"What Alan had rented this time was a Ukrainian dance hall on East Fourth Street. "The Ukrainians" owned the building, and they had a dance hall on the first floor, and a bar and club room upstairs, but everybody in the neighborhood referred to the entire building as the Ukrainian Dance Hall. Alan persuaded the owners to rent us the dance hall for a theatre. They readily agreed. Besides the rent, it meant extra business for their bar upstairs. They opened the bar during play intermissions, and before and after the Sunday poetry readings.

The place had a small lobby (not big enough for an art gallery), and a large empty space with a stage at the far end. Folding chairs came with it.

But Alan was obsessed with the plant itself--as he had never been with any of our other spaces. He raised and spent a great deal of money: buying used theatre seats, "real" red velvet theatre curtains, redesigning the stage, and covering the stage floor with hardwood ("for the dancers" he said). he even laid cork under the hardwood so that the floor would have more "spring." And he built the rectangular stage into a "U" so the two sides extended into the audience. He then further strained our budget by buying handblown Steuben lampshades (secondhand) for the theatre walls.

When he was done, the place looked extraordinary. "A jewelbox of theatre," Frank O'Hara told me, "like the best art theatres of Europe."

Not having been to Europe I didn't really have too good an idea of what Frank was talking about, but it gave me a way to explain the place to myself.

I thought I knew what Alan was up to, even if he didn't. Now that Freddie was dead, he was making a theatre for him, the kind of place Freddie had always wanted. Freddie, who had constantly complained about the dance floors he performed on--what they did to his arches, his knees--and who loved smooth hardwood floors laid over cork." -- Diane di Prima. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001.