Café Cino (yer)

Joe Cino, a Sicilian-American dishwasher from Buffalo, opened Caffe Cino in a former sandal shop at 31 Cornelia Street in December 1958. The room was tiny — fewer than 30 seats, a coffee machine, walls covered floor-to-ceiling with junk-shop pictures — and it was never licensed as a theatre. But between 1959 and Cino's suicide in 1967, and through the coffeehouse's brief final coda in 1968, more than a hundred plays premiered on the corner platform, most by writers under 30, many openly gay. Cino is the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway. Its playwrights — Lanford Wilson (*The Madness of Lady Bright*), Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Sam Shepard, William M. Hoffman — wrote the first American plays with openly gay content produced anywhere in the US. Wilson's *Lady Bright*, which premiered here in 1964, features an ageing drag queen alone in his apartment; it is credited as the first American play with an openly gay protagonist to receive an extended run. Cino ran the coffeehouse on the honour system: playwrights kept the door money, ushers were volunteers, Joe cooked pasta at 3 AM for the actors. He killed himself in March 1967 after the death of his lover Jon Torrey. Caffe Cino closed for good in April 1968. The storefront at 31 Cornelia Street has since housed a laundromat, a shoe shop, and — as of writing — an artisanal ice-cream café. There is no municipal plaque. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project has been petitioning for one since 2019. Worth a five-minute detour on any West Village walk: the sidewalk photograph you can take here is of a Cornelia Street storefront that changed American theatre.