New York’s poetry-reading scene began in a tenement basement in 1959.

Evidence

That winter, coffeehouse poetry readings took root in New York. Carved from the dank basement of a Greenwich Village tenement at 116 MacDougal Street, the main venue was the Gaslight Poetry Café. The joint opened in February 1959. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s thesis: cheap rent (dank tenement basement) is the material precondition for the scene.