The room above the street

Before we were Four Hands, we were a living room.

Our friend Shiv hosted music salons in his parlor-floor apartment on 73rd Street. Five or six musicians taking turns at the piano, neighbors squeezed onto the sofas and the stools and the floor. One night the coat rack tore off the wall under the weight of too many jackets, right in the middle of a song. We were outgrowing the room.

There was another problem. Bill and I had started to worry about the invite list. Every gathering, there were more neighbors we had to leave out and that kind of exclusivity was the opposite of what these nights were for. We needed a bigger room. But we didn’t want to lose the closeness, the way strangers we’d just met at the coffee shop became friends by the end of the night. Bigger, but still intimate. Did a room like that exist?.

Then someone sat down on the bench.

I was at Black Press one morning when she took the spot beside me. She was wearing what struck me as very fancy running shoes, so I said so, and before long we were talking about our lives. Her name was Jessica Sherr. She was an actor, and in a few days she’d be performing her own one-woman show about Bette Davis at a theater right around the corner on 72nd. I’d walked that block a hundred times and had no idea there was a theater on it.

You could miss it easily. No marquee, barely a sign. Just a door seemingly entering a restaurant and a staircase up to the second floor. But the room at the top of the stairs was something special.

The intimate upstairs cabaret room during a Night at the Triad. / The unmarked street entrance to the Triad Theater on West 72nd Street.

A legendary little room, hiding on the second floor, that half the neighborhood walks past without a glance.

Jessica was extraordinary that night — funny, aching, and I left knowing more about Bette Davis than I’d ever expected to. But Bill and I kept catching each other’s eye about something else. The room was warm and cozy with old-world charm, the kind of place that existed before anyone thought to point a phone at a stage. And the sound was superb. That mattered most to Bill, whose ear is merciless after years being let down by New York rooms. Here he was, in the second-floor room we’d never heard of, hearing everything.

He handed his stage to a couple of guys from a coffee-shop bench on the strength of a conversation.

We didn’t know it that night, but we’d wandered into a room with a history. The Triad has been on 72nd Street since 1984. Forbidden Broadway started there. So did Forever Plaid. A young Lady Gaga made her debut on that stage. A legendary little room, hiding on the second floor, that half the neighborhood walks past without a glance.

We looked at each other and agreed. This felt like the right room.

Bill talked to Peter Martin, who owns the place. We had no track record, no plan, and no clue how many people would come. Peter gave us a date anyway. I’ve thought a lot since about what it meant that he did. That he handed his stage to a couple of guys from a coffee-shop bench on the strength of a conversation.

The date was ten days out. Antongiulio was twenty-four. We asked him to gather the musicians and lead the night, and he said yes and got to work.

That first Night at the Triad was the one that gave us our name. Our neighbors came, and they were stunned. Not only by the music, but by where they were standing. Person after person told us the same thing: I’ve lived three blocks from here for years, and I never knew this was here. They’d found a beautiful room, hidden in plain sight, full of world-class musicians they also hadn’t known were living right beside them.

And it has become a home. Ben Hostetler has run our sound since that first night, coaxing a jazz trio and a solo cellist and a five-part harmony through a single evening without blinking. Peter and Ben and the whole Triad crew stopped being a venue and became collaborators, then friends. And Hannah, my co-director, who first walked up those stairs to sing with us, works there now, as house manager.

Four Hands Collective co-directors Craig Cloutier and Hannah Celeste at the Triad Theater, where Hannah now serves as house manager.

Three years in, we still climb those stairs a few times a season. The door is still easy to miss. That’s part of what we love about it. The best things on the Upper West Side tend to be the ones you have to know to find.

Come find us in the room above the street.