Bad timing might be a genetic trait in David Handler’s family. As he tells it, his grandfather moved from Ireland to the United States just two weeks before the markets crashed in 1929. Then, nearly 80 years later, he co-founded the New York City venue (Le) Poisson Rouge (LPR) alongside Justin Kantor in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession.
“[My grandfather] was still alive when I opened LPR, and he looked at me once and was like, ‘This is the worst time since the Great Depression to be doing what you’re doing,” Handler tells Billboard. “We were just trying to figure it out. I was 27 [years old]. I had never even tended bar, let alone run a place. It was an intense time.”
Despite the recession (and the pandemic a little over a decade later), the Greenwich Village venue persisted in providing a space for artists of all audience sizes to flex their creative muscles on Bleecker Street.
“The reason Dave and we all wanted to do this was because we liked really heady music, but we couldn’t see very heady music anywhere but a place where we were told to shush,” Brett Tabisel, LPR partner and director of programming, tells Billboard. “We’re like an opera house with tattoos, as cliché as that sounds.”
In June 2008, with the paint barely dry, the multi-room venue opened to align with the JVC Jazz Festival (currently known as Newport Jazz Festival), debuting with an invite-only DJ set from Vampire Weekend before hosting shows from classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein, Mos Def, Dean & Britta and more. “The idea was, and still is, to push the popular palette as far and as often as we possibly can,” says Handler.
The venue, which has mainly been used as one big space since the pandemic, was built for sound, explains Handler. Almost two decades later, he still sounds starstruck when noting that acoustician John Storyk (who designed Jimi Hendrix’s famed Electric Lady Studios) designed LPR as well.
Despite the care the LPR team took to create a respectful cultural space, the neighborhood was skeptical of another music venue opening in the co-op building, which includes apartments.
“It was a lot of the older residents of the neighborhood who had moved to the Village at a time in their life with an adventurous enough bone in their body to want to be on the cusp of vibrant nightlife,” says Handler. “Then, of course, as they get older, they would like for the neighborhood to get as quiet as they are getting.”
The neighbors may have been a bit jaded after the same space held the queer nightclub Club Life in the late 1990s. According to Handler, Club Life, which welcomed everyone from Madonna to Prince to Grace Jones, was not the most responsible tenant and had subwoofers that reverberated straight up the building.
“Just to get a liquor license there, I had to bring my violin to the community board meeting,” says Handler, who is a violinist and composer. “I kept trying to tell the neighborhood block association that we want to do serious music in here and we’re trying to bring artistic vision back to this neighborhood.”
For close to four decades before Club Life, the space that now holds LPR was a legendary venue called Village Gate, which opened in 1958. Village Gate originally focused on jazz music, hosting greats like Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and more. It soon became a major cultural site, hosting gigs from Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin, who made her stage debut at the Gate.
Village Gate owner Art D’Lugoff was famous in his own right — most notably for suggesting Bob Dylan find another career after the young musician came to him looking for a gig.
Handler was concerned D’Lugoff would be territorial over an unknown 27-year-old taking over the space, but instead, the former owner helped pick out chairs for LPR. “There were a lot of ways that he could not have embraced it, and yet he really did, and saw that we wanted to honor the tradition of the Gate,” says Handler of D’Lugoff, who passed away in 2009. “Still couldn’t get any pearls of wisdom on how to operate. He told us not to do surf and turf. That was one of his real gems and he said it like it was the gospel.”
“He was a really sweet man,” adds Handler, “as long as you weren’t Bob Dylan.”
Despite the lack of advice from D’Lugoff, LPR has managed to honor its commitment to bring an artistic vision back to Greenwich and has become a hub for singular performances. LPR has welcomed stars including Damien Rice, Jeff Mangum, Lou Reed, Quincy Jones, as well as those who were about to break at the time, including PinkPantheress, Olivia Dean, Noname and Lorde for her first New York show.
They’ve had cellist Yo-Yo Ma performing alongside breakdancer Lil Buck and helped debut an Arvo Pärt symphony as the opener for Japanese heavy metal band MONO. When Mumford & Sons wanted to do a phoneless show years before companies formed to offer this service, the staff used IKEA baskets to form a system to collect and return smartphones.
LPR has built a brand on finding solutions and offering more than just a brick-and-mortar venue. They offer their own orchestra, called Ensemble LPR, and have a permanent 360-degree PA and lighting rig, allowing for true in-the-round performances. The venue’s configuration is flexible in size and features a round stage under the main stage that can be lifted to accommodate special performances.
In recent years, LPR has also gained a reputation for offering Boiler Room EDM shows (events where the DJ is set up in the middle of the floor and surrounded by fans, rather than on an elevated stage). “I’m always trying to find ways to give artists an opportunity to do something that they haven’t done before or play in a way that they haven’t done before,” Tabisel says.
The LPR venue has also become a go-to spot for underplays, including Lady Gaga in 2013 and Skrillex, Four Tet and Fred again.. the night before they played the 22,000-capacity Madison Square Garden in 2025. When the Sunday night of the 2019 Governors Ball festival was cancelled, LPR managed to relocate Charli XCX to its room in roughly three hours.
But fighting to stay alive in one of the most expensive cities in the world as an independent venue, facing recessions and pandemics, has been a test of fortitude. Their solution, LPR marketing director Shannon Wiles says, has been volume. Late-night events that run from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. on the weekends bring in additional revenue. LPR also works with blockchain ticketer KYD Labs, which allows them to access more data on their fans, better target ads and track their sales in real time. Overall, LPR puts on around 400 shows a year in the venue, while its promotional arm, LPR Presents, promotes gigs at other, sometimes larger, spaces, including an upcoming Robert Plant show at the more than 130-year-old Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
“We’re scrappy. We’re dedicated,” says Tabisel. “We’re willing to make far less to do very cool things, which doesn’t really happen that much in this industry.”
