Musical

Rent Walking Tour
New York

Walk the West Village and East Village blocks that shaped the show, from the apartment where Jonathan Larson wrote it to the Broadway theater where it ran for twelve years.

8 stops · All over Lower Manhattan

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Every Stop Has a Story

Where It Was Written

Jonathan Larson wrote Rent in this apartment over a decade, and the boiler that failed every winter became the freezing loft of the show's opening scene; he died here the morning after his final rehearsal, and Rent opened Off-Broadway the following night.

The Scene

Hilly Kristal opened this club in 1973 intending to book country and bluegrass, but got Television, the Ramones, Patti Smith and Blondie instead, and after a decade as the heart of American punk, it's now a luxury menswear boutique that kept the original stage.

The World Premiere

Jonathan Larson developed Rent here for seven years, and after he died the morning after the final dress rehearsal, the cast and crew went ahead that same evening with a concert staging, performing in street clothes on the bare stage.

The Neighborhood

By the time Rent is set here in the late 1980s and early 1990s, St. Mark's Place was still cheap, dense and commercially eccentric, though today the buildings survive while the economics that made it possible do not.

Club Casanova

RuPaul developed his stage persona here in the early 1980s, at the club that hosted New York's first regularly programmed drag night, and though it's still operating today as the real-life basis for Rent's Club Casanova, it has outlasted most of the community it once served.

The Riot

On the night of August 6, 1988, police enforcing a 1am curfew violently cleared a homeless encampment from this park, injuring thirty-eight people in a clash that became a flashpoint for the East Village's rising rents and displacement, the same forces Rent's characters live through when the show begins a few years later.

La Vie Boheme

Jonathan Larson ate here regularly while writing Rent, and the cafe appears by name in the show as the setting for "La Vie Boheme," the Act One finale that the 2005 film shot on location with most of the original Broadway cast.

5,123 Performances

Rent opened here in 1996, going on to win four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and by the time it closed in 2008, the neighborhood it described had been transformed by the very forces of rising rents the show had argued against.

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