Marie’s Crisis Café

On our list of the best live music venues in New York.

The building at 59 Grove Street went up in 1838 as a brothel and boarding house, standing where Thomas Paine died decades before. It had become one of the city's early gay bars by the 1890s, and in 1929 owner Marie DuMont renamed it Marie's, adding Crisis after Paine's pamphlet The American Crisis. It bills itself now as the only acoustic sing-along piano bar of its kind, with music starting at 5:30pm and the bar open from 4pm, seven days a week. A Works Progress Administration glass etching of the American and French revolutions hangs on one wall.