The Gaslight’s birth was literally illegal cellar excavation

Evidence

Conveniently downstairs from another Beat hangout, the Kettle of Fish bar, the Gaslight was born in illegality. According to the legend, John Mitchell—a Brooklyn-born Beat Generation fellow traveler in his mid-thirties who had once roomed with the ancient Village character Maxwell Bodenheim, fathered a child with Jack Kerouac’s lost love Alene Lee, started the Café Figaro at the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal and having started it, profitably flipped it—had dug deeper into the cellar floor to create more head room below the exposed pipes and, like a convict tunneling toward freedom, needed to find a way to surreptitiously dispose of the dirt. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 45

Categorization

• XREF: The illegality thread connects to the reader’s thesis about avant-gardes being produced by conditions including legal gray zones — cheap rent and rule-bending as prerequisites.