The East Village avant-garde was housed in former immigrant entertainment spaces

Evidence

Noting that hip supper club performers like Lena Horne and Bobby Darin were now adding topical songs to their acts, Newfield resisted the temptation to quote the title of Dylan’s year-old release “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” “Today every branch of culture has its own tribe of far-out revolutionaries,” he wrote, citing Lenny Bruce, John Coltrane, Jack Gelber, and his colleague Jonas Mekas, along with LeRoi Jones and William Burroughs, who, a month later, on Valentine’s Day, materialized on the stage of the American Theater of Poets’s new venue, the 129-seat East End Theater, 85 East Fourth Street, a block once home to Yiddish cabarets, Jewish wedding halls, and Romanian wine cellars. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 652

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the material-conditions argument (cheap, formerly-immigrant storefronts) that the reader wants as a test case for culture-stagnation claims.