San Remo Cafe, Literary cafe in Greenwich Village, New York City, US.
San Remo Cafe was a bar and gathering spot on the corner of MacDougal Street and Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. The building still stands at the same corner today, marked by a commemorative plaque on its facade.
The cafe opened in 1925 and ran for over four decades before closing in 1967. During those years it drew writers and artists who were shaping what would later be called the Beat Generation and the broader postwar literary scene.
The San Remo was one of those rare places where writers, painters, and theater people mixed freely at the same bar counter. The corner spot in Greenwich Village became a kind of informal salon for people working across different art forms.
The corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets is easy to reach on foot and sits in the middle of one of Greenwich Village's most walked areas. The plaque on the building is visible from the sidewalk, so a short stop is all it takes to see the site.
Jack Kerouac wrote about the San Remo in his novel The Subterraneans, giving the bar a place in Beat Generation literature that outlasted the bar itself. James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams were both regulars there at the same time, though they came from very different literary worlds.
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