Nuyorican Poets Cafe, an East Village icon, begins a $24M makeover
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which has been a pre-eminent downtown performance space for a diverse assemblage of poets, writers, musicians and artists for more than 50 years, has launched a $24 million, city-funded renovation that organizers hope will ensure the cafe's future for decades to come.
The work would help preserve what has long been an edgy, iconic and culturally rich performance space in the East Village. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe closed in November in preparation for the makeover. De La Luz said she was pleasantly surprised to discover at a groundbreaking on Thursday that the timeline for the entire renovation had been accelerated from three years to two, putting the completion date in spring 2026.
The $24 million tab includes more than $9 million in funding procured with help from City Councilmember Carlina Rivera, according to her office. Rivera, who grew up in the area, called the cafe “an iconic cultural institution, the birthplace of a movement and something very meaningful to Puerto Ricans from Loisaida and across the city.
In his 1999 book “Poetic Culture,” author Christopher Beach noted the cafe drew "middle-class whites from Queens and Bensonhurst, Latinos from the Lower East Side, Blacks from uptown, and visitors who have come to this mecca of slam poetry from Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston or Dublin."
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