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A BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ
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In May 1977 three artists--Robin Hirsch, a writer and director; Charles
McKenna, an actor; and Raphaela Pivetta, a visual artist--stumbled across a tiny
storefront on Cornelia Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and thought it
the perfect place to open a café. For two months they scraped and
sanded, plumbed and plastered, and did the intricate dance one does with the
authorities who live beyond the Village, and on the weekend of July 4, 1977,
mirabile dictu, they opened the Cornelia Street Café.
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It was from the beginning an artists' café. Within a month there were
poetry readings and music performances; and then a tiny play written for the
café; and fiction writers; and Eskimo poetry; and puppeteers; and a
living portrait of James Joyce; and the Four Quartets and the entire Iliad; and
mime shows on the street outside the café; and comedians; and fairy tales
and storytellers and Punch and Judy shows.
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Over the years it has presented an enormous variety of artists, from
singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega to poet-senator Eugene McCarthy, from members of
Monty Python to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It has offered a
performance home to the Songwriters Exchange, the Writers Room, the Writers
Studio, the Greek-American Writers Association, the Italian-American Writers
Association, the New Works Project/Theatre, and many others.
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Since those early days it has also grown. Upstairs there is a beautiful oak
bar, salvaged from the Bowery and restored. There are three dining rooms, one
with a working fireplace. And in the summer there is one of the Village's
loveliest sidewalk cafes.
And there is a real kitchen, which has garnered all kinds of acclaim,
including the 1998 Village Arts Award for "inspired cuisine."
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There is also a performance space downstairs where the tradition of theater,
performance, music and poetry is alive and well. As Mayor Edward Koch said in a
proclamation celebrating the café's 10th anniversary in 1987,
it has become "a culinary as well as a cultural landmark."
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The Cornelia Street Cafe is owned and operated by founder Robin Hirsch,
together with Judith Kallas and Bob Siegler. It is open seven days a week,
serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch--and more than three
hundred cultural events a year.
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