1 hour 30 minutes (approx.)
Daily Tour
15 people
English
Follow in the footsteps of famous writers and musicians through this fun scavenger hunt in Greenwich Village in downtown Manhattan. Download the app to your phone, then follow clues and complete challengers to unlock the secret story behind the places where artists like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Edgar Allen Poe, and George Carlin lived and performed.
The Lucille Lortel Theatre is an off-Broadway playhouse at 121 Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village. It was built in 1926 as a 590-seat movie theater called the New Hudson, later known as Hudson Playhouse. The interior is largely unchanged to this day.
In the early 1950s, the site was converted to an off-Broadway theater as Theatre de Lys, opening on June 9, 1953, with a production of Maya, a play by Simon Gantillon starring Kay Medford, Vivian Matalon, and Susan Strasberg.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Not Included
Suze Rotolo lived in the penthouse of One Sheridan Square with her mother. Miki Isaacson, the ‘folk den mother’, occupied the tiny studio apartment on the floor below the Rotolo’s.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Free
Electric Lady Studios is a recording studio in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was commissioned by rock musician Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and designed by architect John Storyk and audio engineer Eddie Kramer by 1970.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Not Included
The Bon Soir, owned by Ernie Sgroi Sr., was a small night club in New York’s Greenwich Village. Comedians and singers like Phyllis Diller, Kaye Ballard, and Ethel Waters performed there.
“Much of the Bon Soir’s appeal came from its remote, forbidden feeling,” James Gavin wrote in Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. “A walk down thirty-one steps led to a square black room …”
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Free
Washington Square Park is a public park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. One of the best known of New York City’s public parks, it is an icon as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Not Included
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country’s earliest practitioners of the short story.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Free
It was at the Cafe Wha? that young performers like Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor got early chances to hone their talents. Folk singers, artists, poets, beatniks and anarchists came to the club, and so did far greater numbers of tourists, eager to observe those exotic breeds. (The club’s odd name was a shortening of the word “what,” intended to convey incredulity.)
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Not Included
The Village Gate was a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, New York. Art D’Lugoff opened the club in 1958, on the ground floor and basement of 160 Bleecker Street. The large 1896 Chicago School structure by architect Ernest Flagg was known at the time as Mills House No. 1 and served as a flophouse for transient men. In its heyday, the Village Gate also included an upper-story performance space, known as the Top of the Gate.
10 minutes • Admission Ticket Free