Irving Plaza

Irving Plaza stands today as a celebrated music venue, but its origins are far removed from the world of rock and roll. The structure began as four separate brownstone dwellings in the mid nineteenth century before being combined into a hotel that catered to wealthy, Spanish-speaking travelers. Inside those walls, an aristocratic Cuban resident once maintained an eccentric private collection of roughly two hundred primates, including a favorite pet monkey named Jocco. It would take decades of further reinvention as a ballroom, a Yiddish theater, and a community center for the site to eventually shed its Gilded Age skin and adopt its current identity.