The San Remo bar concentrated avant-garde artists of every discipline in one room

Evidence

8 A straight bar known for its openly gay habitues, San Remo boasted a list of regulars that included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Miles Davis, and Frank O’Hara, as well as the Living Theatre crowd and the Beats. Kerouac met Alene Lee at the San Remo; it was his favorite New York bar, called the Black Mask in The Subterraneans. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1874

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for this chapter’s thesis about cheap physical proximity and cross-disciplinary mixing as material conditions enabling invention density.
• CANDY: A single bar whose regulars included Cage, Cunningham, Miles Davis, and O’Hara — instant cocktail-party fact.
• SHARE: For anyone interested in the New York School / downtown scene — the San Remo as a cross-genre collision point.