Requiem for the Cornelia Street Café in Exile

By Roger Paradiso

Cornelia Street Café in Exile, a film by Michael Jacobsohn

“If a city loses its artists, it loses its heart, its pulse.” – R. Hirsch

The Cornelia Street Café lost its battle with New York City gentrification disease and closed its doors on January 1, 2019. Michael Jacobsohn has expertly dealt with the crisis by doing a documentary, The Cornelia Street Café in Exile. The film is a requiem about the many artists who performed on the tiny stage with red curtains. By sticking close to the songs and words spoken by those artists and Robin Hirsch, one of the three owners, Jacobsohn creates the world that once existed for 41 years at the Café located near Bleeker Street.

One of the performers sings “Manhattan what happened to you?” Well folks, Manhattan grew old and money hungry. Just take a look at your new Greenwich Village. It’s been through a war of economics which can be quite lethal to peace-loving Villagers. Many clubs, movie theaters and music halls are not around in the new Greenwich Village. That is the sad tale of Cornelia Street. Using a combination of old media film and video, photographs, sound, and footage from the last show, Jacobsohn transports you to the Cornelia Café.

As Robin said, “We thought we’d celebrate this afternoon the long tradition of songwriting…in 1980 Stash Records did its only non-jazz record called Cornelia Street Exchange. The album still sounds fresh…and you will hear some of those songs today.” The first act of the film is off and running through performers young and old, with archival footage and live performances caught on that last day of the Café — December 28, 2018.

I remember one evening I was screening my film, The Lost Village. I asked Robin to join our discussion and he told us that the Café was closing. His thoughts fit in to what we were saying about The Lost Village. The Village was being transformed into Condo World as displaced artists moved to Jersey City or Brooklyn. As we spoke, I heard Robin struggling to let go.

Later in the film, as we watch the workers tearing apart the Café, we hear the spirits sing in the soundtrack. In a collage of memories, Robin talked ironically about this book, Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski. Robin called the book a mosaic. The main story in act two of the film is about the author still dealing with his parents fleeing Germany during Hitler’s purge of Jews and others including artists.

Robin was born In London during the blitzkrieg of German bombers that were trying to destroy his home. This irony and the juxtaposition of acts one and two is that it brings us some insight as to how Robin might have felt as wrecking crews came to destroy his beloved Café.

Robin’s son, Sascha Hirsch, said, “Without a doubt the Holocaust and the impact on my grandparents … had an effect on my father …. my dad did a really good job and was really conscious not to repeat the things he experienced as a kid.”

Clearly, there were emotional scars from the families who escaped Hitler. And somehow, some way these hard experiences led Robin to start a café. Rather than rattle the viewer, this section of the film enhances the experience of the documentary. Jacobsohn has done well fitting these mosaic pieces together and that is what documentary filmmaking can do at its highest moments: it connects the small pieces of glass and stone into a mosaic that makes sense to the audience.

For the final act, we see the rebirth of Cornelia Street Café In Exile. And that is what many other artists have had to do — move on. The history of Manhattan is that as each neighborhood gentrifies, many mom-and-pop shop owners and artists have to leave because of higher costs. Some go out of business or some move farther out than Manhattan and try again. The Cornelia Café in Exile moved on like a Broadway Truck and Bus Tour. They went to the Meatpacking District, created a stage on the plaza and re-created a show based on many of the same acts as Cornelia had done inside its former physical space. We follow the exiled troupe around to other parts of the tour.

And then COVID hits and you have to shut down. What do you do next? You do what other artists and businesses did and are now doing. You zoom your events or your meetings. And that is what Robin does along with his team. They are on the internet in exile. We also see Robin performing by himself and connecting to an audience whether it is live or zoomed. And finally at the end, he seems to come to grips with his loss by performing to friends and audiences. He has found a path that works for him.

Sascha said, “I don’t know why he continues to perform … I think it brings some kind of joy, some kind of relief and some kind of escape….”

As we watch the credits crawl, we understand how the Cornelia Street Café and its family will survive the loss of a physical building. It will be passing down the poetry, the songs, the films and the memories of a shared experience in a time and place that may still exist in exile. I think the pulse is still there, it’s just maybe a little slower. The patient has survived. And the audience is cheering a somewhat happy ending.

“What good is sitting alone in your room, come let the music play.”
Cabaret, music and lyrics by Kander and Ebb.