• Live From Home” at Housing Works Used Book Café

  126 Crosby Street, 212-334-3324; housingworks.org

  Combining the sleek, polished wood of a private Park Avenue clubhouse, the angular clientele of a Soho lounge, and the shaggy liberalism of a nonprofit coffee shop, Housing Works has been downtown’s anti-Starbucks for seven years. Recent readings along the McSweeney’s–Safran Foer axis have only increased its cachet, and a new concert series is giving coffee-house folk an extreme makeover. Ryan Adams inaugurated the monthly series in January (when he wasn’t opening for the Stones at Madison Square Garden), and Rosanne Cash launched her comeback album here in March. The concerts are the café’s first ticketed events, but at around $20—all of it going to Housing Works programs for homeless people with hiv/aids—they’re a steal.

From the 2003 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine