Cafe Wha?

You are walking toward 115 MacDougal Street, a basement space that began its life in the nineteenth century as a horse stable. In 1959, an actor named Manny Roth transformed this subterranean area into a venue by laying the floor himself using broken pieces of marble he purchased with his final one hundred dollars. He painted the walls black to evoke the feeling of a cave and filled the room with discarded chairs and flickering candles. The name of the club was a deliberate phonetic shortening of the word what, intended to capture the incredulity of passersby as they discovered the vibrant, unconventional performances happening beneath the sidewalk.