Village Gate

[2] Throughout its 38 years, the Village Gate featured such musicians as John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Mongo Santamaria, Jimi Hendrix, Golden Earring, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Larry Coryell, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Vasant Rai, Nina Simone, Herbie Mann, Woody Allen, Patti Smith, Lucio Dalla Velvet Underground, Edgard Varèse, and Aretha Franklin, who made her first New York appearance there.

The "Salsa Meets Jazz" series at the Village Gate was a seminal part of the history of New York Latin music.

Sonny Stitt with Eddie Palmieri, Dexter Gordon with Machito, Dizzy Gillespie with Tito Puente, James Moody, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby Hutcherson, David "Fathead" Newman, Slide Hampton, and Pharoah Sanders, to name a few, all jumped in to "jam" with the best salsa bands of the time.

The club hosted a benefit for Timothy Leary in May 1970 that featured performances from such counterculture luminaries as Jimi Hendrix and Allen Ginsberg.

It starred future comic notables John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Garry Goodrow, and Christopher Guest, and lampooned the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which had taken place upstate two years earlier, calling it "Woodchuck" and equating the entire hippie generation with lemmings bent on self-destruction.

The cast included Stan Taffel, Marc Kudisch, Debra Wilson, Eric Douglas, Garry Goodrow, Miguel Sierra, Ken Dashow, Nola Roeper, Bonnie Comley, and Richmond Shepard.

Art D'Lugoff, co-producer of the show A Brief History of White Music was looking to rent the space in a site formerly occupied by the Lone Star Road House.

In spring 2008, the space was reopened as a multiuse performance venue and gallery bar called (Le) Poisson Rouge.

The club is mentioned by salsa superstars Richie Ray & Bobby Cruz in their song Pancho Cristal, off their 1968 LP Los Durísimos.