Village Gate
The Village Gate was a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York. Art D'Lugoff opened the club the late 1950s, on the ground floor and basement of 160 Bleecker Street. The large Chicago School structure built in 1896 by renowned architect Ernest Flagg [1]. was known at the time as Mills House No. 1 and served as a flophouse for transient men.
Throughout its 38 years the Village Gate featured such greats asJohn Coltrane, Jacques Brel, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone, who recorded the album At The Village Gate there in 1961.
Aretha Franklin made her first New York appearance there.
In 1971 Madame made her debut on the arms of Wayland Flowers, performing in the high camp Kumquats, The World's First Erotic Puppet Show.
From 1971 to 1973, a musical-comedy review called National Lampoon Lemmings had a successful run at the Gate. It starred future comic notables John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest, and lampooned the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which had taken place upstate two years earlier, calling it "Woodchuck" and equating the entire hippie generation with lemmings bent on self-destruction.
The Village Gate closed in 1995. The space is currently occupied by CVS/Pharmacy
Trivia
The Village Gate was a stop on the Greenwich Village Walking Tour, in part because Bob Dylan wrote A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall in September 1962 in the basement.
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