In the Headlines...
Housing Works- Live from Home
By: Erica Futterman
Anyone walking past 126 Crosby Street in NYC will see shelves and shelves of books if they glance in the window. That's not a problem – this is the Housing Works Used Book Café, after all. But anyone walking past the building on the third Friday of every month will see a slightly different scene. The books are still there, of course, but now so is a seated crowd and a performing musician, as the Live from Home series takes over the space for its monthly concerts. And each show comes with an extra incentive to attend because all proceeds benefit Housing Works, a non-for profit organization helping homeless people living with HIV and AIDS.
Live from Home will celebrate its second birthday in January 2005, and its performance list so far boasts well-known musicians. The shows feature up to three acts and the $25 earned from each ticket helps works Housing Works provide services including healthcare and housing to the many people who need its assistance.
Alan Light, Editor-in-Chief of Tracks magazine, started the series when a friend on the bookstore’s exec board approached him about doing a concert there. “She said they had thought about bringing music in, but no one could get it together, and would I want to? I was waiting for my baby to be born and waiting to launch the magazine [Tracks] – somehow it seemed like a good idea,” Light says with a laugh. So he called his friend Ryan Adams and asked Adams if he would play a few songs. “And Ryan being Ryan being Ryan came down and said he’s going to do a full show if he’s playing here,” Light says. “He played a two-hour arena rock show that sold out in minutes and we realized we had something.”
That something has manifested itself as the Live from Home series. About 250 people each month attend the shows, and almost all of the dates sell out. Some even go past that capacity, such as Lyle Lovett’s performance in ’03 and John Mayer’s acoustic set in ’04, with each having a crowd of over 300. Sometimes acts are determined when a musician approaches Light and expresses interested in playing, but they’re based on music Light is listening to and/or performers he thinks would fit in the space.
Light, who is now co-chairman of the bookstore, estimates Live from Home has earned at least $125,000 in ticket sales alone since it started. But the crowds in attendance have also helped the bookstore in another way: Light says he was told the café ran at a loss during the week before the series started. But once it started, the weekday traffic flow increased and the café started making money – due largely in part to first-time visitors who wanted to return.
“There are some regulars who are there almost every month, people who come up to me after the shows and tell me they haven’t heard any of the artists but like what I do so they come each time,” Light says. “But there are also people who say they live in the neighborhood and never knew this was here, and that’s even more gratifying.”
The series’ increasing popularity has prompted discussion about future plans for the program. At the very least, Light says he’s interested in finding a broadcast outlet – probably radio – for the performances. There’s also a quarterly series in the works with VH1, who already did one show with Jamie Cullum in ’04. But most important is finding a way to draw more attention to the cause at hand. “The whole thing has consumed more and more of my life, which is great,” Light says. “People are aware of what we do, we’re booking shows, we’re selling dates. It’s a now a question of what things we can do next to draw more attention to Housing Works and the work that we do by using Live from Home.” Stay tuned, because it looks like things are going to be great.
For more information about Housing Works, visit www.housingworks.org
To go straight to the Live from Home series announcements, visit http://www.housingworks.org:8080/usedbookcafe/UsedBookCafe_Events.jsp