Café Cino (site)

Joe Cino opened Caffe Cino at 31 Cornelia Street in December 1958. It was a tiny, unlicensed room with a few dozen seats, an espresso machine and walls crowded with junk-shop pictures. Between 1959 and Cino's death in 1967, plus a short final run in 1968, more than a hundred new plays went up on its small platform, most of them by young writers and many of them gay. It is widely credited as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway. Lanford Wilson's The Madness of Lady Bright (1964), about an ageing drag queen alone in his flat, opened here, along with early work by Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson and others. Nothing of the coffeehouse survives, so come to see the street-level site in the West Village rather than a museum.