"and he was in the coffeehouse business"

"The first coffeehouses in the district --- two spare neighboring rooms called Edgar's Hobby and David's --- had opened in the late 1940s for the area's Italian population. Their inheritors --- more than a dozen places all around the Village with progressively whimsical names such as the Figaro, the Rienzi, the Caricature, the Cafe Wha?, the Dragon's Den, the Bizarre, the Why Not?, and the Hip Bagel --- now offered folksinging (sometimes mixed with poetry readings, jazz, and comedy) to the mobs of weekend visitors, including uptown residents who would stroll around the Village, just minutes from their homes, as if it were a resort. The owner of a small garage on West 3rd Street, a block south of Washington Square, took a threadbare wool couch with one leg missing and miscellaneous battered furnishings from  neighborhood trash piles, tacked a "Folk Music" sign on the front wall, and he was in the coffeehouse business."

David Hadju

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina