and valued. It is, I believe, an almost unique space. To my knowledge, the only park like it that exists anywhere else in the world is the Promenade Plantée in Paris; a few cities like St. Louis, Philadelphia, Jersey City, Chicago, and Rotterdam are now planning similar projects. (The suggestion that the old Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson between New York’s Westchester and Rockland Counties might be converted into a cross-river park when a new bridge is built has been recently rejected. However, back in New York City, a group has proposed turning a former MTA trolley terminal under Delancey Street in Lower Manhattan into Delancey Underground, nicknamed the “Low Line.”)

I’ve walked along the High Line twice now—I live five blocks directly east of one of the farthest-downtown entrances—and I’ve walked beneath it a number of times since it started being opened in segments. (I did try to go up right after the first section opened, but I chose the one afternoon on which the city decided to close it early.) The High Line is, aside from any other attraction, a stroller’s paradise—an urban boardwalk, as the New York Times characterized it. When I was a teenager, my family lived in Germany for several years and my dad picked up the practice of Spazierung, taking a leisurely promenade purely for the exercise and enjoyment of it—not going anyplace, not shopping, not running errands, just strolling. In Dad’s first assignment, we lived in the small city of Koblenz and the government-provided house was on the Rheinanlagen, a pedestrian promenade along the Rhine River that was closed to motor vehicles. Dad started collecting Spazierstöcke, walking sticks, and habitually took evening walks along the Rheinanlagen, watching the river barges going up and down or the activity along the shore or in the houses and businesses on the city side of the promenade or the scenery on the opposite bank. The High Line has a similar feel—though the passing scene is different. One entrepreneur who built a hotel straddling the walkway on Washington Street at 13th even proclaims, “It’s like a 19th-century bucolic stroll. You can almost imagine people with parasols.” Well, maybe—if you squint and plug your ears.

High Line Park is a linear park built on a disused, 1½-mile stretch of the elevated New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side Line which has been redesigned and landscaped as an aerial greenway. The elevation above the street is 18 to 30 feet—at around the level of the third story of most buildings along the route. The park currently runs a mile from Gansevoort Street, three blocks south of West 14th Street, up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to the Hudson Rail Yards near the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Starting just west of 9th Avenue, most of the High Line’s route runs above or slightly west of 10th Avenue, but at the northern end, the last half-mile segment, donated in July 2012 by CSX Transportation, will shoot west over 30th Street to 12th Avenue and then hook north around the Hudson Yards development site and along the Hudson bank to 34th Street. The total length when completed, at a projected cost of $170 million (sections one and two are reported to have cost $152 million), will be 22 city blocks from northern Greenwich Village through western Chelsea into Clinton (formerly known as Hell’s Kitchen); at 30 to 60 feet wide, the park will comprise almost seven acres.

The rail line itself dates back to 1847 when the city approved the construction of a railroad down the West Side at street level, but there were so many fatal accidents involving the trains that 10th Avenue acquired the nickname “Death Avenue.” Men on horseback, known as West Side Cowboys, rode before the locomotives to warn away other traffic by waving red flags, but by 1929, New York City and State and New York Central agreed on improvements that included the High Line. Running 13 miles from 34th Street down to Spring Street in what’s now SoHo, the elevated tracks opened in 1934. Serving the factories and warehouses directly, the line ran through buildings along its route, such as the National Biscuit Company (home of the Oreo and since 1997, Chelsea Market) and the Bell Telephone Laboratory, rather than necessitating street-level depots and railroad crossings. This allowed cargo to be loaded and unloaded without obstructing traffic or commerce along the street and reduced the opportunity for theft. Trestles entering and exiting buildings several stories above the ground are still visible along the park’s route, though the rail-trail doesn’t include many of them.

As interstate trucking replaced shipment by rail after World War II, the line became less trafficked and by the 1960s, the section of the High Line below Gansevoort Street was demolished. Conrail, the successor to New York Central (and the predecessor of CSX), last ran a train along the elevated track in 1980. Following that, property-owners over whose lots the line hovered lobbied to get the rest of the now-disused and deteriorating line pulled down. I used to drive up and down the West Side fairly regularly in those years (actually starting in the mid-’70s when a train might still lumber through once or twice a week), and the rail bed had become little more than a rusty, ugly derelict—fascinating because of its suspension above the roadway and its passage through buildings along the West Side Highway (also once elevated and now mostly gone). It was an eyesore, but the far West Side of Manhattan was largely industrial—warehouses, factories, auto shops, piers—and the waterfront a few blocks farther west was deteriorating as well, so the abandoned rail line was just part of the general decay of the whole area.

During the 1980s, on the coattails of the fiscal crisis of the previous decade, nothing was done and the track sprouted its own kind of vegetation—wild grasses, a few rugged trees, and other self-seeded plants—and became a little-known destination for urban spelunkers to trek through (though access was officially prohibited). During Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration, 1994-2001, the High Line was scheduled for demolition. Even then, however, there was a movement to save the elevated track as a rarity of urban architecture and do something useful and beneficial with it rather than just junk it. (The same kind of sentiment resulted in the Hudson River Park that now attracts walkers, bikers, diners, and others to the riverbank where deteriorating piers were rotting and crumbling into the water. Commercial interests also wanted to tear that all down and open the riverbank for development. Big, busy, bustling New York City, it seems, has its own kinds of environmentalists. I think the now-lamented loss of the old Penn Station and the near-loss of Grand Central—averted by an effort spearheaded by Jackie Kennedy Onassis—has taught New Yorkers an indelible lesson in urban preservation.) Still, High Line Park looked to most New Yorkers like one of those ideas that sounds good, but won’t ever really happen. (Another one was the late Senator Daniel Moynihan’s proposal to replace Penn Station, the monstrosity that took the place of the elegant original, with the city’s James A. Farley Post Office across 8th Avenue—designed by the same architects as the lost railroad terminal. That’s looked like a dead idea several times, but it may yet happen, too.)

In 1999, the Friends of the High Line formed to advocate the preservation of the rail line and repurpose it for public use and open space. The Promenade Plantée, inaugurated in 1993, was apparently a model, and this time, public support grew. The far West Side of downtown Manhattan had already begun to be a place of considerable interest to the cool and trendy—clubs, restaurants, boutiques, and design and photo studios were replacing the non-retail businesses down there—as Chelsea, home since the mid-’90s to what became the world’s largest concentration of art galleries, was being gentrified and reclaimed as a desirable living area of renovated brownstones, converted loft buildings, and new construction. The High Line was a curiosity and something unique to the area and people living, working, and visiting in the neighborhood wanted to keep it. With celebrity support from people like designer Diane von Furstenberg; her husband, media executive Barry Diller; and actors Ethan Hawke and Edward Norton, FHL persuaded Mayor Michael Bloomberg to reverse his predecessor’s demolition decision, and City Hall and the City Council committed to the redevelopment of the elevated rail bed as a greenway in 2004. That fall, after an open design competition, FHL and the City of New York selected the design firm of James Corner Field Operations, a landscape architecture company, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, an architecture firm, to devise the park. The team included planting designer Piet Oudolf and experts in the fields of horticulture, engineering, lighting, public art, and other fields pertinent to the venture. After obtaining the necessary clearances from the federal agencies that oversee rail operations, construction began in 2006. The first section of High Line Park, from Gansevoort up to 20th Street, opened to the public on 9 June 2009; the second section, north to 30th Street, opened on 8 June 2011. The last section, from 30th to 34th Street in the neighborhood once known as Hell’s Kitchen, will be starting construction later in 2012 for a projected opening in Spring 2014.

The construction process was broken into the stages: 1) Remove all existing surface material on the elevated tracks, including gravel, soil, debris, and a layer of concrete, down to the steel-and-concrete structure; 2) Repair the steel and concrete, install new drainage and waterproofing, and sandblast all steel surfaces to remove the original lead paint; 3) Construct the new park landscape itself. Once the superstructure was renovated and restored, in most cases to the appearance of the original trestle, and the lower layer of waterproofed concrete was laid, the High Line’s walkways were created from smooth, tapered concrete planks (resembling wooden laths as if the greenway were, in fact, a metropolitan boardwalk), leaving space between the foundation and the surface for drainage and wiring. In many spots along the path, the original railroad tracks were embedded in the concrete planks or incorporated into the plant beds as part of the design.

The walkway blends foliage (modeled on the self-seeded vegetation that grew on the High Line after it was abandoned to nature) with the long, narrow “planks” of white concrete forming a linear promenade. The greenway contains attractions such as a water feature that allows visitors—especially kids!—to wade barefoot; platforms for watching the traffic below; a sundeck and a lawn for picnicking; and gathering spaces for performances, art exhibits, and educational programs. Plentiful seating has been designed into the greenway, including plain wooden benches, metal café tables and chairs, the park’s distinctive “peel-up benches” which rise gradually from the walkway, and wooden chaises longues (on miniature train wheels mounted on embedded tracks) with views of the Hudson. Access to the High Line, by stairs and elevators from the sidewalk below, is arranged so that the seemingly uninterrupted flow of the path isn’t disturbed, giving the impression of a country promenade—only with city views. And since the park remains open after dark, there are lights along the rail-trail, but instead of overhead street lamps, lighting is provided by LED’s set in the railings below eye level so as not to wash out the ambient light of the cityscape as dusk falls over western Manhattan and the New Jersey shoreline across the Hudson.

The path swings from side to side along the greenway, leaving room on one side or the other for beds of plants lining the park. The plantings were selected by the High Line’s team of horticulturists according to the plans of landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and planting designer Piet Oudolf, inspired by the weeds, grasses, and wildflowers that grew between the abandoned tracks. The plant varieties were chosen for their hardiness, sustainability, and textural and color variation, and the landscape was designed so that different plants bloom at different times of the year so some foliage is always growing. The irrigation is based on a self-sustaining return system which directs rainwater to the plant beds rather than pumping an outside supply up to the park. (This is one of the reasons that dogs aren’t permitted on the High Line—to cut down on the pollution of the irrigation water.) About 75% of the 210 plant species are native to the New York City ecology, though others have been imported from all over the country and even beyond to create an environment that, like the constructed elements of the design, is a blend of the artistically artificial and randomly self-seeded nature. You might envision the growth you’d find along a rural riverbank—but as if it had been cultivated and gardened by some avid naturalists. New York’s Adam Sternbergh described it as “a thoughtfully conceived, beautifully designed simulation of the former High Line.” It fits perfectly with the idea of planks that look like wood but are really concrete and a boardwalk that’s suspended more than a dozen feet above a busy city thoroughfare. In fact, Ricardo Scofidio of the architecture firm has a word for the concept, ‘agri-tecture,’ which he explained “combines organic and building materials into a vegetal/mineral blend.” Not really coincidentally, the construction of the High Line itself isn’t the only conceptual clash—or palimpsest perhaps—associated with the park. Up top, it’s tranquil, contemplative, calm: no bikes, frisbees, ball games, or rollerbladers; down below, it’s traffic, metropolitan whirl, nightlife, commerce. Separated only by the structure of the defunct rail line, it’s what one area businesswoman calls “cross-cultural friction.” (Where else but New York City. Really.)

Scattered among the foliage are also art installations, selected specifically for the greenway’s environment. Some of the artworks are integrated into the plantings—and aren’t always easy to spot among the vegetation—while others simply compliment them. (A few, like Elad Lassry’s 2012 billboard Women (065, 055), on view at West 18th Street and 10th Avenue through 7 September, are off the trestle but designed for viewing from the greenway.) Since both the plants and the art are labeled, you could look on the High Line as both an urban nature walk and a linear sculpture garden. (The park’s website lists the commissioned art. Log onto http://www.thehighline.org, which also includes a page for news and a blog, for all kinds of current and updated information about the park and its neighborhood.) The High Line artworks include site-specific pieces, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of what FHL calls “billboard interventions.” (This doesn’t take into account art commissioned by the private buildings in sight of the rail-trail, such as Urban Rattle, a sculpture by Charlie Hewitt installed last May in the courtyard of Ten23, a residential high-rise at 500 West 23rd Street at 10th Avenue.) Not all the art is purely visual: the current offerings include at least two sound works, one by John Cage (One11 and 103 at the West 14th Street Passage) and the other by Uri Aran (Untitled (Good & Bad) on view between West 25th and West 26th Streets). The Cage piece, a celebration of the composer’s centennial, is a presentation of Cage's 1992 film and sound composition (from 1:00 to 11:00 p.m. through 13 September); Aran’s “playful sound installation” (until 14 April 2013) turns the park into “an imaginary jungle.” FHL commissions and presents a variety of art projects on and around the High Line and there are also plans to use areas of the park for temporary art exhibits as well as other kinds of presentations. I predict it won’t be long before performances of one kind or another are conceived for the strip park, perhaps a hybrid of the shows commonly presented in ground-level parks and the guerrilla pieces occasionally performed on moving subways.

There’s no restriction on bringing a snack or a drink into the park—aside from the common-sense rules regarding littering and alcohol consumption—and there are areas where picnicking is encouraged, but the park also hosts some food vendors. As the park’s website states it, FHL “is committed to working with entrepreneurial food partners whose products are good for the people eating the food, good for those who grow it, and good for the land.” The vendors, serving varieties of food from snacks to desserts (especially the frozen kind) to light meals, are concessionaires, of course, and what’s available will change from time to time as vendors come and go. (Some concessions may not be open on certain holidays or during bad weather.) Some of the concessions are small cafés with limited seating nearby, but many are stands or carts and you either eat on the move or light on any convenient bench or perch—or you can enjoy your refreshment as you stand at the rail and gaze out at the Hudson or the cityscape (but no sitting or climbing on the railings or other parts of the High Line structure). Though alcohol from outside the park is prohibited, some of the concessionaires do sell wine or other spirits. In addition to the vendors, the High Line hosts occasional food-oriented programs and demonstrations. (The website lists the current concessions and there are sites that keep prospective parkgoers posted on events of all kinds.)

The whole experience is anomalous. It’s not like hiking along the road or even walking along the edges of a ground-level park where you share the space with street traffic and sidewalk pedestrians, but at the same time it’s not very far above the real world, like, say, the observation deck of the Empire State Building. At three stories up, you’re not removed from the world of the street—you can still hear it and smell it, even feel it—but you’re untouched by it. At 17th Street, a spot called 10th Avenue Square, you can sit on bleacher-like steps and watch through a huge “proscenium” window as the cars and trucks rush northward along 10th Avenue below you, like a giant, live video show. Park users can even peer into the apartments of people living along what the New York Post dubbed the “‘Pry’ Line”—you can’t do that in Central Park or Washington Square. In a development that seems quintessentially New York City-flavored, some residents of apartments almost within reach of the High Line, began playing to the crowds that gathered at what was the end of the promenade when section one was all there was. The fire escape of one apartment, lit by the stairway lights of the new park, became a stage as the tenant and her friend presented a “laundry installation” and sang pop standards at the High Line Park Renegade Cabaret. “This is what we wanted,” said one the founders of FHL who was in the audience one evening. More than the plantings and the art, he added, “It is going to keep it wild” up on the High Line. Only in New York.

Some of the new buildings have even incorporated visibility from the walkway, along which apartment-dwellers “live in a peep show,” into their designs. The designer of one of the High Line high-rises pointed out, “People who live on the lower floors are probably not eccentric recluses looking for a haven,” though one report quoted a High Liner complaining, “It's voyeuristic, and there's zero privacy. It's just really embarrassing,” and another exposed resident objected, “If I’m watching TV on a random Saturday, I don’t want a tourist looking in.” For other new residents, however, it’s become a sort of witting Rear Window lifestyle: they chose to live in the fishbowl, they know they’re on display, and they even select their décor and even their behavior to accommodate the exposure. “I have no problem living in this bubble,” one resident declared. “It’s the best bubble.” Another explained, “Whenever I have my blinds open, I make sure my apartment looks pristine.” Some even flaunt the exposure a little: preparing a space in her living room for a new sculpture that would be visible from the trestle, the resident of another of the new High Line buildings proclaimed, “If we can show an artist to four million people, why not?” It’s symbiotic, too, of course, since the parkgoers are also on display to the residents. Many who live along the promenade think of the park as their lawn: “It’s like having a backyard, but we don’t have to mow the High Line,” said one. Arranging one room for its view out the window at the park, another apartment-dweller admitted, “We knew it would be the best view in the house.” Often sitting in their windows or on their balconies and fire escapes watching the passing show, apartment-dwellers wave to the lookie-lou’s. One man tells of watching a little romantic drama set in the park: a marriage proposal. “It was very well staged,” applauded the unobserved observer.

The park and other improvements to the far West Side of the island have spurred new construction and conversion. New York magazine already speaks of “the High Line neighborhood: the new skyline of glittering retail spaces and restaurants and condos.” The Whitney Museum of American Art has begun construction on a new main building—it’s leaving its longtime home at 75th and Madison—at the southern terminus of High Line Park at Gansevoort Street, to open in 2015. A number of the new buildings along the High Line have innovative and even daring designs by pioneers like Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Annabelle Selldorf, and Neil Denari. Ironically, those same property-owners who had objected to the High Line’s remains hanging over their plots in the ’80s have benefited from the rise in property values and the increased development, the drop in crime, and the growth of business opportunities in the vicinity of the High Line. Tourists, diners, and shoppers are flocking to the area and locations like the Chelsea Market, installed in the old Nabisco factory before the park was built, are always busy and crowded. Crime in the park itself is virtually nil (and even infractions of park rules is lower than Central Park, say officials); in the surrounding area it’s remained very low as jobs, beyond the 8,000 construction workers employed to build the park, have increased by over 12,000 as of last year.

Of course, as often happens when a neglected, shabby area revives and becomes desirable, old residents, often low-income and elderly, are displaced. It happened in Greenwich Village and then in SoHo, among other trendy New York City neighborhoods. The little diners and saloons of Chelsea have been supplanted by higher-priced restaurants and bars, cold-water walk-ups have been converted into loft apartments and condominiums, and other old buildings have been torn down to make room for new steel-and-glass structures in which the former tenants can’t afford to live. Rents in some buildings have doubled since the park opened reported one city official, and leases for business properties along the route have increased as much as three- and fourfold, pricing many mom-and-pop stores out of the area. Not all of this change is connected to the High Line: a lot of it started before the park was built or even approved. In fact, Chelsea was well on its way to becoming the new Greenwich Village, which had priced itself beyond the budgets of most of the artists, writers, actors, and other trend-setters who had lived there, a decade or more before the first weed was pulled along the elevated tracks. It may well have been because of the upgraded status of Chelsea, which was a low-income tenement neighborhood when I first came to New York and moved into the neighborhood to the east (then without a hip name), that the High Line had the local support that made it a reality.

High Line Park, owned by the City of New York but operated, financed, and maintained by FHL, the non-profit organization that promoted it, under an agreement with the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation, is open year round, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. daily. (The hours may vary depending on the season. Check the website.) Fully wheelchair-navigable, the High Line has entry points about every two or three blocks; there are restrooms currently at the 16th Street entrance and water fountains are located near the Gansevoort Street, 16th Street, and 18th Street access points. (All entry points have stairs, but there are elevators currently at four entrances. The park’s website provides updated information about access points and services as the sections open to the public. FHL staff and volunteers, identified by ID badges or the High Line logo on their clothes, are on duty along the rail-trail as well.) The west side subway lines don’t go further than 7th and 8th Avenues, but many crosstown busses will take parkgoers to 9th or 10th within a block of most entrances. Though bicycles are prohibited on the High Line itself, there are bike racks near the staircases at most of the entrances. Walking tours of High Line Park, available on a first-come, first-served basis, are scheduled during the summer, fall, and spring for groups smaller than 20. Larger group tours, as well as photo and film shoots and parties or other large events, can be arranged by contacting the park authorities at info@thehighline.org.

Most of the regulations governing behavior and activities in the park are the same as for any of the street-level parks as well, including the ban on smoking, but in addition to the rule against biking, visitors are not permitted to bring dogs into the park, ride skateboards, skate or rollerblade, ride a scooter (except a handicap vehicle), throw objects (including balls or frisbees), pick the flowers or plants, set up elaborate photography equipment, or play amplified music or sound. (Those last prohibitions, along with a few others, can be waived by permit or prior arrangement.) Except in the designated spots, visitors are forbidden to walk through the plant beds or on the grass. Despite such restrictions, however, parkgoers find a wide variety of activities, mostly low-impact, to be sure, such as writing—there are many journals and notebooks on view as you stroll along the path—and sketching. On one recent walk I watched a couple of groups of little kids from a daycare or summer camp in the area, probably between five- and eight-year-olds, having a drawing class in one of the southern plazas near where the greenway passes through the Chelsea Market building. All around them, as they sprawled on the ground or propped themselves up against a pillar, were other visitors taking a break in the chairs set up at metal café tables while a steady stream of walkers in couples and family groups passed by. The scene changes as the day goes on: there are early-morining joggers, kids playing games in the daytime, office-workers on lunch breaks in the afternoon when the park is fullest, and dating couples on the benches in the evening gloaming. Anytime I’ve been there, the park’s been busy—it attracts millions of yearly vistors—but not crowded, full of partakers, but leisurely.