One memory stands out for Helena D. Lewis. She was coming out of the little back door at Nuyorican Poets Café to perform her piece for the Grand Slam poetry competition. She accidentally banged her knee. The combination of the hit and the lack of food in her system caused her to faint before she could do her first poem.
“Helena, I’ve seen you do this poem before. Is this a part of the act?” asked one of the event curators.
The next thing she knew, she woke up in the manager’s apartment across the street, surrounded by poets trying to feed her orange juice and bananas. The people that Lewis now calls her “extended family.”
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a non-profit organization and a multi-cultural venue. Its programming runs the gamut from visual arts exhibits to poetry slams to theatrical and musical performances. As its website explains, the Café’s purpose is to “provide a stage for the artists traditionally under-represented in the mainstream media and culture; promoting their work while building an audience and providing an ongoing support system for them as they grow.”
The cafe started in 1973 in the living room of writer and poet Miguel Algarin. When the space couldn’t accommodate the people and the energy, Algarin rented out an Irish bar called the Sunshine Café. In 1980, the booming audience led the Cafe to take over its current space at 236 East 3rd Street.
“For years, the café has been a grassroots volunteer organization – the strength and the durability of the organization given through the people involved and their love for the organization,” said Nuyorican’s Executive Director Daniel Gallant. “The downside is that at a certain point, it is difficult to sustain after you have been around for decades with people giving themselves and all their time for years. If our organization wants to grow and continue, it needs to professionalize in terms of financial operations, how we handle programming, how we market ourselves, how we compensate our performers. We have been professionalizing for years while maintaining the edgy and grassroots community-based feel.”
According to Gallant, the Café owns the space, allowing for its survival while other arts and non-profit organizations have had to close their doors. Earned income sustains the building. Ownership also helps Nuyorican maintain low ticket prices – typically $5 to $12 – and audience accessibility. With the increasing demand for the space from artists and promoters and spectators, in addition to the increasing audience base, Nuyorican has started a campaign to expand.
“We were lucky enough with a lot of hard work to get the city to commit $500,000,” said Gallant. “It’s a fantastic first step. We have reason to think in the next year or two, the amount of funding can increase significantly. For an organization growing like ours, it’s something that has to happen as an ongoing effort.”
Right now, three of the upper floors remain unused. Nuyorican is working to transform them into a second performance space, classroom area, a multimedia lab and a bigger office space.
Nuyorican also plans to move forward in touring and developing stronger online offerings.
“We’re still working on the best way to present all of our work – especially slam poetry – in a format that really demonstrates the strength of the art form,” said Gallant. “We’re working on finding digital ways to document not just the performance itself, but the real interaction between the audience and the artists. The live experience.”
Increasing off-site bookings is also on the to-do list. Starting in January, Nuyorican is having a 6-month series of performances at the Brooklyn Museum – a mixture of music and spoken word. Be on the look-out for acts such as the Mighty Third Rail, Mahogany Browne, Carlos Andres Gomez, as well as muMs & Aurora, a group that started at Nuyorican.
Lewis has been going to Nuyorican since 1998, but she didn’t start “slamming” until 2000 when she decided she wanted to be on the Nuyorican National Slam Team. When she was looking for a venue to house her play “Call Me Crazy: Diary of a Mad Social Worker,” Nuyorican gave Lewis the chance to produce her show.
“If it wasn't for the Café giving me a chance to put my play up, use their stage, their lights and all at a very reasonable cost, I would not have been able to build such a strong audience with the show,” said Lewis. “I'm so thankful that Miguel founded the Café to give artists a chance to perform and showcase their work – to give a voice to the sometime voiceless performers who are not classified and ‘mainstream.’”
