"That October [1961], around the same time that LeRoi and I were busted for The Floating Bear, Alan Marlowe had located the first home for the New York Poets Theatre. It was a large, dark back room with a stage and little else, located on East Tenth Street, in what was then becoming the downtown gallery scene. The place had been dubbed the Off-Bowery Theatre by its optimistic owners, who ran an "avant-garde" gallery in front. The back room had minimal stage lighting and very little heat. It had nothing going for it, in fact, except the location (people were coming to East Tenth Street to go to art shows, and therefore might come to a theatre, we reasoned) and the price-iit was very cheap. [...] 

The Off-Bowery Theatre was dark, and gloomy, and I remember it as dirty, but that might just have been my own prejudice. It seemed like we were there day and night, rehearsing and generally carrying on, hashing stuff out. Everything seemed like a big hassle, and Freddie and Alan fought all the time."

-- Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001.