Across the Universe | Webster Hall — the East Village ballroom that has been throwing this party since 1886

Webster Hall was built in 1886, and almost immediately it became the room New York used when it wanted to misbehave in public. Union locals rented it for meetings. Anarchists rented it for fundraisers. Greenwich Village bohemians rented it for masquerade balls so notorious that the 1920s drag balls held here are still the best-documented queer gatherings of their era in the city. The building at 125 East 11th Street was doing counterculture six decades before the counterculture had a name.

That continuity is what makes it the right address for this film. Across the Universe is a story about music rooms — about what happens to a group of people when the songs get louder and stranger and the war outside gets worse — and the production shot at Webster Hall, a hall that had already lived through several versions of exactly that. In the eighties it was The Ritz, where a generation of British bands played their first American shows. In the nineties and after it went back to its own name.

The exterior is unassuming from the sidewalk: a brick front on a narrow East Village street, a marquee, a queue. Inside, the main ballroom still has its balcony wrapping three sides, which means the room reads the same way it did to a dancer in 1913 and a kid at a punk show in 1982 — bodies below, more bodies leaning over the rail above.

The best way to visit is the obvious one. Buy a ticket to whatever is playing, get there early, and go up to the balcony before the floor fills. From the rail you are looking at a hundred and forty years of the same room deciding, night after night, to stay open late.