San Remo Café
overview
The San Remo Café was a Greenwich Village Italian restaurant and bar that became a famous Bohemian hangout in the late 1940s and 1950s.
It attracted a mixed Beat and gay clientele that had, among its most prominent patrons, many gay artists, writers, dancers, and actors.
San Remo Café entrance, 1960. Gift of The Estate of Fred W. McDarrah.
San Remo Café, 1930s. Courtesy of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
Actors Montgomery Clift and Kevin McCarthy (left) at the San Remo, c. 1950s. Courtesy of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, c. 1959.
Gore Vidal, 1948. Photo by Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust. Source: Library of Congress.
History
The San Remo Café was a working-class Greenwich Village Italian restaurant and bar that operated from about 1925 to 1967. It was located on the ground floor of the tenement building at 189 Bleecker Street, corner of MacDougal Street.
Though mob-owned and not especially welcoming, it became a famous Bohemian hangout in the late 1940s and ’50s that attracted a mixed Beat and gay clientele with, among its most prominent patrons, many artists, writers, dancers, and actors. These included such gay and bisexual luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, W.H. Auden, Chester Kallman, Harold Norse, John Cage, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Montgomery Clift, and Merce Cunningham. One of the San Remo’s most famous legends is Vidal picking up Kerouac here, and taking him to the Chelsea Hotel for sex.
The online blog The Last Bohemians indicates that by 1960 the San Remo had a mostly gay clientele, with hustlers from nearby Washington Square, and that “Andy Warhol loved the Remo, and stocked his early Factory with men he found at the bar.” In the 1960s, Edward Albee, composer William Flanagan (Albee’s friend and lover), Terrence McNally, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns were also known to have frequented the bar. It closed in 1967.
Entry by Jay Shockley, project director (March 2017; last revised January 2023).
NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.
Building Information
- Architect or Builder: John P. Voelker
- Year Built: 1907
Sources
Dan Foley, “The Ghosts of Greenwich Village #2: The San Remo Café,” The Last Bohemians blog, May 15, 2011, bit.ly/2gL9ksl.
Danny Fields, in “Tales From the Warhol Factory,” by Guy Trebay and Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, November 12, 2018.
Jay Shockley, “The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community’s Presence in the South Village,” South Village Historic District Designation Report (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2013).
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